Den of Scorpions

The title of this post comes from the last words I spoke before waking up from a dream.

I actually shouted those words – DEN OF SCORPIONS! – rather than spoke them, in surprised alarm after finding about six big black scorpions living in a cardboard box which I’d bunged on a table sometime earlier in the dream.

The cardboard box was supposed to be empty, and I was in the process of picking it up to recycle it (because apparently I’m conscious of the need to do that in my dreams as well as RL) when I noticed that its emptiness had been filled. In a short space of time. Hence my surprise. The alarmed part of my surprise was due to my bare hand being in close proximity of the upturned stingers of the equally alarmed and surprised scorpions.

(The big black scorpions from my dream were ones I regularly came across in my father’s studio in Italy when I was a child)

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image via Flickr : The frog and the scorpion by Jose Antonio Fundo

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I didn’t wake up out of fear. It was simply time to wake up. The dream had reached its end.

It was an odd rambling dream kind of like most of my posts, which are typical of the way I think.

At one point in the dream, the washing machine caught fire and I quickly ran to get the fire extinguisher only to find that it too was on fire – but nothing else in the house was burning.

Before that I’d been sitting on a deck chair on the beach outside my house (in RL the beach is about a couple of hours away, but sometimes I like to imagine that my house is beside the sea because I’ve always wanted to live by the sea but the sea doesn’t seem to want to live by me), wishing I had magic powers to change the layout of the hedges and stone paths with a blink of the eye (that is something I do a lot, and have always done. I like to move things around in my mind’s eye and sometimes I wish I could do it for real with a blink of a magic eye). Not sure why there were hedges on the beach in my dream, perhaps because I’ve been thinking that I need some hedges in my RL garden along the road to create some privacy and some noise reduction… my thoughts have yet to become action which frustrates me about myself, always has… there’s so much to do according to my mind, but my body just can’t keep up with my mind’s demands.

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Anyway… the scorpion part of the dream is fairly easy to interpret (although it might take me forever and a day to get to the point).

Before I fell asleep I was thinking about the recent Kdramas I’ve been reading via episode recaps on Dramabeans…

I haven’t been watching Kdramas in the last few days due to having wandered into the territory of – Hyori’s Homestay – which is a reality show that is very different from Western reality shows in a wonderfully quirky way. It’s so ordinary… which makes it rather special and extraordinary.

(also Hyori’s relationship with her husband, Sang-Soon, reminds me a lot of my relationship with my partner, although neither of us would be as comfortable as they were letting strangers into their hermit home… but then again neither of us have a job which entails being a celebrity – that’s a job which requires a lot of sacrifice of the things non-celebs take for granted. We may dream to be them, but would we really want to be them? Whoever our particular ‘them’ is – their life tends to look better from the outside looking in, all perks with none of the downers we associate with our own life… but is it really what it appears to be?)

I used to quite like watching reality shows several years ago when they were new and different from all other TV shows, but then… the powers that be decided that reality wasn’t watchable, popular, profitable or whatever, and needed to be edited, fixed, staged, dramatised to the extreme, interfered with on a constant basis, and made completely devoid of real reality. The more stressful, the better… but Hyori’s Homestay is so relaxing to watch because a lot of nothing happens… we need more of that, imo, especially since our perception of reality nowadays seems to be so influenced by what we watch on TV or online.

I apologise for straying so much… but am I really sorry for doing that?

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Before I fell asleep I was contemplating the villains in Kdramas, and how I felt that they often ruined a good story which really didn’t need that kind of a villain or that sort of villainous subplot woven into the main plot.

Of course in RL that’s what the villains in our lives do to our own RL stories – they derail a perfectly good story with their illogical, ridiculous, baddie nonsense (which isn’t nonsense, or ridiculous, or illogical to them, just as it isn’t to us when we’re the baddie who doesn’t know we’re the baddie). My parents could ruin a perfectly ordinary moment in a blink of an eye (usually accompanied by a temper tantrum). The amount of times they turned a nothing into a something which then became a giant ant-wasp-infested drama picnic… was that really necessary!? (if you need an example, go here – Missing Teaspoons and Other Very Important Issues – if that example is not good enough for you, go away)

Apparently, yes, it was vital! Their Kdrama villain antics made me anxious and nervous about even the most simple things – to this day I still hesitate or feel unusually anxious about doing things which most people think of as a nothing, as easy, as drama-free…

The villains and villain subplots in Kdrama often feel shoe-horned into the story like a really jarring PPL (product placement). Maybe that’s just how I experience it… although reading the recaps written by the Dramabeans crew let’s me know that it’s not just me.

So… as I fell asleep, I was mulling over how aggressive people, the villains, the assholes and bitches of our lives (which are sometimes us, but we don’t usually like to see ourselves as being those people in our own lives or in the lives of others… so why would we think those we perceive as villains in our lives would see themselves that way or appreciate that we see them that way?), are often being villains, assholes and bitches, because they’re afraid… and our fear of them is in some ways reflective of their fear of us.

