Chapter 58 Chapter 5 The dream of falling into the sea

A frequent childhood nightmare I had was falling into the ocean.The boundless blue sea unfolded before my eyes, and I was trapped in a broken net, and that hateful broken net became fragmented as I struggled.After all the meshes were scratched by me, like a kite with a broken string, my body quickly plunged into the terrifying sea.There are usually two arrangements for the ending of the dream. The most common one is that when I lose all hope in the fall, I will wake up from the dream immediately.After a few seconds of confirmation, I was glad that it was just a dream.Another kind of ending is quite mischievous. When I fell almost to the surface of the water, another broken net picked me up and lifted me into the air, and then I repeated the tragic scene I had experienced before.This terrifying feeling of falling from a high altitude has a profound impact on me. To be honest, I still dare not ride the roller coaster that falls from a high altitude.

The net should mean a bondage, but in my dream of falling into the sea, the net has become my life-saving straw.I would rather be bound by a net than risk being thrown into the sea.The sea is full of poetic romance in the original image of human beings. In fact, human life also originated from the sea.As the saying goes, "The sky is high enough for birds to fly, and the sea is wide enough for fishes to leap." The sea is a symbol of freedom at this level.But the sea, because of its vast and boundless devouring power, is also a symbol of death.The Titanic is like the broken net in my dream, throwing thousands of lives into the sea.

The pursuit of freedom and the escape from freedom are the dilemmas that human beings have to face all the time.The social support system is like that broken net in everyone's life.For those who are good at swimming and love the sea, the broken net is not so much a support as a landscape; for those who are not good at swimming and fear the sea, the broken net is a life-saving straw, but this life-saving straw is very fragile . The sea is right in front of people, whether to jump or not is a choice for people but not a choice at the same time.In the process of falling, one can clearly feel that death is opening its mouth wide, wanting to devour everything that falls.Am I going to die, or am I going to be born again?Everything is as Hamlet thought: "To be or not to be, that is the question."

The death feeling of falling into the sea is different from the feeling of jumping off a high cliff.The fear of the sea is a kind of boundless engulfment, which is a complete test of the limited vitality, willpower and wisdom of human beings.The sea sometimes feels like a return, a return to the mother, the perfection of being one with the mother.When that complete return is achieved, the fears of humanity will naturally disappear, because the fate of the individual is the same as that of the Mother Sea. "Going to sea" is a major choice in Chinese life.When all the Chinese are talking about going to the sea, few people pay attention to the psychological meaning of the word going to the sea.This image of falling into the sea has actually existed in everyone's collective subconscious for a long time, and it is more or less expressed in the dream of falling into the sea.That broken net is like China's fragmented social security system in reality. It is obviously unreliable, but there are still many people clinging to it.I would rather live in the tension and fear of the ever-changing security than allow myself to let go and jump into the torrent of life.

A child who often dreams of falling into the sea usually lives in an environment of confusion, insecurity, and lack of trust and support.When children do not have enough mental preparation and corresponding ability, they are forced to be pushed to the foreground of life to do jobs that they are totally incapable of.If parents think that this can exercise their children's abilities, then the children's exercised abilities are likely to be like duckweed in water. Although they have roots, they have nowhere to take root. In the plot of the dream of falling into the sea, another image "net" is also very meaningful in human life.Generally speaking, the net is a kind of bondage and imprisonment.Skynet is extensive, sparse but not leaky, talking about the role of law, ethics, and even karma.Falling in love is a human evaluation of the complex emotions contained in love.

In my dream of falling into the sea, compared with the shackles of the net and the danger of the sea, the net has become a symbol of safety and hope.It is a common problem of human beings to prefer to be bound rather than directly face the challenges of fate.When there is no freedom, people shout the slogan "give me freedom or give me death".But when freedom overflows, people start running away from it. In the middle of the 20th century, freedom in the United States reached an extreme state that could not be added.Freedom has indeed inspired people's motivation and creativity.However, the disorder and chaos brought about by freedom also made many people confused. The proliferation of drugs in the United States can be said to be a product of freedom.But drugs are not so much about giving people freedom as about giving people a way to escape from freedom.When people enter the net of drugs, you can indeed gain a short-term sense of security under the anesthesia of drugs.But after waking up from drugs, that fragile sense of security will be like a broken net, fragmented and unable to carry the burden of life.

"Broken Net" is really a very expressive image of existence. The net provides a sense of security while restraining a person.But breaking the net cannot satisfy the individual's desire to be bound voluntarily, and at the same time, it cannot provide the sense of security that the individual expects at the cost of losing freedom. There are more or less "secondary gain phenomena" in human morbidity, that is, while enduring illness, one obtains some kind of compensation.A person who is mentally ill in a sense makes himself mentally ill, because he can derive from his mental illness a certain state of being that he desires. The most common benefit of mental illness is to The evasion of the responsibility of life that the individual should bear.

