Such a strange dream...
It's only five thirty in the morning. I had myself all wound up yesterday trying to sleuth out the mysteries of my ancestors. Then to finish off the day I had this exchange with my wife about how she always tells people what a genius she is married to and I replied back that's not exactly the way I put it to people, I tell people that if people were to actually take the ideas I give them and put them to use there would be a lot more millionaires in the world. She looked at me sort of askance like I was some kind of self-delusional fool. Even though it's true!
So it took a lot of effort last night for me to get to sleep and it was likely well after midnight before I could read myself to sleep. I did have a few very brief power naps yesterday evening so it's not a complete loss but I do seem to be putting my spell checker to use this morning. My mind's still in a bit of a fog and with any luck I'll get back to bed and get some more sleep before I actually begin my day.
But there's something I want to say first, something I want to talk about with my always-silent audience, my readers. It's about a dream that I had that just a few minutes ago woke me up. It was a very powerful and emotional and disturbing dream, hopefully the kind that most decent folks never have unless maybe they awaken in a blazing fever or something after hallucinating their way through a bad dream.
As I recall, the dream started with myself and my wife playing some sort of a game that we were accustomed to playing (although I have never played this game with her) where we were together in a room bouncing a small very bouncy golf ball sized rubber ball against the walls where it would bounce hard and fast against a wall and cross the room and bounce against the opposite wall while we, she and I, competed against each other to see who could stop the ball first and make it bounce in another direction. At one point I stopped it by making it bounce against one of the other two walls in the room, something she wasn't expecting and it upset her. I'm thinking now in my awake state that she was upset because she always had to win the game and I had come out of nowhere this time with the audacity to actually win the game myself.
Somehow this morphed into a grey area in the dream where I was outside and she was still inside but we were getting ready to go somewhere but I was in an emotional state of mind that actually is a familiar state of mind for me. I was upset with my wife, emotionally upset, and it had to do with her not winning the game and me somehow being the one who was to blame, the one in the wrong. I frequently am driven to emotional distress by this.
So somehow my beloved cat became involved. I have a love hate relationship with my cat. She's not actually my cat but she is. She is my daughter's cat but we have been the cat's caretakers for about the past decade since our daughter moved out west. This cat was born back in 2004 to a featherweight but loving cat that we used to have and her daddy was a really scruffy looking old tomcat that wandered the neighborhood and if you ever got close enough to get a good look at him he had this large broad face that had this wild look of fear on it just before he bolted and ran off across the road into the woods. He clearly didn't seem to be anybody's cat because he was so scruffy and fearful but I see the broad head and wild look of his face in his little kitten, my cat, so I know he was the daddy.
Even though she has this wildness built into her that has always kept her from being the kind of lap cat that most cat lovers enjoy having, I still enjoy seducing her into enjoying a good heavy purr on a regular enough basis for her to know I'm her daddy, not that untamed broad-faced tomcat that she carries in her genes.
So it came as quite a surprise to me when in this dream I smothered her to death in a soft towel of some sort and put her in a bag or box of some kind and locked her inside the car that my wife and I were preparing to go somewhere in. Within minutes my wife was outside with me or maybe we met at the door when she was coming out and she asked if I had seen the cat. Of course I said no but she kept persisting and eventually she began to suspect that I had done something bad to the cat because, I suppose, I was still in this emotional state trying to hide my anger about not being allowed to win at this bounce ball game.
We went back and forth for awhile about are you sure you haven't seen the cat but eventually she became convinced that I had done the cat in and was hiding it in the car. From there the dream quickly morphed into her needing to get the police involved because I had gone bonkers again. I say again because in real life I am quite accustomed to going bonkers whenever I am forced to face the consequences of not letting her win all the games she plays, the relationship games, the ones that she repeatedly uses to win the dominance she enjoys over me. If you've read this blog over the past five or so years you might be starting to see where this dream is going and why, but for those who are new to it I'll do what I can here to keep you going with this. This dream and the real-life situation that spawned it isn't candy to the reader's eye. It's bitter.
So eventually she does get into the car and she does find the dead cat and I am in the background trying to imagine that I see some life in the cat because of course I never actually wanted the cat dead even though it was for sure me who had killed it but somehow the dream moved from needing to involve the authorities to wandering through the back stage of some training school with gifted students preparing to take their next lessons from accomplished art masters. There was this one older man, a piano expert, trying to lure me into my next music lesson (or was it my first?).
