Last night's dream was a frustrating one that at least this time I can attribute to something that I was actually thinking about before I went to bed. Lord only knows how long, in real world time, that this dream was actually going on, but in my mind, it took place over the course of many days.
This dream jumped all over the place though and had multiple themes but they all lead back to one particular thing which was a house or apartment that I was (in the dream) preparing to move out of and had almost everything in place waiting for the moving truck
src
Before we move on I want to talk about the above image. It comes from a web article from 2023 that talks about a Japanese invention that claims to be capable of recording your dreams like a movie. Since the article is a year old and YouTube isn't filled with people's dreams, I'm guessing it is not true. It's interesting though and worth a look.
Now let's get back to my dream:
Before I went to bed last night I was looking around my apartment and taking stock and realized that my bedroom desk has become an area where all of the "maybe clothes" are perpetually kept. There's 7 or 8 pairs of shorts and a dozen t-shirts just lying there. Some of them have been buried by the others to the point where it is extremely unlikely that I am ever going to wear them. Before I went to bed I determined that I was going to get a box and set a day aside to turn the air con on high and try on all the clothes and if they do not "spark joy" like that Japanese lady says in the house organizing show, I am going to donate them to the local charity.
src
Lately, I have become increasingly aware of the amount of clutter in my life and it just kind of disturbs me especially since when I moved here from Thailand, I decided that my entire life needed to fit into 2 suitcases henceforth. I can assure you, that at this moment in time that this is definitely not the case.
This does NOT spark joy
So last night I had a dream that is something I frequently dream about and that was one of moving house. At the point in the dream the moving truck hadn't yet turned up and there was stuff all over my apartment. The place was just littered with mostly crap that I had no interest in and it was a huge amount of things - far more than I have in real life. Towards the end of this section of the dream I finally came to the conclusion that I was going to leave most of it behind and started to go through the items and separate them into two piles. One for keeping on one side of the room, and the other for leaving behind.
There were some moments of indecision because in the dream there were some nostalgic but also useless keepsakes mixed in with the items. Now that I am awake the things I can think of that relate to my own life would be random table decorations such as fake plants and pots of some sort the likes of which you would pick up at Pier-1, if that is still a store in USA. I bought a lot of stuff from that store to dress up my apartments in the past and I retained NONE of those items.
By the end of the dream I had managed to realize that a vast majority of the things in my apartment / house, were things that I didn't need to take along with me to the next place. The frustrating part of the dream came from whenever I would finish one area, another area would pop up or I would find more clutter in another room so my task was a Sisyphean one.
According to a dream interpretation website that I frequent this can mean a wide variety of things in relation to your real life, but as usual most of it sounds like astrology crap that could apply to anyone such as "lack of self care, needing to move on in your life emotionally, or change that is coming in your life that you are nervous about."
I call bullhicky on this and believe it is moreso about the fact that I was looking around my apartment right before bedtime and wanted to clean up the clutter.
The other aspects of my dream likely evolve from my interest in science fiction and survival movies and stories. When I wasn't in my apartment I would be "whooshed" away to a wasteland of sorts where there was one group of people that I was part of that were being hunted in a way by the establishment and I was helping them to stay hidden. In this dream I also spent some time in a failed project established by some very wealthy person or people that was meant to be a haven for people that are not pleased with the way that various governments are ruling the world. The massive facility had fallen into ruin and I don't know why that is. Given the context of the dream I would presume it was because of the people that were hunting me and the others.
Psychologists would probably have some generic explanation for all of this but I can tell you right away how that applies to my own life. I do not like the governments of the world and get seriously annoyed whenever they interfere with my life. This is particularly true in relation to the government that is on the cover of my passport and the reason why I moved out of the United States in the first place was because I was fed up with having every aspect of my life be governed by the most incompetent and inefficient people that you can imagine. Red tape for the sake of having red tape and the bullies who administer said rules is something that I despise and unfortunately I've found that it exists all over the world. One benefit of living in Vietnam is that the government doesn't have the resources to be "all up in your business" about every little thing that you do.
The dream also incorporated me somehow transforming into older me and having young people wandering my yard sale that I was unaware I was having until they were browsing the items. I took on the role of the old-timer in this case and I can definitely see how this would apply to my own life: I am in my midlife and a lot of the people that I encounter living in a tourist part of the world are people that are 10-25 years younger than I am. I find that as time goes by I take on more and more of a role of the "old guy" despite the fact that I live a more youthful life than most of the younger people that I encounter. This does bother me IRL so I guess I can understand why it would end up in my mind.
src
"This is a candlestick holder. Back in my day when the electricity went out we would put something called a "candle" in here and light it on fire instead of using the flashlights on our phones"
So while last night's dreams might not be as exciting as the ones I had in the past this sequence of events was more interesting to me because I am actually able to point to all the major aspects of it and see exactly how it relates to my own life. Much of the time my dreams are so convoluted that I have no idea how it got into my brain in the first place.
Had any dreams lately? Let's evaluate them together if you want.