My dreams are often filled with violent imagery and the deaths of myself and others.  I often awake in a cold sweat, having felt an all too real death of my being.  My therapist and I spent time discussing this recently as I have not had a “good” dream in months, if not years, at this point.  She surmised that my subconscious was focusing on what my consciousness has been feeding it: death, destruction, and chaos.  For all my hedonism, my life is spent with a focus on death, rather than with that which composes a life worth living.

I surround myself online with psychopaths and the otherwise antisocial.  I watch videos of various dismemberment and destruction of human bodies.  When I am in the throes of Bipolar depression, I vividly imagine violent suicides of every kind.  Such imagery fills my days and my nights.  It seems that it would follow that my subconscious must be tortured.  I wonder how common this must be for the psychopath – at least the intellectual and introspective one – to have such animus within their skull.  We tend to be hedonists, seeking pleasure at every turn, but this hedonism is quite solitary.  We tend to crave bloodlust and the disfigured chaos that may exist as part of the human condition.  I wonder to what extent we leave out the other possibility of life: an interconnected network of unique existences.  Or, maybe I am merely a prototypical nihilist.

My therapist and I discussed the possibility of a weak form of spirituality in my own life.  Maybe I will never believe in God or in the beliefs of interconnection by others, but maybe I can see that life should focus on life and not death – order and not chaos.  Maybe then my dreams will return to their halcyon days of peace, back in an age where I was too young to focus on the death and destruction all around me and that could be created by me.  As intrigued as I am by disorder and chaos, disfigurement and the grotesque, maybe I can supplant that with a childlike awe at the order that could be rather than the disorder that is.