I had another dream about black widows last night. I've always wondered what it meant, because I have very few reoccuring dream themes, and up until recently very few nightmares (recently being the last two years or so). In some of the dreams I know there are black widows that have infested my room.
In this particular dream there was just one, and I was trying to get rid of it with wasp spray. Except it was hiding, the wasp spray wasn't working like it should, and (oh yeah) it was slightly larger than a grapefruit (and ended up being a family of spider-human people, but that's not the part of the dream I'm focusing on, just the part where it was completely a spider).
I've searched dream journals, which tell me that I don't trust some relationship I have. Which I know isn't accurate. I just feel it isn't accurate, and I know all dreams are a very personal thing. So I searched the internet, and I searched the internet, and I came across this:
I remember one of the few incidents I came across a live black widow. I had promised to feed and water the dogs for my grandmother, so I went out to give them water. Their dish had been flipped over, so when I flipped it over to put water it in, I found a black widow was in the bottom. I freaked out, and I went and got the wasp spray, and I sprayed it and sprayed it for the longest time. It took forever to die, as if poisonious creatures couldn't die by poison. It took me a long time to go back into my backyard."I see that I cannot rid my energy field of negativity. There is nowhere to place the ugly and dangerous parts of life that is outside life; just as we are never rid of radioactive waste, in spite of burying it deep in toxic dumps. My aura continues to infinity and includes everything-- spiders, wasps, lovers, and angels alike. I have been bothered this week by disharmonious stimuli from my environment over which I have no control--early morning contruction workers, barking dogs, machines malfunctioning, rude check-out clerks. From my dream and waking omen, I see I’ve arrogantly defined these things as disharmonies and given them the authority to threaten my peace of mind."
- The Present Moment: A Daybook of Clarity and Intuition by Penney Peirce
http://www.intuitnow.com/pdfs/2VisTimesMAM02.pdf
Now, I've been having a hard time recently. I feel like I majorly screwed up with a professor during an email because I handled it poorly. Why did I handle it poorly? Well I felt it was because of the mental issues I have. I've been fretting and worrying that this mistake will haunt me for the rest of my undergraduate career, and not just that, but that I will make these sorts of mistakes again.
What the passage above made me realize is that the dream is about the negative stresses in my life I feel I can't control. Spiders are a natural phenomenon. Even black widows. They will end up in your house. You can't avoid living with them. You don't have any sort of control over what they do, no way to get rid of them.
In some ways, the issues I have from my childhood and the mental issues that it has left me are like that. I struggle to act normally, to not let them affect anything, but like black widows, they are there. I can't completely control them. Nor can I control the irrational fears and anxieties, nor can I control a society that has no sympathy for me and further, that I don't completely understand nor relate to.
Thus from a dream, an unconscious metaphor if you will (if you aren't in another theoretical camp, and even if you are, in this instance using a dream as a metaphor), I have come to some truth about my present situation. I am acting like there is something I can do that is going to make these things controllable. Like I can put them somewhere else, somewhere that is not my life, so that I don't have to deal with them any longer. Get rid of them. But they are things that I am going to have to live with, because they are a present reality. Like black widow spiders, even though they are there, I still have to live and sleep, and I can't let fear of them overtake my life.
Does the metaphor fit completely? No, probably not. Coming back to my original point, the only reason metaphors are constricting is because one might expect the two things being compared to fit completely. They never will. Black widow spiders and social phobias attatched to mental issues aren't the same thing. My mother said I was like a cat today because when I wanted affection I got very close, but when I didn't I was pretty withdrawn. This doesn't mean that I am completely like a cat. There are many differences between me and a cat. But the metaphor helps to get to a core truth. Sometimes that core truth can lead you places; sometimes things are similar because of similiar underpinnings in functioning. So that if I am like a cat, maybe there is something in basic cat behaviour that is manifested in my behaviour. If I follow that metaphor I might find something out about the things involved.
So metaphor, I don't think is completely dangerous. Bad science is dangerous, because it'd allow people to support inaccurate ideas reached through faulty metaphors. With any proper science behind it, though, following ideas through metaphor could be a great tool for brainstorming.
On an ending note, I think that the use of wasp spray to try to kill things accurately represents trying to kill a part of my personality that just won't die. Sometimes mental illness is like that.
On another note, I do think truth is universal, and that in the end, all things are connected. I do believe that is some of the power behind metaphor. Everything, is, after all, just atoms trying to find stability while being acted upon by forces of physics. Everything after that is starting into the theoretical concept of a self. And yes, it is time to start asking yourself if that exists. Not everyone has answered yes. Not that you can prove about atoms or physical forces either.
Relativity makes everything uncertain, and I really do believe everything is relative. We just try to put it into our own contexts.
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