HELP!! ..I'm in between worlds...

[-->PhenomenoN<--]

Man, my nightly experiences are all over the place and I think it has a lot to do with my daily experiences...I'm lost!  Mentally i've been struggaling big time...trying to find myself, trying to find my place in life, and trying not to lose control, before I do something stupid (to myself)..I have such a big ego - i know i can do anything and become anything - and I think that's why it takes such a big toll on me, if I don't feel like I'm walking in perfection i just feel dirty., depressed, lost, etc etc.
let me give u some examples of my dreams that's probably the best way to understand exactly what's going on in my mind (these range from a few months to a few days)
depressed dreams:  i'm doing something, in front of my house, i'm running up a hill, apart of me hates my self, i'm tired of living, i'm on a pretty big skyscraper, i jump off (attempted suicide), i could feel myself hitting the ground, it hurts, i never die..i go back up and try it again, try landing head first so it could be more affective faster, less pain...i feel everything, my neck braking, everything (not extreme pain but enough to know) - these dreams will last for awhile
ego dreams :i have a lot of dreams where I'm back with with all kinds of people my age, doing something..at a big convention, at a huge hotel, just doing something having some kind of adventure/experience - sometimes i'm on a huge stage over looking millions of people talking about something - just feeling that huge rush of knowing millions of people are watching me and that feeling of security
Last night i had a dream about Lindsay Lohan, ive always kinda had a thing for her, and egotistically i can be in hollywood, walking the red carpet on the big screen - so anyway i just remember being with her pretty lucidly just talking to her face to face holding her face in my hands and just kissing her on occasion
I have a lot of dreams where I'm in a bad neighboorhood or somewhere just running all over the place having sometkind of adventures, being shot at, fighting, explosions around me or something..the feelings are incredible I feel the bullets everything
Well i could take up pages just telling you guys some of my dreams - i didn't realize how hard it is to write it in words rather than actually experiencing it first hand but at least u get an idea
My dreams are always pretty lucid...apart of me is definetly there
I dunno..tell me what u guys think

[GANAMOHA]

you need to take a step back from everthing and evaluate your goals in life and learn to accept the parts of life that arent perfect because lets face it life is difinetly not perfect. setting your goals high is good and having the mindset that you can accomplish anything is good too and maintained will take you far in life however sometimes you have to force yourself to accept failure as negative as that sounds. because my dad is a living example of that *peers over shoulder* he used to work himself into a frenzy making everything perfect and maintain his 'image' so to speak and then he would get really depressed and feel to much pressure and basically all progress was lost until he was able to snap out of this however lately he has been learning to set his standards on his self rather that meeting every other persons standards and he is a happier person because of it. and........now I just completely lost my thought process because my cat just jumped over my head until next time...

[leroyskagnetti]

Hey Phenom.

I wanted to reply to you because I think I have been going through something similar to what you're going through.  I know what it's like to feel utterly lost...trying to find yourself, confused and entrenched in the bewildering products of your own mind.  Now, I'm no psychologist (I do, however, study psychological anthropology), and I would say that you should only listen to anyone if you can verify what they say with something inside you, but I think I might have felt some of the things you are feeling now and I can offer my experience. 

You mention your own ego a lot in the dreams.  It's interesting to me, because I spend a lot of time psychologizing myself and scrutinizing my own egotism, etc.  While this may serve you in breaking down your current identity (sort of in the Shiva-the-Destroyer sense... destroying the old to prepare for creation of something new) it can also cause you a lot of unnecessary grief.  You may not necessarily be an egotist.  Just because you are lost and heavily into your own experience (perhaps against your will) does not make you "bad."  If you are like me, you are constantly looking for ways to valuate your personal experiences...i.e. "walking in perfection," "dirty," etc.  Well, one thing that helped me was reading a bit of ego psychology and figuring out within "the narrative" of psychology just what my trouble might be.  I found something written by R.D. Laing in his book, "The Divided Self" that I thought applied to my situation, and it sounds like it could feasibly apply to yours:  he laid out the ego psychology of a person with schizoid disorder, a personality quirk wherein the subject's attention (and thusly his thoughts) is splintered in a million different directions.  Laing says that this person may have trouble with social situations because his mind is moving in a thousand different directions at once, and that the biggest of his fears and self-conflict comes from a belief that others see him as a narcissist.  He is, in fact, not a narcissist, because a narcissist is not aware of his own self-obsession.
    As this relates to your experience, both awake and dreaming, it can cause you intense anguish and an inability to escape from your own self-scrutiny (or at least I find this to be true in my own experience).  I wanted to mention that for a long time, as I used to go to sleep, I could feel "my ego"...what I thought was my ego...shrinking and expanding in extreme directions.  For instance, as I would drift off, my sense of self, physically, metaphysically, emotionally...would sort of shrink into a tiny, barely perceptible blip.  Then it would expand and get larger and larger until I felt, to take a line from William James, as if I "owned the infinite" - that is to say that my sense of self expanded unto basically the universe.  I don't know if you feel anything like that, but maybe somehow that can help you.
     
As for what you're dreaming, I can't tell you what your dreams "mean," but I can tell you how to find out for yourself what they mean.  You must seriously contemplate the relationship of the thing in your dream (person, place, object, symbol) is to your self.  I've never read any theory about this, but I believe that dreams are in some way the ego's attempt to self-narrate.  And if I were you, if I wanted to gain access to who my true self was...I think that's the hard part...I would try to think of it in terms of a narrative.  If you consider that your dreams are a narrative outline of what your true feelings are, think about the phenomenon behind the narrative as it applies to your real life relationships..to society, and to yourself.