Then somehow as if by magic my wife and I were in a church setting, somewhat of a young adult setting since somehow I have never moved my own spiritual mindset beyond being a young adult I guess, and it was just about time for some of the young people attending to start their confessions and it quickly morphed into one of those things that happen in churches where people are actually allowed to participate and not just sing songs or sit and listen. This was a setting where someone begins their confession and it becomes this well-practiced virtue signaling kind of long-winded thing where the person doing the confession is feeding their ego by dominating everybody else's time so as soon as I saw that was where I was and my time to speak would never come I got up and walked out and my wife was right behind me trying to get me to stop and return to the confession session.
The next scene - only moments later in dream time - was a night scene where my wife and I were walking along the edge of the woods up on my little farm and we came across a large gathering of kids and church counselor type young people being all happy and having fun around a bunch of campfires in the edge of the woods so here I am in absolute misery still in my deeply disturbed emotional state having just been found to have murdered my pet cat while my wife is making it crystal clear that if it wasn't for me and my bad side we could be enjoying the company of all these happy kids and camp counselors - when something dawned on me, something profound.
The dream becomes fuzzy at this point but my wife and I suddenly wound up inside a car with several other people and it was back in the confessions mode but this time it was my turn to confess and because these confessionals are always such bullshit anyway and because they never actually go anywhere, never accomplish anything, always are just virtue signaling ego trips that never solve any real problems, I was remaining silent. I didn't want to do it. Everybody was waiting and laying this guilt trip on me but I just didn't want to play this game with them and enter into shameful submission. So it went on for awhile and the pressure kept building for me to say something and I kept resisting and finally I swung open the door - I was in the driver's seat - and started to get out but the urge came to me to turn to my wife and say something, over and over again, with the group in the car as my witness. I said, "Why is it that I am the one that always has to change and not you?" Over and over again I said it.
On that note I awoke from my dream.
Why is it that I am the one that always has to change and not you?
Unfortunately this one question has been the story of my life since I married my wife. She was an early subscriber to the "love me for who I am because you're never going to get me to change" crowd. The year 2019 was the year that both of my sons were forcefully put through this same nonsense by their significant others too so it's very fresh in my mind, but buried just beneath the surface, just out of consciousness. I live with this as my reality.
So I jotted down a note on an index card and left it in the kitchen for my wife to eventually see, maybe today, maybe later. It says this:
Here is the question that the victim of a narcissist always asks:
Why is it that I am the one that has to change and not you?
If you've done any reading or have studied narcissism this is a well established concept. This is the reason most counselors advise victims of narcissists to get out of the relationship. This part of the relationship never does change because nobody has the cure for narcissism.
On that note I will post this story and attempt to go back to sleep! Wish me luck!
So it took a lot of effort last night for me to get to sleep and it was likely well after midnight before I could read myself to sleep. I did have a few very brief power naps yesterday evening so it's not a complete loss but I do seem to be putting my spell checker to use this morning. My mind's still in a bit of a fog and with any luck I'll get back to bed and get some more sleep before I actually begin my day.
But there's something I want to say first, something I want to talk about with my always-silent audience, my readers. It's about a dream that I had that just a few minutes ago woke me up. It was a very powerful and emotional and disturbing dream, hopefully the kind that most decent folks never have unless maybe they awaken in a blazing fever or something after hallucinating their way through a bad dream.
As I recall, the dream started with myself and my wife playing some sort of a game that we were accustomed to playing (although I have never played this game with her) where we were together in a room bouncing a small very bouncy golf ball sized rubber ball against the walls where it would bounce hard and fast against a wall and cross the room and bounce against the opposite wall while we, she and I, competed against each other to see who could stop the ball first and make it bounce in another direction. At one point I stopped it by making it bounce against one of the other two walls in the room, something she wasn't expecting and it upset her. I'm thinking now in my awake state that she was upset because she always had to win the game and I had come out of nowhere this time with the audacity to actually win the game myself.
Somehow this morphed into a grey area in the dream where I was outside and she was still inside but we were getting ready to go somewhere but I was in an emotional state of mind that actually is a familiar state of mind for me. I was upset with my wife, emotionally upset, and it had to do with her not winning the game and me somehow being the one who was to blame, the one in the wrong. I frequently am driven to emotional distress by this.
So somehow my beloved cat became involved. I have a love hate relationship with my cat. She's not actually my cat but she is. She is my daughter's cat but we have been the cat's caretakers for about the past decade since our daughter moved out west. This cat was born back in 2004 to a featherweight but loving cat that we used to have and her daddy was a really scruffy looking old tomcat that wandered the neighborhood and if you ever got close enough to get a good look at him he had this large broad face that had this wild look of fear on it just before he bolted and ran off across the road into the woods. He clearly didn't seem to be anybody's cat because he was so scruffy and fearful but I see the broad head and wild look of his face in his little kitten, my cat, so I know he was the daddy.
