A Dream About Individuation

By Reuven Kotleras on July 25, 2023

Guest blogger Reuven Kotleras is a profoundly gifted ex-child and polymath. He has published professionally on European political history, Eurasian economic development, epistemology of science, and mathematical logic, among other topics. His skills include decision analysis, organizational design, and strategic foresight. He also is a poet, pianist, runner, and dog-lover.

A Dream About Individuation

I don't intend that every post I make to this blog should be a dream, but I had another dream. This time, I just tell it and give the interpretation at the end without such elaboration as I provided in the dream blogged here on July 10. I am driven to record this dream, unlike some others. In this dream, I was in an old suburban neighborhood, not one that I recognized from my actual past, but it was a leafy, well-appointed, and comfortable one. It seemed I had been invited to some kind of gathering. I didn't know any of the people there but they seemed somehow familiar. It was not a party per se, but a kind of gathering of people who were distant acquaintances.

The purpose of the gathering was to get to know one another, with the understanding that there would be a mutual transformation, not only dyadically but seemingly also “collectively". In the house, people were gathered in a group, probably in the living room, rather than being dispersed throughout the house. There was no music but the silence was not oppressive. People were open; they talked and got to know each other. I mainly observed and listened. I don't remember what they said, and I don't remember saying anything myself. They were all younger than me and seemed to express more energy in search of catharsis. They were young people looking for their futures but quite well-mannered and polite and intelligent and mutually understanding and calm.

I don't remember leaving, but I do recall that I established good, “friendly" relations with a few of them, or at least I thought I did. At any rate, everyone had every reason to be instinctively well-disposed toward everyone else. It was in this sense of having that mutual understanding that they “knew" one another.

There was going to be a second meeting. I intended to go. I drove out there and had a meal in a restaurant early. Then I drove home and went to sleep for a nap. I missed the meeting. Hours later, I telephoned, recognizing the person who answered, and who recognized me. “We have all decided to continue to be in touch and continue our exchanges, and to see [only] one another [socially]." The person was very welcoming and open, and the fact that I had missed the meeting didn't really mean anything to our exchanges, yet without saying so, I felt that I had missed something important by sleeping through the meeting, although I was not really upset and did not feel anything that could be called regret: i.e., I did not “hang onto" the feeling of having missed something; rather, that was how things were, as though some other future had escaped me, yet without eliminating either the present or still other possible futures.

At the same time, there was a part of me that obviously didn't want to be there at the second meeting, or else I would not have gone back “home" for a “nap". Any sense of regret that I may have felt for not being there was balanced by a certain contentment not to have been there, insofar as I must have had some underlying feeling that being there would have been a “risk" of some kind to the integrity of personality and solid levelledness that I have lately discovered.

The young people at the meeting didn't want to threaten me, that is for sure. In the neighborhood I found a traffic sign (not red, therefore not a “Stop" sign, but yellow and in the shape of a “Yield" sign) that had a symbol graffitoed on it, which I later discovered was supposed to be a sign for “bitcoin" (although not the dollar-sign symbol for it). One of the people at the gathering had a house in the neighborhood in the front yard of which was a porch swing, in the same form as the graffito but also appearing in the style of the bicycle iconic of “The Prisoner" television series. This was the symbol of the valley into which the youth descends from the mountain in order to seek his fortune, following the river that rises there from the rains and which runs through the valley and beyond.

I was at the house of the meeting again (which was not the house with the porch swing) after everyone had left; or at least no one was there. I was looking around, not wistfully, but as if something (i.e. the meeting) had passed me by. I wanted to be with those people but had not enough in common with them, although I am certain I had a lot to offer them. They were now clearly aspects of my younger selves or people whom I had once met and to whom I had attributed qualities or potentials, or projected these.

What is this stability that I have achieved? I am content not to be uncertain and seeking, yet also again I am (like a launched rocket) “arcking out" again [I also put a “k" in “picnicking" because “picnicing" is “pick-nice-ing"] as I described in a recent (offline handwritten) journal entry, in the sense that I felt and recorded the same in my journal when I was in my early 20s.

All those other figures are representations of my past possible futures and potentials that they evoked at the time. They have gone their own ways and I am individuated, yet they are still around somewhere unseen. Probably I am not consciously aware when they reach out to me.