Maybe our fear of them is due to their fear of us – we’re picking up on their fear subconsciously and turning it into our own. We’re owning what they’re disowning… and others are owning what we’re disowning.

The wound is being passed on and on and on…

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I’ve been lucky recently in not having to deal with any villains, assholes or bitches or similar types (or if I have, I haven’t viewed them that way, ergo they’re not that according to my perception of them).

Am I no longer attracted to them? Are they no longer attracted to me? Or is something else going on?

It’s kind of funny because for most of my life I felt as though I was somehow doomed or cursed with the bad luck of always having to deal with villains, assholes and bitches and similar types.

I tried to think positively to attract the positive, to create my own good luck, etc… and grew to hate that whole concept of Positive Thinking… it seemed to be a con aimed at people like me who were desperate, who felt down-trodden, who wanted to believe that a reality beyond the one experienced existed and could be manipulated into existence if it didn’t exist… and would pay or do anything to get out of the seeming jail they were in.

None of the ‘fixes’ I tried worked. Why? Obviously it was my fault, right?

I gave up on all of that after a long period of refusing to give up on it… and… then things began to slowly change.

How?

Why?

And…

What exactly changed?

And can I capture that in a formula, bottle it and sell it to make millions and become a chaebol?

(ps. If I could do that, knowing me, I’d give it away for free… and… either someone else would ‘borrow’ it, ‘repackage’ it and make millions from it or no one would notice the solution because it wasn’t being sold to them in a neat and tidy buy this miracle magical formula format.. or some other subplot which probably wouldn’t make it into a Kdrama)

For awhile I explained my bad luck by using the concept of accrued karma. In other words I went with the idea that I’d been a really bad asshole/bitch/villain (who probably thought they were the hero) in a previous life and in this life I was reaping what I’d sowed in the former life.

I have no idea if the concept of past lives and karma is a real thing, sometimes it doesn’t matter if something is real or not.

Viewing the villains, assholes and bitches, in my life as perhaps being the people I’d wronged in my former life getting their own back on me, repaying me for what I’d done to them, teaching me a lesson… helped me to become less of a poor-me and more responsible and accountable, which eventually (after a long torturous path) lead me to that weird experience known as acceptance.

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I’m not sure if I truly have anything figured out, or if I’ve genuinely accepted anything… it’s easy to be accepting when you have it easy (or easier), and to think you’ve figured things out when you’re not being bombarded with a puzzles and problems onslaught. But then again… maybe my good luck at the moment is because I don’t react the way I used to and have a different attitude to things, people, happenings, life, etc.

This year hasn’t been without challenges, stress, anxiety… in fact it started out in the middle of a stressful experience which was very fear-filled. And a portion of my recent good luck could be put down to my just not having the energy to do anything other than accept things as they are, and being thankful for those pockets of comfort in amongst the discomfort.

I’m not sure how much I’ve changed… we are who we are… but my attitude, on the other hand, has gone through some turnarounds throughout my life, and throughout this year in particular. So, who I am may not have changed, but how I experience being who I am, the attitude I have about being me… hmmm… I don’t know… if my attitude about me being me has changed so much as my attitude towards others being themselves has changed – are the two mutually exclusive or inclusive or… ?

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by Amrit Brar

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I definitely look outside of me differently, with a different attitude – sometimes I force myself to do that, other times it’s a change which doesn’t require any effort.

So… what was I talking about, what was the point I was making or trying to make? Oh, yes, the den of scorpions…

Human nature appears to be the only version of nature which attacks without provocation… but, of course, we humans always have a reason, an excuse, a justifiable trigger even if no one else understands it or can see it in the moment (even if we have forgotten why we’re reacting as we are… why did I stab that person with my eyes, my mouth, my fork? Maybe I’m a bit of a psycho, teehee aegyo… or maybe they’re a psycho grr boo, and I was right to do that to protect myself, yay me).

We sting those who haven’t harmed us, while exposing our soft bellies to those who constantly sting us. We reject those who don’t deserve our rejection while chasing after those who constantly reject us. We want love from those who only know how to hate us, while hating those who love us. We hurt and pass our hurt on while complaining when others hurt and pass their hurt onto us, refusing to acknowledge that other hurt as we do.

We throw our waste away and then blame someone else for all the waste.

We are humans who are living in fear of machines taking over our world (mainly because they’ll kill us for being weak, stupid, and useless), and yet we willingly work on constructing machines to take over all the functions we don’t want to do ourselves – we call it progress and turn progress into something which kills us.

We’re weird… but we’re afraid of being weird and strive to be normal, then hate it when someone tells us we’re normal. But hate it when someone says we’re not normal.

I guess the neocortex is just trying to figure out why it developed…?

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Does any of this need to make sense?