For instance, if your dream involves you hanging out with a lot of your close friends, or standing on a huge stage getting a rush from millions of people, spend some time dwelling 1.  on what that person is or how they have meaning in your life, and 2.  what the relationship between you and that particular meaning in your life indicates about it.  If I were to take a rough guess about what some of those dreams meant, I would say that it is likely that there are a couple parts of your dream that bears the significance of your self having fantasies of wanting to be a part of a narrative that everyone around you would admire and perhaps even envy.  Because you don't know Lindsay Lohan directly, I think it is fair to say that her appearing in your dreams doesn't have any deep emotional significance.  It's more like what she represents to you may be fame, glory, and acceptance from society.

I don't want to confuse you more than you already have, and I feel like I'm doing a tinkle-poor job of trying to explain what I mean, but let me try to put it this way:  in order to figure out who you really are (if that's what you want to do) and where you belong, you have to spend some time thinking about the Self and the Other.  Think about your relationship to society.  Is there a certain way you tend to treat people?  Don't go crazy dissecting every little thing you do to people (that's sort of a trap I fell into), but if you are interested in self-analyzing, it's somewhere to start.  Think about the way you treated your parents and siblings - your primary socializers - growing up, and how you treat them now.  How do you feel about society?  How do you feel society perceives you?  In one of the dreams where you're running through a bad neighborhood, what types of feelings do you get from the "bad neighborhood"?  What does the bad neighborhood mean to your waking experience?

I don't know if any of this helps, but I do know that whatever your problem may be, the best thing you can do is to figure out just exactly how to be honest with yourself.  On one hand, it can be the hardest thing in the world, but on the other hand, it is the easiest most freeing thing to do.  If you're like me then you will eventually find that there is a part of yourself that is creating your problems, and that you can simply let go of it.  I totally sympathize with what I see as the crave to create values for yourself... as someone who has been lost for the past 8 months or so, and is not sure that I have found myself yet, I know that things would be so much easier if I could simply set down a code - take myself out of the equation - and value every part of my experience against it as good or bad, right or wrong, dirty or perfect.  But it's not that easy, and unfortunately, I believe, the wiser more experienced you get in life, the decisions become more complex and more frequent. 

Let me just end by saying that you will find something good out of your current situation.  I don't think you'll doing anything to harm yourself...I hope not... outside of mental self-destruction which will hopefully dissipate.  When I was at my lowest point a couple of months ago, a friend of mine told me that he had recently been going through some of the same things and mentioned to me something that St. John on the Cross, an early Christian mystic, had talked about as he endured a hard part of his life.  He called it the "Dark Night of the Soul."  Below is sort of a new-agey interpretation of what he wrote, but the same truth applies:

"The dark night occurs after considerable advancement toward higher consciousness. Indeed, the dark night usually occurs like an initiation before one of these special seekers is admitted into regular relationship with higher consciousness. The dark night also occurs to those who do not seek relationship but immersion or unity in the higher consciousness. While the term dark night of the soul is used broadly, its general meaning ?in the field of higher consciousness ?is a lengthy and profound absence of light and hope. In the dark night you feel profoundly alone."

The point is that in order to achieve a truer and broader understanding of yourself and the world around you, you may have to go through a period of pain.  You don't have to fear it, because you can be confident that you will get through it... just as a snake sheds its skin or a caterpillar must enclose itself before metamorphisis, you too may have to endure some raw experiences before reaching wisdom that will eternally bring you closer to becoming that real, true perfection that you may be looking for.  I hope this helps you in some way.  I may be way off, who knows.  But even if I am, just know that I sympathize with your trying times, and I would be more than happy to exchange emails with you if I could be of any help.

Take care, bro...and keep working towards what you know is true.

[-->PhenomenoN<--]

Thanks for the replies, it does help out a lot...I did and am still having to re evaluate myself alot but I'm definetly getting a lot better.  Just a depressed and lost period in my life but like i said i'm doing a lot better.  And like u said, once I pass this stage I'll come out of it stronger and better than ever... I'm definetly my biggest critic though, it's just sometimes hard not to focus on the negative things.
Yeah i've read a few books that pertain to our ego and all that.   I agree with you about the the 'divided self' and us having 2 sides...i've learned that we have a spiritual side (right brained) and ego side (left) - spiritual : energy, curiousity, knowing, being, ...while ego: aware of yourself, knowing you have physical expression, etc etc.   I've never had problems being spritual, it's just the ego that's sometimes hard to control/stabalize.  But when i do stabalize it's just great..knowing exactly who you are, why u are etcetc.  I've had alot of dreams like that too...just complete confidence, knowing exactly who you are, no fear.  Its great
But again thanks for the replies, taking time to share and help...i don't have a lot of time so I better keep it short..but again thanks
Prlly be hearing more from me, i'm liking this astral pulse thing
Well take care!

[Leo Volont]

Dear Phenomeno,

Actually your dreams are okay. Lindsey Lohan is cute.  The Stage with the comfort of a million people looking up at you.  You are not shy.

But in Waking you DO have some serious mode swings.

Perhaps it is your digestion.  Sometimes people think they have psychological problems, when the real problem is at exactly the other end.  People don't eat enough bran and so the food they do eat stays in them so long that it rots and turns to poison, contaminating the blood and making us feel edgy, hostile and morose.

So, eat bran, poop often, and you'll feel a great deal better.

Then with your capacities and assertiveness, you will begin to enjoy your life.