So then . . . BRAIN . . . what’s the deal?
What’s with you?
Why the infinitely repeated dream?
Why the insult and humiliation, night after night . . . the recurring reminders of lack of control? Why, brain, why repeatedly wake me up, panicked, overheated, out of breath?
Don’t you think I know how little control I really have . . . ??!!!
I get it!
I know. I want too much control—every note in perfect alignment, in perfect pitch, flawless melodies and harmonies, all in perfect Bachese / Mozartese / Brahmsese. I totally get the grey-matter metaphor.
I also get that if it quacks like a duck it can in fact be a Lyrebird.
Maybe that’s why our hearts still yearn for 5-Star acoustic concert halls, the world’s best orchestral players—each a worthy soloist, playing only works of genius, conducted by the most perceptive and enlightened musical mind in generations. For half an hour we can suspend the imperfect world we know and surrender to the fantasy of perfection.
You see how it all works? There, underneath all the nice words and phrases of that last paragraph, the same old irony, suspicion, and sarcasm; there’s the Lyrebird delivering his chain-saw (or his cute little duckie) imitation: the real world is kicking right back in, in vengeance; prepping you for yet another repeat of . . . nothing less than . . . your own powerful impotence.
Might I enlighten with a working response to this taunting unconscious?
Time to treat it like a school-yard bully.
You have to, so to speak, as you lay your weary head on your softest form-fitting pillow, and adding in as much withering sarcasm and irony as you can comfortably muster, give sub-mind a piece of top-mind.
Before you go to sleep you tell your brain you will be very disappointed if it chooses to replay the same old hackneyed video again. You don’t want it. You don’t need it. You understand the message.
Speak to it as an equal: You expect the unconscious to be not only more co-operative but much more (infinitely more) adult, (!!!) and creative with its offerings. (!!!)
Astonishingly the sub-mind submits much more willingly than I could have imagined it would.
fillière 