Res Ipsa Loquitur (phrase)- Latin, Legalese: "The Thing Speaks For Itself." . . . DREAM JOURNAL

This morning, I has a dream that was set in a combination of Delaware and Rhode Island. My subconscious loves to play with geography for some reason. Anyhoo, I had wandered off from this event where people would walk down an isle --graduation like-- and the guys on stage would tell the large attending audience the person's innermost fears. I was first in line, dressed in a white, wispy, Victorian-style gown. The guys running the ceremony stated that I "felt like an outsider" and went on about related things from there.  Disgusted, I wandered off, feeling, indeed, like an outsider since I wasn't comfortable with their little show. Eventually, I ended up by a dark river, and decided to try my usual technique for feeling more connected: make friends with another person who wasn't part of the group.

I found a young woman with reddish hair crying by the river and talked with her for a while. We seemed to be getting along quite well, but then some exclusive-minded friends of hers came along, and I was left alone again for a while. There was --out of the blue-- a sequence about a black man who went to a university in Rhode Island who had written a poem about a historic statue that was being destroyed to put in a parking lot. He was excited because his poem had been published. Then things shifted to a boarding school of sorts.

Everyone was in a large wood-floored room and scared because the headmistress was coming. Some of the girls from the river-side seemed to be there. A tall woman in a gray Victorian dress entered, and was very nasty to everyone. Someone had to leave to do hard labor for the headmistress... the headmistress left a bit, and then came back, and I hid underneath a table, ignoring her and reading an interesting article. After some more nastiness, I stood up and at first started fighting back with contract law, demanding my own terms for staying in the room. Suddenly, I realized that the headmistress was --in that odd dream way-- the harassing, negative parts of real life, and further that she *needed* us to be fearful: if it weren't for us, she couldn't exist. I blanked my thoughts, and the headmistress was gone.

Later on, I was in a room in the residence for the boarding school. I'd gotten one of the nicer places, and was chatting with a friendly girl next door (who looked like the red-head by the river, but actually seemed to be remaining a friend this time), explaining how the universe could work to one's favor in para-natural ways. She was interested, but didn't quite believe me. There was something else --unconnected, it seemed-- about a castle in Delaware near a mountain.

Anyhow, this dream seemed notable on a few counts. I really do hate feeling like an outsider, but have also been resigned to it on some level since early childhood, as I simply can't force myself to be what I'm not even if the price is not fitting in. The symbolism seemed to aptly cover that. The scene with the headmistress was quite interesting in retrospect, especially the way it went out of its way to let me know that she represented the parts of the real world that are oppressive and negative. I rather like the idea of those parts, mythically, being entities that need our fear to live. Fighting for one's own terms, or blanking out the mind, deprived the entities of their normal foraging sources, causing them to leave or loose some of their power.