Schweinfurt Georgia

I recently unsubbed from r/dreams and r/dreaminterpretation. Here's why.

In my teens, I read some books about dreams and dream interpretation and in my twenties I kept a dream diary as part of therapy. I still pay some attention to my dreams to try to help me navigate life successfully. 

Dreams are a window into the subconscious. They help me figure out what I think about life.

They are also an idiolect -- a dialect of a single person -- and that fact doesn't get adequately respected in online discussions. 

I know a lot about a lot of things but have few "credentials" plus a lot of my views fall outside the Overton Window, so I'm easily attacked and dismissed by people with more credentials or social standing whose fucked up behavior is more generally acceptable because the world has agreed this SHIT is somehow correct.

Dreams can be useful to examine BUT they are also unreliable information. If you recently got high, drunk or took prescription medication, your dreams may be vivid and intense and feel super important and it may be gibberish, not meaningful commentary on your life.

If you are running a fever, your dreams are likely to be nonsense. If you were sleep deprived a long time and are finally sleeping better, your dreams are likely to be vivid and intense and probably feel like nightmares. 

It isn't deeply meaningful. It just means you are playing catch-up.

I never see comments on these subs suggesting your vivid dream might be chemically induced or otherwise might be meaningless nonsense. All comments seem to agree that we are having a super important conversation here about deep shit, honest.

Everyone on the internet in "progressive" spaces like Reddit are eager to vilify men, tell women that all sexual relationships are abusive and DTMFA. They do so on the slightest excuse.

Oh, he burned your toast. We don't need context. We are happy to pronounce him a misogynist who will never do anything but abuse you.

People in advice subs are eager to give life-altering advice with significant consequences to the person listening and none for them. Doctors and therapists require substantial training and licensing to give life-altering advice AND can be held accountable if it goes bad.

Not so when people decide to scream "DTMFA!!!" in your face on the internet. No credentials required and no holding them accountable. At worst, they might get banned from a sub but probably not because hating on men is trendy right now.

I see too much of that on these subs based on "Your own dream is telling me your current romantic interest is a creep!" Again, no accounting for "Maybe she was high." or even "Maybe her dream symbols don't mean what I think they do because it's an idiolect."

Some comments reference things like psychic phenomenon and past life memories. 

I believe in psychic phenomenon and in reincarnation. I believe people are generally more psychically receptive when asleep.

But I don't think it's wise to discuss past life memories very publicly. They aren't provable and it goes weird places, especially in our current internet culture that lacks good practices for how to deal constructively with unreliable info.

Most of the past life memories people talk about publicly trend towards "I was such and such important historical figure!" It's much less often "I was some loser nobody and still haven't sorted my karma from that life."

People probably publicly talk about having been important in the past to enhance their ego, to grab a little limelight without accomplishing anything in this life. There's no way to determine if they really were that person or not and no way to determine if they are straight up lying to intentionally con people or simply deluded.

I saw some discussions of dreams about imaginary cities. People seem fascinated with such and longing for some special meaning, like maybe it really exists somewhere in the multiverse.

I used to dream of Schweinfurt, Georgia. I grew up in Georgia. I lived at one time in Schweinfurt, Germany.

My mother is German. I grew up eating a lot of German food. Both places have a lot of very tall evergreens. 

Schweinfurt, Georgia is a place in my soul, so to speak. It's a symbol about me and my life.

It's a little bit of Germany in the state of Georgia. 

A la "You can take the girl out of the country but you can't take the country out of the girl." 

It just means I'm part German but mostly a gal raised in the Deep South. There's no deeper meaning there and you don't need to read my dream diary to know that about me.

I guess the cities thing was the final straw for me. It has shades of crap from Lovecraftian mythos.

Lovecraft had vivid dreams, possibly due to drug use. Cthulhu Mythos is most likely Freudian commentary on ugly social reality he personally experienced. 

Cthulhu Mythos boils down to "A bunch of gods that will casually destroy your life like a large animal stepping in an ant's nest and we are the ants. Nothing personal. No deep meaning. They don't care about you AT ALL."

This was the stuff of his nightmares and it probably means that the Christian culture he lived in wasn't exactly living up to the message of "God loves you and everyone should love their neighbor and strive to live right so we can all go to heaven."

No, everyone had their dark "gods," the ugly things they really believed and you knew it because of how they chose to live. 

And too many online spaces are exactly like that and I've been burned a bunch by people claiming to be good-hearted idealists who did nothing but intentionally crap all over me. 

So I'm not going to play in these spaces. Too much downside for me, no real upside for anyone.