some shadowed places

let me theorize for a moment here. i had a dream the other night that was oddly coraline-esque, in the sense that i was struggling with some dominant monster in the house that i grew up in. i don't remember a lot of the details; i wish i had written closer to the actual event but i haven't been finding the time lately, and it just struck me upside the head with its oddity. i do remember that i was in my parents' bedroom, though as characteristic in dreams it was not so much the same in furnishings, or size, just in relative location and perhaps general shape. this is an energy-center of a house for children, so i can understand why my mind would choose it as a setting of some sort. i'm sure that i also branched, at some point, into my own childhood room, which was just across the hallway...an easy jaunt even if progress was hindered by battle, or whatever~

i'm not really sure where i intend to go with this prelude...it strikes me as, not necessarily unusual, but quite curious that so many of my dreams happen in or around my old house. you would think that my mind would be engaging nightly with newer problems, newer ideas, and setting them appropriately in my new surroundings...but perhaps these are too volatile, in my lack of knowledge of them, to paint adequate pictures for a backdrop. i'm fairly certain that my themes, the ideas that my dreams are really digging their fingers into, hashing out, are more intelligent than they used to be...that they deal with different issues as they develop, as i come across them in my actual experience. but they come as ghosts in my old haunts, which, for my part, was unexpected.

so, the parents' bedroom was unique, usually not a typical setting. there are other places which recur with more frequency...namely the backyard. we had a good-sized backyard at my house in the springs, and i suppose that i spent a good deal of time in it. in the dreams, however, it is permeated with a sense of mystery, of vagueness and enormous, almost incomprehensible, size. i wonder about myself as a child, and in the wonderment i find this charmed recurrence of earlier self. it makes me wonder about the most basic sensations in life....that of the security of the home; the focus of life for everyone that you know. the comfort found inside those walls, and how that is imbued upon a childish mind....what the outside would have meant to me, then. i imagine myself, done up in blue one-piece winnie-the-pooh pajamas, gazing in rapt bewilderment out the glass doors in our main entryway, trying to decipher the strange wilderness, the unexplored depths of our backyard. what does a two-year old think of a tree? of grass and flowers? do they have the same positive valence that we would attribute to them now? part of me thinks that they would be frightening totems (head on pole) of the outside world, of complete loss of control.

of course, to a child, unknowns behave in different ways than they do to us now. our adult selves build up apprehensions based upon our past experiences; they fortify us from the outside world with snowglobe-like bricks, each teeming with motion and memory, each distorting the outside world more and more as we look through them, sometimes not even being able to see past the memories themselves. children become apprehensive, fearful, but only after their base comforts have already been stripped from them. a child misses his mother only once she is gone, not before; a child does not fear being lost until it actually arises. we tangle with these scenarios before they exist, and in that we lose something valuable in our interface with the world - we begin to focus more and more, and ultimately we see less and less.

so here i am, standing with my hands and nose pressed against the glass separating my child self from his house's backyard. squirrels scamper by, and i do not understand them. i wonder what sensations they call to my heart.

if i had to guess (since the time i am describing is before memory), and i am going to infer from my dreams now, i would venture to say that i felt fear. not a gripping terror, but an ambiguous shadow floating just beyond my perception, darkening. i say this, because in my dreams i find this same darkness to it. it has apparently been chosen as the place where i work out most of my unconscious struggles. i wish i had a running count of the number of dreams and/or nightmares which at some point trample through that backyard, which in reality has not a trace of ominousness to it but, who can say what a mind will twist anything into at the end of the day~ different sections of that backyard are honeycombed off in my mind; each attributed with memories and characteristics, properties which are real to me but which never belonged.

additionally, as if that weren't enough, i have an amplification of this wilderness....i have my family's cabin, secluded deep in the woods of kenosha pass. this was the spot for family vacations, an inexpensive spot to get away from it all, and i'm certain that it is tethered to numerous memories for everyone who goes there so it is a logical place to return to. i have spent time at this cabin as far back as i can remember, and always it has been a holy temple to me, an observation of the depths of nature and a retreat from the world as i knew it. this cabin is a fantastic place; perhaps you, reader, will be taken there one day~ but it has also developed, for me, as an extremely psychologically-powerful token. i go to this cabin, in my dreams, in my unconscious mind, when apparently there are mountains of rubble in my head that need to be worked through. almost always this cabin appears to me as a fractured house of the most haunted and haunting capacity possible. always there are deep-seated ghosts, literally; always it is overrun with the raw power of nature, crowned with black, spindly insects, the wardens of what deeper unsettled spirits lie slumbering there. the woods around this cabin host my deepest dreams, my deepest indications of what being 'lost', or pursued by the night, feels like. always it is an incredible adventure just to get to this place, rarely by car as would be expected; typically i must forge my way through snowfields and packs of savage animals, cross extreme conditions and distances in pursuit of something i do not know, at least not consciously. i am never sure what the motivation for returning to this place is, but always there is something drawing me towards it.

i do not know why these nature spots have become the seats for my subconscious psyche. all i can say is that they are bottled with unspeakable things; they reflect a different side of the world, as if i had stood in the middle of them and used the mirror from A Link to the Past. things do not make sense there, and everything is darkened. i thought it notable, towards the goal of figuring myself out a little better...and it always helps me to sort out my thoughts more clearly, this 'writing'.


shhh! listen:
royksopp - "royksopp forever"