Dream Wraiths
I dreamt I was walking along a city street. A large dog began barking at me and chasing me. I broke into a run, looking behind me every few strides. An elegant woman stepped out of a boutique just as I passed. When the dog reached her, she tipped it over with a folded umbrella. The dog fell over, but continued barking and making running motions. I stopped to observe the scene more closely.
The woman said, “Careful. This dog bites.”
The dog was seemingly oblivious to the fact that it had been tipped over. I knelt to examine the dog. It was some kind of robot.
I’m pretty sure the elegant woman was a dream guide. I often receive cryptic lessons like this one.
The dreaming world is full of creatures like that dog: beings that are startled or aroused by something in the environment, but which then react according to some internal program. Once triggered, these beings do not react appropriately to the environment. It is the very definition of trigger that it is an internal mechanism that determines what follows a triggering event.
Most of these creatures are humans.
Personhood
Western civilisation has a confusing narrative about personhood. On one hand, every human is a person, yet some humans are less so, some more. For example, a child is not a person in the sense that the decisions that a child is allowed to make are limited. A child has not full personhood. The same is true of prisoners and soldiers. At the end of the day, the question is about agency, the ability to make decisions and to implement them. Whether a person has the innate ability to exercise agency, or whether the right has been taken away, at the end of the day, it is agency that defines personhood.
People who are triggered are therefore cannibalising their personhood. It might sound dramatic to put it that way, but this is the only way to describe that being triggered is hardly a right of personhood; it is corrosive of personhood. No one has an interest in husbanding a trigger.
Lucidity
I have written elsewhere about lucidity, so I needn’t redefine it here, but in brief, it is the ability to see the obvious. There is something or someone relevant to your situation and you notice it.
Ironically, to be aware means to be trapped in a bubble of lucidity. For example, we are not aware of microscopic events, nor are we aware of galactic events. The outcomes are real and they affect us, but we cannot follow their processes as they unfold. These are matters of scale. There is also the matter of context. For example, children are not aware of political norms. They see the actions and hear the words, but they are not aware of the context, and therefore, much of what goes on appears senseless to them. So it is with dreams. Much appears senseless at first glance, but behind the appearances is a context that brings order to what is observed.
Lucidity is therefore always limited by context and scale. Anything unbounded by context and scale could hardly be called awareness. It wouldn’t be much of anything. Yet, it is the condition of all aware beings that they must march on with whatever lucidity is available to them.
Wraiths
Most people use the word wraith interchangeably with ghost, but it is a different word with a different meaning. A wraith is a likeness of a living person, not a dead one. It is said that anyone who sees his own wraith is not long for this world.
It has long occurred to me that our dreaming selves are very much wraiths. They look like us and they have our predilections, but they live in a supernatural world (dreams) and they potentially have supernatural powers. The primary difference is that they are much more emotional and reactive than we are. They are subject to being triggered, and in fact, they seem to do little else. Old traumas and unfinished relationships are their favourite past-time.They are not lucid. They are ghost-like after-images of our waking selves — delusional, self-absorbed, and wilful.
If it is true that the waking world is a kind of dream, then we would expect to find wraiths in it as well. One can hardly find a better explanations for 2025.