Beware The Darkness

Most of the time my dreams are silly. If you took a video game and crossed it with an action movie, that would be a good basis for describing my standard dream. Every now and then, however, I have one that gives me pause. Last night I had one that gave me reason to think it was a bit more than the standard brainchurn.

In it, I was looking down into a shared courtyard at an apartment complex. There were a couple of firepits in the ground of the complex and one resident lit a fire. Not long after, the fire started going out of control and this resident had to call the authorities (I say authorities because the people who showed up did not look like firefighters). As I watched, I knew this was the second time this had happened for this resident.

A pair of authorities showed up and contained the fire. Then one of them, a woman, turned and began berating the resident who set the fire. On the one hand, I understood that having to perform repeat containment for the same dangerous issue was a frustrating thing. However, the woman was smirking the whole time as she continued driving it home hard and derisively, sometimes grabbing the resident's arm and shaking it. She was bullying and quite obviously enjoying it.

I walked up and pushed the woman away, saying that the point had been made. At that point, she threatened escalation against me unless I apologized. I badly wanted to take her on (because clearly she was in the wrong and I was right) but I opted to hold my peace for the sake of ending the situation. I apologized for shoving, stating that I hoped we could all go our ways at this point.

Instead, she sniped at me again and pushed me. At this point, I began retaliating, and every time I thought I had shouted enough to make my point or pushed hard enough, she would lash out again. By the end of the dream I was literally dragging her around by her hair and I wanted to murder her--and she was still grinning and smacking into my legs to rile me.

Needless to say, I woke up disturbed. I processed this dream in my half-conscious state, where ideas flow more freely, and tried to commit whatever details I could to memory.

The clearest sense I got from this was a sort of warning that this is a facet of my own darkness that I haven't yet confronted.

This dream came on the heels of a week of intense and heated (though never antagonistic) political discussion and three weeks of deep-diving into politics in a way I've never done in my life. The anger is palpable when I hit on topics where I just can't fathom the madness of the world. My voice rises, my hands gesticulate more, and I drop in the occasional swear. It's a bit of a high to feel right and secure in that rightness, and in those moments I can absolutely see how easy it is to get hooked on outrage and start listing and labelling your "enemies." I know it's still a bad idea, but it's easy for sure.

Walking the tightrope of self-education in politics is rough. On the one side lies eternally ballooning outrage and blind dogmatism. On the other side lies apathy, inaction, and despair. I spent far too much time on the latter side, and I admit, the former looks attractive by comparison at this moment.

And then I look at the dream, wherein I was dragging a woman around by her hair, fury-blinded, ready to murder her because she just wouldn't stop.

Jordan Peterson has done a whole lot of work to make Jung's writings more easily accessible and understandable in his various lectures and talks, and one of the things Peterson often talks about is the dark side of our psyche that we need to confront and leash. Not eradicate--leash. "You have to be a bit of a monster in order to be able to say 'no'," he often says. I've spent so much of my life tamping down that 'no' or any possible conflict as well as 'this is what I think right here and now' that as I begin to correct that, it's very tempting to commit the opposite fallacy just to right the scales. Besides, it feels good--

I. Wanted. To. Kill. Her.

²⁵ Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body.²⁶ “In your anger do not sin”^[d]: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry,²⁷ and do not give the devil a foothold. --Ephesians 4: 25-27

I have to find the narrow path between these two cliffs. That doesn't mean I'm not allowed to assess rights-and-wrongs. It doesn't mean I'm required to back off of convictions. It means "In your anger, do not sin." Speak the truth, but do not stab with it. Speak the truth, but remember that the person you speak to has also been made in the image of God.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things

I cannot change

The courage to change the things I can

And the wisdom to know the difference.