flooding baby monster?

Ok, I wonder what you guys will do of this dream:

Flooding Baby Monster - Dream Journals - Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views

The plot of the dream is in the linked journal entry above, but here are a few thoughts about it:

I had this dream as first remembered dream after a dry spell in dream recall.

I used my netipot for my sinuses for the fist time in a long time yesterday evening. And the flooding aspect may have come from that.

The dream dry spell has been due to stress: lots of stress at work (both mine and my husband's), also recently fought with my husband (better now I think), also we had a one week visit from my mother followed by one week visit by mother in law and now my mother again (they are helping us with gaps in after school coverage in September, but due to this I got less alone time, and my introverted self suffers), also school started and routines are changing.

I do not have a room mate in real life, nor do I know this woman. I am thinking that she may be there to detach myself from the baby, that it is not my baby, and thus not saving it is not as much of an issue. But I suspect the baby symbolically kind of is mine.

I do not live in an apartment in real life - thank goodness.

I love babies, though my two boys have outgrown babyhood.

The time travel rationalization could be from the tv series Dr Who. This is my second nightmare recently with some alternate scenes, where I change stuff for the better, like not kicking the room mate but kicking the monster instead. I think this may be my lucid dream practice paying off - though this was definitely a non lucid, but it was edited for better plot, and I think the time travel explanation was the justification for my ability to do that rather than my realizing that it is a dream.

Those are all my thoughts right now.

Edit: I also wonder whether the flooding baby monster could in part be about my recurring depression, and that the negativity needs to be killed off before it can grow again? The recurrence of depression could also what this dream's time travel is about, because I know the signs and I know how it can end and either grow poorly or be battled by me early on. And the stress could have reminded me of that, though I am not depressed now, more stressed but more active than when I get depressed.

Edit2: Thinking about it, while the baby monster was evil and I do not think he made it, the flood was more like a cleansing flood, even though in the dream it killed more people than the monster, but in the dream I did not have a negative reaction toward the flood. So whatever the flood represents is more positive, though it is uncontrollable.

Edit3: It occurred to me that the start of the dream may have been about "don't throw away the baby with the bath water" and if so, that didn't work out. However, as the dream progressed I was very competent in-charge, unlike my useless roommate. And while at the end I thought I would get blamed for the flood, but at least I didn't think it was my fault, so my self esteem was not bad in this dream. I had a kind of head of household role in this weird situation of a "family" of three: me, useless damsel in distress, and baby monster.

Edit4: The more I think about it the more parallels I notice to this other nightmare I had recently: http://www.dreamviews.com/blogs/joannab/bandits-50218/ - both dreams have other female in addition to me, both were nightmares, in both I had an active troubleshooting role, in both part of the plot there is alternate plot, and both dreams include calling 911. Also both dreams are about family more than about work. Troubleshooting a family emergency situation. So that makes me think that this is related to my marital issues.

I believe that cause and effect are present in a way that we often overlook in dreams, since it rarely seems logical. For example you write:

"My roommate looked, and the baby's hair had turned grey, and now e head was turning orange, and the baby was growing into an orange monster."

I believe that this transition ocurs BECAUSE your roommate looks at the baby. I believe this transition is important. You are convinced that this baby is an evil monster that is not yours. I actually believe that with a negative view you are making this baby into a monster.

I didn't get the impression that you were scared in this dream, but rather that you acted on firm beliefs. Is that correct?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sover

I believe that cause and effect are present in a way that we often overlook in dreams, since it rarely seems logical. For example you write:

"My roommate looked, and the baby's hair had turned grey, and now e head was turning orange, and the baby was growing into an orange monster."

I believe that this transition ocurs BECAUSE your roommate looks at the baby. I believe this transition is important. You are convinced that this baby is an evil monster that is not yours. I actually believe that with a negative view you are making this baby into a monster.

I didn't get the impression that you were scared in this dream, but rather that you acted on firm beliefs. Is that correct?

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That is correct. I did act on firm beliefs. In fact it was uncanny how I throughout this dream knew what would happen. My dreaming mind was rationalizing it as time travel or parallel universe, but yes, you are right that it could have been more cause and effect and expectations. I do think that the fact that I have been trying to have a lucid dream is related. It's as if this is a nonlucid dream in which I had some control but was not aware that it was me controlling it. But I was more in control than I would expect during a nightmare. I would still call this a nightmare, but I was not afraid, it was rather a very difficult tense situation. Lots of troubleshooting going on to not make the situation even worse or to turn the bad situation into a better one.