The river in New York is really cold in winter One of my patients, Dai Wei, is handsome but suffers from severe depression and is unemployed at home.He and his girlfriend, Joni, have had a girl for 10 months.Joni earns a high salary, enough to feed the whole family.But Joni has a bad temper, and makes David miserable in every possible way. In every psychotherapy session, David repeated the topic of how Joni abused him and disrespected him.Once, Joni's father visited and told David privately that he couldn't understand why David could put up with Joni's bad temper. "Look, even Joni's father said that, so it can be seen that Joni is really bad." David seemed to have found evidence.

"If Joni is so bad, why are you still with Joni?" I asked bluntly. "I endured the humiliation for our children." David seemed to have a good reason. "Could it be that all the fathers in the world have to be unemployed and stay at home like you for the sake of their children?" "Well, what can I do?" David sighed deeply. "Actually, I think you can get a lot of benefits by being unemployed and bearing the burden of humiliation." "Benefits? Do you think I'm willing to take on Joni's shit?" "You and Joni can at least have enough room and board."

"Well, who wants to live like this." David didn't deny my argument. For a man who has given up his life responsibilities, living with a curmudgeon girlfriend, making himself a punching bag for her in exchange for "free money" necessities, is the potential benefit of a masochistic pathology.While the average person trades his hard work for a living wage, the masochist trades his masochistic state for the abuser's reward. The relationship between David and Joni is actually a sadomasochistic relationship.This kind of relationship is like a net that traps David, and David is willing to let this net catch his melancholy and helpless heart.The problem is that this sick net is actually a broken net.Because of the pathological instability of both sides, even if David wanted to be caught, the net would snap unexpectedly.

Although David complained about Joni's bad temper every day, he would still endure it until one day Joni kicked him out of the house.One wonders what would happen to David if Joanne did kick him out of the house (the sadomasochistic web was finally torn)? In my dream of falling into the sea, when the net is torn, the end of the person in the net is to fall into the sea.For those who cannot swim, the sea means death; but for fish who are good at swimming, the sea means the home of life. David's fate finally reached the most tragic step, and he was driven out of her home by Joni.A drunken David called me from a telephone booth on a cold street in New York. It happened that the battery of my mobile phone died that night, so I didn't receive a call from David.When my phone was fully charged, I saw the message message displayed on the phone. I know something is wrong with David, but what can I do for him?If I had received his call at that time, what else could I have done for him besides persuading him?If he wants to spend an evening with me, should I say yes or no?If I say yes to him, I'll be his new "Joanie."If I hadn't said yes to him, I really don't know what would have happened to him that night.I avoided this dilemma because of the accidental power failure of my mobile phone, but my heart was still a little flustered. On my way to work the next day at the Fifth Avenue Psychiatric Center, I got a message from David from the Psychiatric Center at Belfer Hospital.He really jumped into the river last night, but was rescued.David was the first patient to attempt suicide in the course of a session with me since I began regular therapy.If he really succeeded in committing suicide, the psychological impact on me must be very serious. When I called the ward, David recognized my voice on the other end of the line. "Hi David, what's the matter with you?" I asked. "Sorry." David smiled on the other end of the phone. "In such a cold weather, are you afraid of freezing your body when you swim in the water?" I still couldn't help but joked with him. "Well, when I got out of the water, the cold feeling was really unbearable, but I wanted to go ashore but couldn't, so I had to call for help." David smirked again on the phone. "Dude, before you go into the water next time, please tell me, I can help you get a towel." I didn't mention the word suicide from the beginning to the end. "Oh, I made a big mistake this time. If I had called you, I wouldn't have taken that icy cold shower." David's words comforted me a little. David, who fell out of the broken net, fell into the river, but he found that the river was not his destination either.For a patient who just wants to escape, even death has nowhere to go, the world is really a joke.From the dream of me falling into the sea to the real case of David, we can see the symbolic meaning of the net and the sea in life. Interestingly, the Internet has a new form in the modern electronic world, which is the "Internet".After people were busy going to sea in previous years, now people are busy surfing the Internet.If you haven't surfed the Internet, in the eyes of netizens, you are like an antique from the 18th century who doesn't understand modern life.But netizens themselves cannot deny that the charm of the Internet sometimes binds people like a curse.The various forms on the Internet are enough for patients with social phobia to find a reason to escape from the real world and be as comfortable as an invisible person. In fact, before the Internet, the binding power of TV networks had already reached the effect of captivating people's hearts.After living in Chicago for 3 years, before moving to New York, I specially donated one of my TVs and VCRs to the Lei Zang Temple next door to my house.Master Lianzi in the temple asked me why I donated the TV set. I laughed and said, "This thing makes me so fascinated that I can't sleep at night, so I send this harmful thing to the temple to rectify the Dharma body." A "sage" with such a determined cultivation base can't defeat the soul-stirring method of the TV network, let alone ordinary people with weaker minds?In New York, I live a TV-free life, but spend at least a few hours a day on the Internet.In modern urban life, it is almost impossible to yearn for emptiness and purity.