Scars and the Christmas Room

January 31st 2008

This is the dream with which I will open this blog.

It began with me going to visit somebody I remember from a previous job from about 10 years ago. He was a manager, a small, quiet and very introverted man who most people believed to be a bit strange. Personally, I didn't have many dealings with him and neither did I like him particularly (see the associations section). I was with my mother and my sister. I can't recall anything else about his place of residence in this dream beyond the fact that it all took place in what I assume was his living room. The room itself was dimply lit and coloured in dark red and green. Oddly enough, there were decorations and a sparsely decorated Christmas tree in this room even though it wasn't actually Christmas.

The first thing I saw when I walked in was an unopened Christmas present in a large, rectangular red box which sat on a sofa chair. We all sat down, and the man explained that even though it wasn't Christmas, he kept his room decorated like this because it made him feel "safe" - it was, he explained his refuge from the outside world. We all sat around chatting, but I can't remember what we talked about (I don't even know why we were visiting him). I also fired up a Nintendo Wii that was in the room, but switched it off when I realised no-one wanted to play Tennis with me on the console.

In the second part of the dream, I have an accident with a claw hammer and as a result end up with two deep gashes above my right eye. The first is a small but deep cut, and the second a longer slice that begins from above my outer right eye and ends at the centre spot between both eyes. My mother is also here at this point and is just as shocked as I am by the cuts. My first thought is that I would be permanently disfigured by this and that the scars would make me unattractive to the opposite sex, but I somehow console myself with the though that some women consider scars a sign of rugged manliness.

Then, I am in a hospital getting the scars looked at. The doctor there manages to remove them completely, and I confirm this by looking at my now scar-free face in the mirror. The dream then changes location again and I'm in an industrial estate at night. I'm running around, but I'm not sure where I'm going. On my travels, I encounter people who keep laughing at me, and it is then that I realise that I still have the scars! Everyone I comes across laughs at my scars and some people even want to attack me because of them. I keep running, trying to avoid confronting people who want to hurt me because of my scars whilst, at the same time being baffled by the fact that even though the scars aren't visible the mirror, people can still somehow see them. I then wake up.


Associations

Christmas : Despite my cynicism because of its commercial trappings, Christmas has positive associations for me. It is time I spend with my family (the aforementioned mother and sister). Christmas is something I associate with warmth, togetherness and the "safeness" also felt by the man in the room.

The ex-manager : As before, he was a small, introverted man whom most considered a bit weird. Myself included. He was in his late 40s, unmarried and lived with his parents. I actually used to think he was quite a pathetic, pitiable character and used to wonder what life circumstances would result in someone being the way he was. I felt sorry for him, but despised his apparent weakness of character (or so I saw it).

The unopened present : Surprise. A mystery/unknown quantity.

The Wii : I have one of these. They're a lot of fun. I enjoy introducing it to new people. Most take to it, but some don't - just like the dream.

The scars : The bigger scar resembled one I have on my left leg from an accident I had on holiday when I was about 7 or 8, where I cut my leg open on a tin. This was also a very deep scar.

Disfigurement angst/hospital : I was actually in hospital last summer for about a week due to a rare kidney illness which eventually cleared up. Prior to my admission, my body swelled up, with some of the swelling showing on my face. Both my mother and myself were concerned about the facial swelling, and I wondered if it would be permanent (it wasn't).

These are the main elements and associations. It's still early days, so I don't have any interpretive thoughts yet.


Update (5-5-08)

After a lot of thought and introspection, I come to what I think is an explanation of the first part of this dream. At the time, I was going through a very introverted phase where I was not interacting socially very much at all for reasons I won't go into here. I'm normally quite a social person, but I was going through a dark period. I'd come home from work and stay home and even when I did go out at the weekends, it was not for very long. At the same time, I was substituting actual relationships with the opposite sex with fantasy, having effectively "given up" on relationships in general. What I feel this dream was doing was warning me about my attitude at the time. It was showing me that my willful introversion was isolating me, keeping me in my own little world that I thought was "safe", but was ultimately harmful.

The unopened present was the dream' way of symbolically reminding me that by shutting myself off, I'd be left with no-one with whom to share what I have of myself (if you get my meaning); a gift, but with no-one to give it to. I believe there were also sexual connotations too, due to both the colour and shape of the box. The shabby Christmas decorations represented the ultimate decay that would result in following this path.

However, the most obvious representation of the unhealthiness of this forced solitude was the ex-manager. As I described, he was a quiet, introverted man that was also very lonely. Characters from dreams are always representations parts of yourself, no matter who they resemble, so by using this guy, the dream was trying to tell me something about myself at the time. It was a warning of what I myself might become if I didn't do something about it.

The part with me trying to get the other people in the room to play on the Wii can be explained thus. Obviously, "I" represented my ego in this dream, which, whilst not wanting the state of solitude suggested above, had chosen to allow it to happen. The unwillingness of the others to participate in a "game" or to do something "fun" was the dream's way of showing me that the state of being I was in at the time was slowly draining my libido.