Me and My Subconscious

And Us And Ours

I wrote last week about how vulnerable I - and all of us - are to the seductions of magical thinkng, i.e., thinking something is true because we want it to be true. It got me to thinking about the wider question of unreason, that is, our individual and collective subconscious minds.

I am fascinated by my shadow self, the self I can never really know, that exists inside me plotting, scheming and making sense of things in its own idiosyncratic and not always wise way, then selling the conclusions to me as rational ( because the conscious mind is essentially the PR agency for the unconscious mind).

I suppose a lot of people never give this a second thought, but I cannot escape the bewildering idea of how this inner psychic organism shapes my life. I look for clues in dreams, but can rarely decipher them. What particularly interests me is that when I am in a dream, I remember other dreams I have had years sometimes decades previously - that I possess a sort of dream memory. Then when I awake, the memories disappear in a puff of smoke. Surely they must mean something - although I have no idea what.