I don't know if my dream will have meaning to anyone born after 1960 but it might. But, for me, it was a complete breakthrough in how I see everything. I'm writing it down so I don't lose it by going back to sleep. It's in the middle of the night and the middle of my sleep cycle but I don't want to lose the benefit of this dream.
I suppose the dream could be titled, "It's about survival!"
Another subtitle might be, "It's not about whether one is gay or straight"
Also, I've never been interested in being Gay even though several of my friends now dead were. And some of them were in love with me which I found difficult to deal with and remain their friends. So, this dream was also important in helping me with this as well.
I woke up and thought, "It's not about Gay or straight! It's about survival!"
If you grew up in the 1950s as a child like I did if you were gay and open about it there was a high likelihood that you would be beat up every day in school and possibly killed by peers by adulthood. This was just a fact of life. But this was only true for boys. If you were a girl men might find you interesting if you were gay as long as you pretended to be straight most of the time and got married and had a family. They didn't really care then if you were attracted to your female friends as long as you remained married with family. That was how it actually was in the 1950s. It is still this way in most of the world for billions of people worldwide. It is for those people and for those who grew up in the 1950s and before that I write this. And for myself.
It might be a hard world for people to imagine here in the U.S. if you were born after the 1960s.
When I was in my 30s a friend and I studied with a medicine man named Crow. He said of my friend, "You are a complete contrary." And then he turned to me and said, "You are a half contrary." To a native american a Contrary means that such a one doesn't like the status quo of society or civlization and will fight it and try to create the world his or her way instead. So my being a half contrary meant that about half of the way things were in the world were okay with me and the oher half I would fight anyway I could to change. So, as much as possible I have been fighting everything that I thought was wrong with life on earth and civilization ever since. And my friend has been fighting the whole world in his way too. He became a very successful musician. I got married and had a family and began by 30 starting businesses. Now my friend and I are both world travelers, he in his late 50s and me now at 62. We still ski together on Mt. Shasta and kayak on Castle Lake, the Pacific Ocean, and Lake Siskiyou, and once we went to Nepal in 1985 where I met him there with my family. He flew there from Switzerland where he was visiting relatives.
I hesitate to write of the dream because it was so difficult to endure. I can see now it was a simile of life itself. In the dream there was a private club where males gathered. But the club in a sense was a fight club of sorts. Because if you lost you would be raped by other men just like happens in prison in real life. And for some people this is their everyday lives. If a man is straight it drives him insane or kills him directly or indirectly. If a man is gay he is either killed or enjoys the whole thing. But either way the struggle is what I experienced in the 1950s growing up.
But for the first time I experienced it not as a gay or straight thing but as "The Law of the Jungle". I saw all this dog eat dog sort of thing as pure animal survival. In other words the whole domination thing was more about being ruthless enough to wind up on top than anything else. And that all the gay stuff in the dream was really about seeing whether a person was a "Dominator" or was "Submissive" in the world of men. For the first time my dream was able to separate for me at a very deep level the whole gay and straight thing from simply what men do to survive anything, especially other men.
To be able to separate the whole Gay Straight thing from the basic "Law of the Jungle" of animals is incredibly empowering for any man or woman. It puts everything on a "Survival" basis and takes it away from the cultural contrivance of either being Gay or Straight which in the end is very artificial and confusing for everyone in multiple ways. It is almost like giving a definition of Gay and Straight to people disempowers the culture and makes everything artificial somehow and even more confusing than "The Law of the Jungle" is already for anyone anywhere trying to find a way to survive here on earth.
God helps us when we least expect it.
Later: It is now September 12th 2011. My thought is that it makes more sense to describe people as dominators or as submissives than it does Gay or Straight because even within the Gay community there are Butches and Queens in the male gay community and the Bulls and the Fems in the Lesbian community. I think eventually society will get around to the "Dominators and the Submissives". I know right now it would not be politically correct to speak this way. However, eventually it would make more sense if you were looking at humans within the "Law of the Jungle" perspective which I think would be a whole lot less confusing than what we have now. Clarity might save a lot of lives once the gay concept becomes safer and less fatal worldwide than now. Dominator is not gay or straight it is both. Submissive is not gay or straight it is both. So once societies stop killing gays around the world which likely will be in the next 100 years, the next step might be clarity.
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