On second thought you may also be right about negative views turning baby into a monster. I do believe that negative thoughts have strong repercussions, and I have had a lot of stress lately with some negative thoughts.

I've read everything here, a few times, and here is my moment-by-moment breakdown, so some may overlap with what was said or say it a bit differently. Though I think it may be nearly useless now.


ALTERNATIVES
Maybe you were thinking of a parallel way your life could have been going, or growing, as you relived the past with that in view.
And maybe you were going back to correct where it went wrong, so that you could change the outcome.
Talking about cause and effect. Maybe you wanted to locate the cause.
You knew the way this one turned out, whether it happened yet or you could see it coming - so yes maybe repeating the past a bit which you didn't want.
The alternate plot is probably the alternatives you can take, or thinking how alternatively it could have happened.
The question becomes what is that baby? If it's a good new part of you growing, why would you die if you saved it?
(That sounds like a paradox equal to the usual time travel paradox - real ones I mean, like in movies.)

BAD BABY
The roomate is the other part of you that you live with. An apartment shows you sharing one room in yourself with this other part of you. Two parts, apart, together.
So the baby was supposedly not yours but came from this other side of you, so might explain why it was negative and harmful if allowed to live and gow in you.
So then you tell this other part of you You don't want this baby. You want to leave it.

ORANGE MONSTER BABY
So the other you looked, and that's why the baby started to die. You chose it to. Your new growth's thought turned colorless or lifeless, and now that thinking was turning orange is something for the life of me I cannot figure out yet. Usually I think orange means warm. So that maybe it's that after all. If it was a parady or travesty of warmth - that idea turning into a monster. Also your room-mate may suggest you had to live with a part of yourself that compromised yourself, such as what happenes in real life when you share. So that may reflect your various real-life visitors, or perhaps interaction with your husband as you said. Orange is a very simple colour - well all are, lol, but I mean the meaning of any must be simple - so unless it has some meaning for you, I can't think of anything else. Do you like or hate oranges? So the other part of you realized you were right, and did not try to save this new growth.

FLEE THE SCENE
As you fled the scene, followed by your slower other half, you closed the door on this new monster, not before properly kicking it in the face. So you had the simultaneous vision of actually kicking your other self in the face that made that monster. You were aware of that, I think.

COMING BACK DOWN
You hesitated whether to get - strangely not above, but down from this quickly and easily I guess, or whether to perhaps work your way down. That can explain why you knew the stairs were better. Though slower, you are more in control.
So maybe all that happened so far in the dream was upstairs in your mind, for now you have to come back down - down to Earth, or to reality?
But the thought, maybe the emergency, put you there at the exit straight away.

FLOOD!!
So you tell the rest of yourself to evacuate. It will be flooded, which does sound like being overwhelmed potentially, drowning. You say it's a cleansing flood and was not negative, so to kill or drown the undesirable, so in killing more of you than the baby monster, but parts that were not wanted.
The part of you attending this tried to stop you - like a check of your thoughts at this juncture - but you ran out from what you built up there.
Still running, you called emergency help within (should be 1, or 11, not 911, really), even though you knew you'd blame yourself for this outcome, and you could not stop it, and a lot of you that resided in that building in yourself would die due to the flood within you.
But you did not know what else to do.

WAKE UP
You woke up then I guess when the main experience ended and at the main crisis point.

FLOOD ANALYSIS
Hard for me to get my head around a cleansing flood that was not negative, as it still suggests overwhelming, and with the emergency, out of control or you could not stop it, and the blame - though you knew it was your lesser, less thoughtful half's fault.
Could it be you were familiar with this type of overwhelming reaction, so that you didn't fear it? And that you wanted to keep it in check but were unable to, such as your depression as you said? Could the flood be negative depression yet cleansing? Such as a black fire can cleanse the land and make it grow better after.

Thank you, superman1. One thought that reading especially the last part of your response reminded me of: I have been of two minds about my periodic depressions. On the one hand, part of my goal is to stop the depression a from happening because when I get depressed it's not good. However, it has occurred to me that the depressions do serve a useful purpose: I get to a point where I have to change; there is no choice; and so then I do; thus, the depressions are an opportunity for personal growth, for building a new personality within myself, kind of like a Phoenix bird that emerges from the ashes. Come to think of it maybe that's what this dream is about.

