Returning to this: https://the-black-book-gallery.com/2021/06/11/post-apocalyptic-ukiyo-e/

The demolished cityscape represents the self/ego and the different blocks and aspects of the city represent the different aspects of the self. Initially I thought the crumbling landscape symbolized a fractured ego. But I’m coming to the conclusion that the dreams mean something else.

From the destruction and decay of the cityscape, life reasserts itself. The modern city represents alienation and compartmentalization, and the whole edifice of it all is destroyed, while oddly enough maintaining the bustling nature of it, arguably the main feature of a city.

Vegetation overtakes the sprawl. Whorehouses and crackhouses are situated alongside decrepit, concrete playgrounds and businesses.

Innocence and the darker aspects of the self commune with each other, coming into contact and communicating with each other.

The whole psycho-geography of the landscape is fascinating – the simultaneous urbanity and the primitiveness of the landscape seamlessly coexist, bringing forth new ways of living, communing, relating, communicating with others and viewing and inhabiting oneself. And the reason I compared the dreams to ukiyo-e is that these elements – the urbanity, primitiveness, seediness, playfulness- seem to mesh harmoniously, literally a world floating above the real world.

Heaven, hell, and purgatory all coalesce in this one spot. This one location. In this liminal space.

So I’m seeing this dream as the process of holistically integrating the ego.

As someone who’s mental health goes in and out of stability and who not infrequently went into psychotic states, this bodes well especially since I’m waaayy more stable these days.

Hopefully, long gone are the days of the schizophony of the fractured self, whose various aspects were in irreconcilable tension with each other. Though it might be premature to hope for that.

The actual experience of the dream is accentuated by the alternating feeling of being disembodied from reality and the lush sensuality/viscerality of the intense and raw atmosphere.

It was simultaneously dream-like and fleshy. It was pulsating, as if one entered into the beating heart of the center of a city and feeling the electricity run through the air and coursing through one’s veins.