Note: I didn’t actually remember writing this. My revision history tells me it was February 5, 2017, immediately following the 45th Inauguration. Since then, it has been sitting unpublished, buried among my drafts, and at some point I forgot about it–so much so that I was completely taken aback rereading my own words. Perhaps I thought it wasn’t finished? Rediscovering it today, I’ve decided it’s time. Please give it a moment. And then perhaps another.
Fear is a privilege, and it’s a privilege we all have. In an infinite existence, our particular corner of a fractalized existence creates a perception of fear as unique as the snow on the ground.
When we begin to recognize fear for the beautiful tool that it is, we can begin to wake up. It is only when the unconscious becomes conscious that we can begin to understand the power that we hold.
Storytime.
A few years ago, my dreams started to change (and I mean my literal sleeping-state dreams, not my wishful figurative ones, though those soon followed–more on that later). And when I say “started to change,” I really mean they hit me square in the face seemingly overnight. My conscious self started to find her way to the surface of the projected characters of my sleeping mind, and I was afraid. I was more afraid than I had ever been.
Except that’s a lie. I was not more afraid than I had ever been. I was more consciously afraid than I had ever allowed myself to acknowledge. I saw horrors in my dreams that scared me into making the conscious decision to leave said dream and wake up safely in bed. I saw angry gods and fire and brimstone. I saw death and decay. I saw ancient conspiracies and murderous regimes, and as my intensely logical mind struggled to process what it was like to be conscious within its own unconscious projections, I began to fear things I had never feared before.
You know those few seconds of confusion that exist between the moments when your dreams fade into your conscious awareness when you wake up? Those moments when your brain is still struggling to acknowledge your physical existence and isn’t quite sure how to be awake? That’s what my brain was doing while I was still sleeping, and that confusion was seeping over into my waking life. I thought I was losing my mind.
Lucid dreaming taught me how to become conscious of the unconscious, to confront my fears–as hyperbole as they were in my dream state–and to recognize that becoming conscious of my fear enabled me to become conscious in my actions and how I responded to that fear. It taught me that I had control even in my dreams, which I had long accepted as being entirely unconscious. It taught me how to wake up, just in time for me to shake the cobwebs from the realities of our world. I may have been living awake in the 27 years that preceded my lucid dreaming, but I was only aware of my physical existence. I was not actively aware of what the world was telling me to be afraid of to keep me in submission, and I was not aware of how paralyzed I was.
Waking up has not changed my knowledge, but it has given me movement. I am awake, I am aware of the unconscious fears that have been projected onto me, I am aware of the autonomy I hold outside of those unconscious fears, and I am aware that I can take action. Life is a fractal, and my brain was trying to teach me how to wake up all along.
The powers-that-be have threatened us with eternal damnation and a world ruled by murderous chaos if we do not concede our intellectual autonomy to them. They have been gas-lighting us our entire lives with their twisted hegemonic rule. We’re told that if we don’t follow their rules of oppression against one another, it’s a quick and slippery slope to the bowels of hell, and whether we consciously accept their methods of control or not, they’ve found their way into our collective unconscious just the same. We put our perceived safety above the human rights of others because they’ve taught us that fear is an entity unto itself, instead of a tool we can learn to use to wake ourselves up. “Beware of false prophets.”
I will not shame you for still waking up. I know exactly what it’s like to be lost in the confusion of the world you thought you understood, and I know what it’s like to feel like your reality is falling apart. I know how debilitating that fear of such a reality can be. I also know that we must face this possibility in order to see beyond the walls of our own snowflake of fear in the fractal of our collective consciousness. I also know that as logical thinking beings, we often try to interpret our metaphorical lessons as falsely literal, and we fail to catch the meaning of the lessons.
Let the concept of your reality die–or at least be able to face it as a possibility–so that it can be reborn with eyes that see farther, and character that is not threatened by the insecurities of those who haven’t yet found the beauty and importance in the curves of their own snowflake.
You’ve been conditioned to be afraid your entire life, and you’ve been taught that fear is the most inconceivable onotological damnation we could ever know. You’ve been tricked into believing that fear is more than just a trigger we can use to pay closer attention to the world around us, and it’s forced you into giving up your intellectual autonomy. I will not shame you for still sleeping–we’re all still sleeping in some layer of the fractal–but I will continue to stop you from perpetuating the systems of violence and oppression that are keeping you under–that are keeping all of us under.