Oh, and no the color orange has no personal meaning for me. Though emergency workers do wear orange vests to be better seen, and in the fog orange is said to be more visible, and my boys have orange sneakers. So maybe that's it. Orange as the color that is appropriate for better visibility, like a safety vest.

Edit: I was thinking some more about what you said about how my roommate gave birth to the monster, and so in alternate reality I kick her. And I realized that the boundaries between good and evil are blurred in this dream: is baby good or bad? Is roommate good or bad? Is flood good or bad? That makes sense because Ever since my big change when I was about 19 years old, I have had a shades of grey morality, not just looking at things in terms of good versus bad. And the idea of of shades of grey morality reminded me that grey is very meaningful to me, so the baby's hair turning grey, neither good nor bad but could be either depending on context.

Another thought I had is that a lot of this dream is about being in survival mode: doing what I need to do to survive, not worry about doing the right thing or the best thing, but what needs to get done to survive.

I will make a few pointers, share my associations and thoughts that pop up when I read this dream, not as interpretation but rather perhaps as some food for thought. I believe most dreams we have are very difficult to interpret, I mean really understand, because we dream about things we are unconscious of (in my point of view), so it is in the nature of the dreams that we don’t understand them at the point in time when we have them. But nonetheless I think it is of great value to keep and contemplate our dreams because eventually we grow an understanding of dreams we have had, and even have now. So these thoughts are for contemplation rather than interpretation.

Setting
The dream takes place in parallel universes. This is probably an image of what actually happens when we dream. Psychologically we are like layers inside: The feelings we had as children, the experiences we had as teenagers and so on and so forth, builds psychological layers inside of us which we experience in dreams. But there are also other layers, from things we are conscious about, our ego, down into parts of ourselves we rejects, things we can understand, which are within the grasp of our consciousness, further down into layers we are truly unconscious of and even further down. These parts of ourselves are like different universes we travel at night, and a dream’s content can be made up of things from all parts of ourselves, so like the shamans who travel between different outer worlds when in trance, we travel different inner worlds when we dream. This is further hinted at by the fact that you “relive variations of your life”, which is in a way something we do in our dreams, when we revisit our old school, our childhood home, and so on. Everything we have experienced in our life are inside of us, and much of that appears in our dreams, when we travel through layers of ourselves, and our history.

Baby
A baby is the start of a new life, of something completely new. For the new to live, the old must die; because if the old doesn’t go, the new cannot come. This is of course a typical theme in fairy tales (which are like collective dreams if you will), and the basis for Sir Frazer’s study in comparative religion, The Golden Bough – the old and the new king which runs like a theme throughout the book. The king can be seen as an image of the prevailing attitude, which must die for the new attitude to prevail. This is a reason for death symbolism in initiation rites – death and resurrection – and so forth. So the baby is the new “king”, attitude, or possibilities.

Unknown friend
Unknown friends or companions in dreams typically represent aspects of ourselves we are not aware of for some reason or another. The fact that the baby is hers hints at that the new possibility is part of that aspect of yours you don’t know about. In other words, if you were able to integrate that part of yourself, something new of great potentiality would come from that.

Death
But that would mean that the “old” you would “die”, and the gut reaction of any ego is of course that that cannot be allowed. Either you or the baby must die in the dream, because the dream ego represent the old, and the baby the new.

Since the baby is not yours but your room mate’s, it is far from “integration” at this point in time, and it is quite natural that the dream ego chooses herself. (If the baby were yours in the dream, it would be closer to your ability to integrate it at this point, and the dream would probably play out differently.)

The flood
The flood is a symbol of unconsciousness in this dream, I think. The baby is a symbol for a new potentiality that you are not really conscious about, and the choice is to make it conscious (“integrate” it), saving it from the flood/unconsciousness – but that would mean the death of the ego attitude – or leaving it here, having it disappear back into unconsciousness (getting flooded).

Becoming a monster
When you say you need to leave, and that the baby isn’t hers, you reject the baby both psychologically and physically. This turns the baby into a monster. On the one hand that is what happens in real life, children who are rejected grows frustrated, aggressive, and does all sorts of bad things to get attention, they turn into monsters of sorts; and on the other that is also what happens in dreams: Inner content we reject turns into something evil and dangerous – parts of ourselves that we reject often come back as aggressors, wild animals and monsters in dreams. So the rejection turns the baby into a monster. At this point your room mate “realize” that you cannot save the baby, and the reason for this is that it is too late, it has been rejected at this point in time, the rejection turns it into a monster, and as such – sinking back into the unconsciousness – it cannot be saved anymore; it is too late at this point.