Even though she has this wildness built into her that has always kept her from being the kind of lap cat that most cat lovers enjoy having, I still enjoy seducing her into enjoying a good heavy purr on a regular enough basis for her to know I'm her daddy, not that untamed broad-faced tomcat that she carries in her genes.
So it came as quite a surprise to me when in this dream I smothered her to death in a soft towel of some sort and put her in a bag or box of some kind and locked her inside the car that my wife and I were preparing to go somewhere in. Within minutes my wife was outside with me or maybe we met at the door when she was coming out and she asked if I had seen the cat. Of course I said no but she kept persisting and eventually she began to suspect that I had done something bad to the cat because, I suppose, I was still in this emotional state trying to hide my anger about not being allowed to win at this bounce ball game.
We went back and forth for awhile about are you sure you haven't seen the cat but eventually she became convinced that I had done the cat in and was hiding it in the car. From there the dream quickly morphed into her needing to get the police involved because I had gone bonkers again. I say again because in real life I am quite accustomed to going bonkers whenever I am forced to face the consequences of not letting her win all the games she plays, the relationship games, the ones that she repeatedly uses to win the dominance she enjoys over me. If you've read this blog over the past five or so years you might be starting to see where this dream is going and why, but for those who are new to it I'll do what I can here to keep you going with this. This dream and the real-life situation that spawned it isn't candy to the reader's eye. It's bitter.
So eventually she does get into the car and she does find the dead cat and I am in the background trying to imagine that I see some life in the cat because of course I never actually wanted the cat dead even though it was for sure me who had killed it but somehow the dream moved from needing to involve the authorities to wandering through the back stage of some training school with gifted students preparing to take their next lessons from accomplished art masters. There was this one older man, a piano expert, trying to lure me into my next music lesson (or was it my first?).
Then somehow as if by magic my wife and I were in a church setting, somewhat of a young adult setting since somehow I have never moved my own spiritual mindset beyond being a young adult I guess, and it was just about time for some of the young people attending to start their confessions and it quickly morphed into one of those things that happen in churches where people are actually allowed to participate and not just sing songs or sit and listen. This was a setting where someone begins their confession and it becomes this well-practiced virtue signaling kind of long-winded thing where the person doing the confession is feeding their ego by dominating everybody else's time so as soon as I saw that was where I was and my time to speak would never come I got up and walked out and my wife was right behind me trying to get me to stop and return to the confession session.
The next scene - only moments later in dream time - was a night scene where my wife and I were walking along the edge of the woods up on my little farm and we came across a large gathering of kids and church counselor type young people being all happy and having fun around a bunch of campfires in the edge of the woods so here I am in absolute misery still in my deeply disturbed emotional state having just been found to have murdered my pet cat while my wife is making it crystal clear that if it wasn't for me and my bad side we could be enjoying the company of all these happy kids and camp counselors - when something dawned on me, something profound.
The dream becomes fuzzy at this point but my wife and I suddenly wound up inside a car with several other people and it was back in the confessions mode but this time it was my turn to confess and because these confessionals are always such bullshit anyway and because they never actually go anywhere, never accomplish anything, always are just virtue signaling ego trips that never solve any real problems, I was remaining silent. I didn't want to do it. Everybody was waiting and laying this guilt trip on me but I just didn't want to play this game with them and enter into shameful submission. So it went on for awhile and the pressure kept building for me to say something and I kept resisting and finally I swung open the door - I was in the driver's seat - and started to get out but the urge came to me to turn to my wife and say something, over and over again, with the group in the car as my witness. I said, "Why is it that I am the one that always has to change and not you?" Over and over again I said it.
On that note I awoke from my dream.
Why is it that I am the one that always has to change and not you?
Unfortunately this one question has been the story of my life since I married my wife. She was an early subscriber to the "love me for who I am because you're never going to get me to change" crowd. The year 2019 was the year that both of my sons were forcefully put through this same nonsense by their significant others too so it's very fresh in my mind, but buried just beneath the surface, just out of consciousness. I live with this as my reality.
So I jotted down a note on an index card and left it in the kitchen for my wife to eventually see, maybe today, maybe later. It says this:
Here is the question that the victim of a narcissist always asks:
Why is it that I am the one that has to change and not you?
If you've done any reading or have studied narcissism this is a well established concept. This is the reason most counselors advise victims of narcissists to get out of the relationship. This part of the relationship never does change because nobody has the cure for narcissism.
On that note I will post this story and attempt to go back to sleep! Wish me luck!
posted by Bill | 7:12 AM
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