Dream: Is it possible for one's unconsciousness to have its own unconsciousness?

DaveC426913

Valued Senior Member
I had a dream the other night where (I'll try to kept the details out and get to the point)

I was selected along with a half dozen of other "office overload" people (where you get called if some business needs extra help for a day or two). We went into the office of some unknown corporation and were seated at a round table in the midst of their cubical farm.

My particular task was to paint in the colour areas on animation cels produced by the senior animators (this is considered scut work - boring stuff for the interns and office extras), but for me (who actually studied classical cel animation in college) this was absolutely awesome!

I was so excited I thought I'd snap a pic to send to my wife with a smiley and a big thumbs up. It was fine work, so I needed to get close-in and keep it in-focus and light it with flash.

So anyway, after a short while of us working, the General Manager came in (big guy, grey suit and tie) and started chatting us up. I barely had a dozen or so words with him before he looked me up and down, saying "And what about you? How are you doing? Fitting in? I'm gonna say you're kind of an arrogant one. Yeah. Arrogant."

I was shocked (that electric shock that raises your hairs and makes you cold with sweat) and genuinely dismayed. I had no idea where this came from or what he was even talking about. (It sure didn't come from my mind) How could he pass judgement after just a dozen words between us? I feared my job was in jeopardy.

At that moment, I rose out of the dream, nearing conssciousness, but not quite there yet. Upon my consciousness activating, I immediately recalled my behavior and realized I had been firing off a flash camera a dozen times despite being a strange newcomer in an office of busy people.

I was mortified by my obtuse behavior. (This is my conscious thoughts intruding on my dream, as I neared the surface). I thought of sending off an email blast to apologize to all, but that would just compound my obnoxiousness. I decided I should simply quietly apologize to the nearest person and, hopefully, they would share that low-key with others as they saw fit.


What beguiles me about this is that I honestly had no idea what this guy was calling me out about until after-the-fact. Yet there must have been something - below my unconscious mind's consciousness - that was separate from my awareness, judging me in my own dream. (Otherwise how could it have inserted such an unforseen twist?) In other words, how can I be aware of something and not be aware of it simultaneously? How it that possible? How can my unconscious mind be receiving messages below its threshold of awareness?

Or maybe not below - maybe two parts of my brain were processing thoughts independently, and one was judging the actions of the other.
 
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I had a dream the other night where (I'll try to kept the details out and get to the point)

I was selected along with a half dozen of other "office overload" people (where you get called if some business needs extra help for a day or two). We went into the office of some unknown corporation and were seated at a round table in the midst of their cubical farm.

My particular task was to paint in the colour areas on animation cels produced by the senior animators (this is considered scut work - boring stuff for the interns and office extras), but for me (who actually studied classical cel animation in college) this was absolutely awesome!

I was so excited I thought I'd snap a pic to send to my wife with a smiley and a big thumbs up. It was fine work, so I needed to get close-in and keep it in-focus and light it with flash.

So anyway, after a short while of us working, the General Manager came in (big guy, grey suit and tie) and started chatting us up. I barely had a dozen or so words with him before he looked me up and down, saying "And what about you? How are you doing? Fitting in? I'm gonna say you're kind of an arrogant one. Yeah. Arrogant."

I was shocked (that electric shock that raises your hairs and makes you cold with sweat) and genuinely dismayed. I had no idea where this came from or what he was even talking about. (It sure didn't come from my mind) How could he pass judgement after just a dozen words between us? I feared my job was in jeopardy.

At that moment, I rose out of the dream, nearing conssciousness, but not quite there yet. Upon my consciousness activating, I immediately recalled my behavior and realized I had been firing off a flash camera a dozen times despite being a strange newcomer in an office of busy people.

I was mortified by my obtuse behavior. (This is my conscious thoughts intruding on my dream, as I neared the surface). I thought of sending off an email blast to apologize to all, but that would just compound my obnoxiousness. I decided I should simply quietly apologize to the nearest person and, hopefully, they would share that low-key with others as they saw fit.


What beguiles me about this is that I honestly had no idea what this guy was calling me out about until after-the-fact. Yet there must have been something - below my unconscious mind's consciousness - that was separate from my awareness, judging me in my own dream. (Otherwise how could it have inserted such an unforseen twist?) In other words, how can I be aware of something and not be aware of it simultaneously? How it that possible? How can my unconscious mind be receiving messages below its threshold of awareness?

Or maybe not below - maybe two parts of my brain were processing thoughts independently, and one was judging the actions of the other.
Thanks for that account.Sounds familiar .

I might be mistaken but I have the half recollection of having asked myself the same question a while back(the details now forgotten)

But yes the awareness I would have in a dream would not surprise me to be multi layered(I may have even wondered if there might be more than one plot going on)

It is such a weird place to be that anything seems possible.

Rereading your account ,actually I have to say that I consider every character in every dream I have to be myself (the characters are just something I hang my identity on.Whether that approach comes from experience or from having learned it from pop psychology in the past I cannot say.

Whatever ,dreams really are the bees knees.I used to practice lucid dreaming techniques some 45 years ago but found it a bit mentally draining and gave it up after a few weeks even though I seemed to be making progress .
 
Rereading your account ,actually I have to say that I consider every character in every dream I have to be myself (the characters are just something I hang my identity on.Whether that approach comes from experience or from having learned it from pop psychology in the past I cannot say.
I have heard this too. It's an intriguing conjecture.

Whatever ,dreams really are the bees knees.I used to practice lucid dreaming techniques some 45 years ago but found it a bit mentally draining and gave it up after a few weeks even though I seemed to be making progress .
Thanks to some changes in my pharmaceuticals, I have been having incredibly rich dreams for quite some time now. Every morning I have a captive audience in the form of my wife in the car who is regaled with my (pointless) recounting of my dreams.

Vast, sweeping plots, with intro, crisis, foreshadowing, character development, climax and resolution. Something I am dreadfully bad at when awake.

A recent dream - absolutely out of nowhere - was an entire children's story about a little backhoe that was being bullied by the other construction equipment. It contained lessons of how to turn weakenesses into strengths, divide and conquer your foes, improvise with resources around you to use them to your advantage and your foe's disadvantage.

The little backhoe went up into the hills and, when the bully excavator and his articulating-truck sidekick predictably followed, he used the narrow crevices first to separate them, then trap them and then individually neutralize them.

I woke up with a cathartic insight into why one might write stories - what purpose they can serve bwyond entertainment: to provide material lessons for readers to use as inspiration for problem-solving in their own lives.
 
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