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. It continued to make running motions, barking and snapping its jaws. I knelt to examine the dog. It was some kind of robot.
I stood. The woman smiled at me as if to say, “Now do you see?”
I’m pretty sure she 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 some previously learned reaction determines what follows a triggering event. There is little to be done with such creatures because they are running some internal program, like a robot.
Most of these creatures are humans. And this lesson was not about other humans.
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-times. They are not lucid. They are ghost-like after-images of our waking selves — delusional, self-absorbed, and wilful.
Once you recognise wraiths in the dreaming world, you cannot unsee them in the waking world. People who are easily triggered, people with airs of moral superiority, righteous outrage — they lack the one quantity that matters in the dreaming world: lucidity. The fact that lucidity is optional in the waking world does not its dearth any less problematic. It always defines reality..