Why keep track of themes in dreams and stories

I am talking to an internet friend about my practice of keeping track of themes in dreams and stories. ~~~~~~~~ Good work. Don't define the theme with the specific emotions. Because as you start watching your story telling activity in your mind, you may see changes. So don't back yourself in a corner. Make the theme more neutral. Invisible, protection danger shame those are all good words. They don't define yourself. If you can make them even more neutral that would help. Start with those, the further developments are interpretations for this moment, but you want to get at the underlying storyline. So keep those, but not at the same level of usefulness as the basic more neutral terms. As I am giving you hints, I am doing the same myself. I have been doing this exercise for many years, but have never expressed what I am thinking or how it works. ~~~~~~~ I can't make up your stories. But you get the idea. See if you don't see the same themes in other stories. Maybe the feeder and the feedee are different. Maybe its a cat or daughter in law who is unacceptable. From the point of view or your reactions does it matter if it is hubby or daughter or cat. Is the story theme so different? You are the person doing the feeling, so is the object of the feeling that important? The whole point of this exercise is to become aware of repetative feeling complexes. To not be overly controlled by your least creative impulses. What I find for myself is I create a whole world based on my self produced stories. I don't allow myself to go out of my stories and to just experience what is here and now. Everything gets colored by the stories. It is easy to say I quit. I am not going to do that. In fact, you really have to work at it. The first step is to become aware. The next step is to one by one recognize the familiar themes as you parade them in your mind. Allow them to run, but step out of the creator seat. Just step aside. I find my old themes come with their own engine. All I need to do is to disassociate from them ~~~~~~~~~~~ The idea is not to put it on the fridg and to nag yourself with do gooder thoughts. The idea is to notice when the story is happening. Not just dream. For us imaginative types, the story itself is part of the unconscious. We don't edit much so we live in this story world. Dreams and stories are closely related. The stories could be all true, but the emotion behind them comes from the unconscious. Our unconscious mind feeds off the basic delusions of humankind. Everytime we tell a great story, we reinforce the delusion without being conscious of it. I just looked at my diary with all its tags. Last night, I had an anxious dream of not reaching the plane, and going back and forth to the bus stop forgetting something. All the time my daughter does not seem to know that she is supposed to be going. A bit like our normal communications. I am lost in time and not communicating with her who is disconnected from me. I don't even have anxiety as a tag. I have all these tags about giving too much advice and pride. Maybe that is what is happening now. Maybe disconnected will be more productive than anxiety. Disconncted gets at the root. Can you see the difference? For me noticing is the essential part, not stoping the process of story making or dreaming. They are necessary releases to the subconscious. My mind is like a cat. It does what it does. I don't have much control in the dream world. I just want to not let this dream world take control of my life world. The other day I wrote an email about my father. My brother adores my father who likes boys. I am sure he was shocked. But I let the dream world slip out. The facts were true, but the emotion behind them come from the unconscious, not from the facts. This is what I don't want to do. No one except sometmes my hubby knows about my dream world so I don't need to include them when I am unable to describe the subtext to them. They are all just lost. I have improved my batting average on "slips of the tongue" by in my normal life keeping track of these typical themes as they float by in story making and dreams. Sometimes I write them down, but usually I am simply conscious of the process. I also meditate which clarifies the distance between the neutral state and the dream state that given my normal weakness, I would normally allow to take over my mind. The themes help me to see the repetative nature of these processes. You are doing this or following my jabber because you want to go deeper with your working remedy than a homeopathic remedy will take you. The remedy will highlight your delusions, but unless you make an effort it will not bring them to consciousness, and it will not root out all the related delusions. I personally want more development than normal homeopathy will give me.

~~~~~
Looks like you are going to make tons of themes.  Gotta pull together what is relevant to your primary delusion or you will just be confused.  This is just like homeopathic analysis.  We are not trying to describe you as a total person. In homeopathic analysis,  we are describing a pathology.  In this case, we are getting deeper into delusions.  So if rage is (or was) a big theme, then you just want to pull up all its roots.  So "likes to have fun," or "reserved" are not useful if they don't get at the rage in some way.  They may, but that is for you to perceive.

For me disconnected gets at many themes that I see already in my diary so I know it is a good one.  Perhaps I will quit following those old themes and start following disconnected.  It all depdends on what comes out of dreams and stories.  I can't really manipulate the situation.

====

I am a very emotional person. I want to prevent myself from jumping quickly to emotionally based conclusions. That just increases the load of delusions that I am trying to allow to fadeaway. I am not trying to control my delusions or to understand them. I just don't want them to control my life. I don't want delusions on top of delusions. That's why I use these tags. When I use a tag for the first few times I really don't know what the tag means. By using the tag multiple times and comparing how I am using it I begin to understand the tag. That does not mean that I really understand the delusion. It only helps me to understand that I am repeating the same type of emotional pattern. My hope is I can catch myself before I make some action based on a delusion.

We all have culturally defined categories to judge and understand our life.I don't really want these tags to be those predefined categories. I am trying to understand myself as a distinct individual.These tags are away to prevent myself from falling into cultural idioms.  Of course, tags relate to the big themes of life very quickly. But I don't want to get there by mistake.

The idea is to keep your stories sorted with the tags. You are trying to figure out which tags are meaningful and what the tags mean. So you don't want to get too carried away with interpretation from the beginning. I am very emotional, so I am trying to get myself to wait on interpretation. To simply listen to myself and withhold judgment.  

I think in the process of simply listening to myself without judgment, the strength of the delusions fades. This is what you do in meditation. I often don't do a good job of meditating. So this is another effort to get myself to meditate more clearly.

====
What triggers this response to you about tags, is I get the impression that you can label someone's action and believe that you understand them. I am trying to do the opposite. I am trying to prevent quick labeling.

If your friend talks to dead people, you really don't know what that means. If you were doing her homeopathic case, you would have to look at the many instances of the same behavior. Maybe she simply talks to people who are not present. Maybe the preoccupation is with death. You want to get at what is deepest within that particular symptom. 

So, collecting stories related to that symptom is like putting the same tag on each story. In homeopathic case taking and analysis, you want to understand the symptom to some extent. But it is not like psychoanalysis. A ballpark understanding is okay. 

For your own delusions, even less understanding is needed because you are in control and are aware of your own thoughts. You will naturally stop repeating the same delusion when you realize how much this delusion controls your life. Without deep understanding, the delusion will simply stop having the power that it had before. This is called awareness. Of course meditating and repeating this process is helpful. But it is not helpful to become preoccupied with categorizing each delusion or trying to understand it when you were meditating.  You simply practice letting go of each preoccupation. With practice, letting go becomes easier. It also becomes easier in daily life. I would not run to the computer after meditating and write down your delusions. Letting go is what you are practicing by meditating.  Writing a tag also is a form of letting go.  You don't judge. You practice waiting, is if you were taking a homeopathic case.