The fighting off
The fact that you happen to kick your room mate instead of the monster is a hint that the room mate and the monster belong to the same psychological content. Dreams often uses that confusion to show what figures are, in my experience. Once I dreamed that I hit a person with a baseball bat, at the same time the person became my cat, so I hit my cat with that swing; so the dream told me that when I’m beating A it is really B that gets hurt – A is B, and that is what I need to realize.

The ending
The dream fades away rather than have an actual ending, so there’s no solution at this point in time. But the dynamic this dream reflects is still inside of you, and you will probably have other dreams in the future which deal with this issue, this inner potentiality of yours which you cannot connect to right now, but perhaps later on.

The other dream
In the dream about the bandits there is an interesting detail, namely that one bandit is wielding a ship anchor. That suggests that the bandits are from the sea, that is from the same big water that returns in this dream.

The sister in this dream is probably the same energy as the room mate in the other dream, so I agree that they are part of a dream series.

I hope the associations and thoughts I get when I read your dream are of any help.

I really appreciate your feedback.

The more I think about this dream and the more I hear about it, the less like a nightmare it becomes, and the more positive there seems in it, or at least potential for positive in one way or another. Things are not positive yet, but there is hope for positiveness, and I think that hope can come both ways, both by not rejecting the baby in the future or by interpreting the flood as cleansing. I think the dream is about choices and possibilities: some of them are new or others affirmations of existing, and I am not convinced that the line of good versus evil is easily drawn there, I think it could go either way. However either way, it is a time for change, either in a new direction or change as reaffirmation of existing but in a more empowered way. That's my thought.

Edit: Of course, there is also the more negative possibility. I have been under a lot of stress lately, and some of the self improvements that started when I joined this site have fallen behind. So this dream may be about that: the new self defeated by the old - hopefully just temporarily.

Aha! I think I have some more insights to this dream series of mine, or maybe just additional thoughts on same line.

Two days ago I had a brief dream "Something was wrong on system, and someone else suggested to overwrite it all with different version, but I objected because that would be a lie." I think this dream is in the same series as Bandits and Flooding Baby Monster. At first I thought I only remembered a fragment, but now I think that this was more of a short summary conceptual dream, perhaps during NREM. How do I interpret this dream. "Something was wrong on system" - well, yes, there was: on Monday I pretty much had an emotional breakdown which was already in the making over the weekend, so yes one could say that something is wrong on the system - my mind is broken. "Someone else suggested to overwrite it all with different version" - someone else? No, that was me myself. I have been trying to overwrite my self with a new, better, less fragile, less prone to depression and emotional breakdowns, upgraded version of my self for the past six months. And I rather thought I was succeeding. But apparently my old self won't go without a fight. "but I objected because that would be a lie." - ah, yes, I do have a major problem with lies, one of my greatest no-no is lying and I tend to be oversensitive even over little white lies and very unforgiving of lying, due to having been lied to too much by someone very dear to me. So part of me thinks that redefining myself would be a lie? Well, I guess she is arguing that the new self is not who I really am, and thus I am lying to myself about myself if I claim that I am not emotionally fragile and prone to depression and all that? Well, that won't do. At this point it appears that at least in my dreams, my old self is winning the battle between old and new self, and I got to turn that around, because redefine myself I must. I had already made so much progress in self improvement in the past six months, and I am not going to fall back on old habits and admit defeat.

So looking back at the series:

In the "Bandits" dream, my old self is the one represented by my father I think, and it thinks it is in charge and can handle the situation, but the part of myself that evaluates the situation knows that my old self cannot handle it. The self that I am identifying with in that dream brainstorms different solutions, and one of them is abandoning the old self, but none of them involves turning to the invisible sister for help. The invisible sister does not speak up and does not act, perhaps the problem is that she is not ready yet, not formed enough. I think she is my future self. My father represents my past self in this dream, I identify with my present self, and my future self is not yet ready to contribute.

In the "Flooding Baby Monster" my roommate had the baby, so a new self has been formed tentatively. However, my in charge current self rejects the new self, and calls it evil. The flood is Noah's flood, God's wrath to wash away sinfulness. I have been having a lot of problems with that Biblical passage: it does not compute with my belief in a good and loving God that he would destroy most of his creation. And yet, I grew up Roman Catholic, and even though I have recently looked into Buddhism, but I am very much rooted in my home faith in the Christian Church. And let's face it, Noah's flood is an important story there, no matter how many problems my future self has with it. So in this dream the wrath of God washes away my future self that is evil in a cleansing flood. The dream is "conservative" as in conserving the old. It is all about survival, and not about change for the better. In this dream change is bad. Well, that's not who I am! That's who I used to be, before I changed drastically around age 19. I am an open minded person who appreciates change, and wants to keep changing my self for the better. I am not one to hold on to a point of view, but rather I keep refining it as I get new ideas that appear right. Well, perhaps during the last few months there has been too much change too fast, and now my old self is fighting back with this backlash to a prior self.

The thing is that the old self winning is not an option. I won't allow it. And so I need to turn this around. She may have won the battles recently, but now it is time for my new self to ... I was going to say to bring out bigger guns, but then I remembered that fighting oneself won't end well, that if I keep fighting myself I will get hurt, and I will lose even if I win. So what I need is to integrate the new with the old, to find a way to be at peace. One good thing about the flood dream: my active self did save the roommate, the one who gave birth to the baby - I note in passing that there were two of us (going on the ark two by two), so I was identifying with Noah (who knew in advance that the flood was coming) and I made sure to save Noah's wife so we could procreate again. Now both of us were female, but in the creation of new personalities unlike in the making of human babies, two female personality parts can of course procreate - no problem - and let's face it, I definitely am female, all of me or at least most of me. We take the stairs not the elevator because at this point in my mind, my old self is winning, so the old approach wins over the new. I need to in future dreams choose the elevator instead or find a way to merge old and new - an escalator perhaps?

Very well done and wrapped up, Joanna.
A lot of mind-altering alternatives - or sometimes the obvious - I can learn, and from Wakinyan.
Not the wrong growth like I said, but that growth is wrong - or seen that way - like he said. The reverse.

DOUBLE MEANING DREAM??
But like looking in a mirror, it seems both can be right and one is the reflection of the other.
Though the second seems the true one, and fits the theme of the two other dreams.
Going through the dream again from both views, I still unfortunately can't discount my view, as wrong as I want it to be.
Some dreams are simply one answer only. This one is as ambiguous as can be. So that makes me wonder if the dream intended both, even if it just naturally fits that way. Or just a co-incidence. That wordy word again.
Makes it doubly interesting.

STAIRS
I had thought it weird you came downstairs instead of up to get away from it, but of course upstairs can mean you were aspiring. And realising you were letting the old win for now, maybe put you outta there faster than the elevator. And you hesitated, still aware of having a choice between the two sides.

___________
BAD BANDITS
My bad in my Bandits interpretation. If I had not confused your father with your husband, I wouldn't have got it back to front. Yes, he meant your old control, not your new better one.
Yes, you thought it a bad idea for your father-side to deal with this problem; as if you knew it would overwhelm you.
So option 3 to leave your father behind was a good idea, which you woke up to.
Please accept my bumble apologies.:upsidedown:

~~~~~
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NOAH
Also, on reality, I wonder if Noah's flood is a symbollic passage, being so grand beyond reality - I mean, the whole world? It sounds decidedly so.
Moses was just one bit of water in the ocean, by comparison.

I would not dismiss the idea of father standing in for husband quite yet. You see my mom was visiting, and she tends to draw parallels between my father and husband all the time, claiming that my husband is like my father, and part of my mind gets convinced by my mother's arguments, which does my marriage no good. Recently I think I have been blaming my husband when he takes charge and won't let me, and also whenever he makes me be in charge and does not take charge himself, so you see he can't win and will get blamed. I am beginning to work better with my husband now again. See that's the big difference between my marriage and my parents' marriage: while my husband and I have our issues, but then we do take a step back and do work it out together, and we do notice the faults in ourselves not just in the other. The only thing that my parents ultimately agreed on was that the divorce was entirely the other spouse's fault.

I would interpret my latest dream as being in this same series of fight of old with new. What do you think?

Kiss, Assacination Attempt, and Opium Den - Dream Journals - Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views