dream other dreams
putting this here essentially because we have a limited time in group and i cant go off rambling about every single media connection my brain makes. i very much function and understand my own emotional state through the media that i consume and so im more likely to go "this reminds me of something" than to have my own words for it.
but i dunno i feel like it sounds silly sometimes.
in group we were talking about how morality is societal, not inherent in nature. and ocd is an invented morality that works with a different, usually more punishing set of rules than the rest of society does. being me of course this reminds me of The Mysterious Stranger.
"I can do no wrong, for I do not know what it is"
Satan in the Paine-Duneka text spends a lot of time pointing this out, that morality was invented by humans (in this case, specifically Christians) and does not exist in the same way in animals. one animal killing another is a morally neutral event, one suffers while the other benefits, there is no right or wrong. nature could not function if animals had morals the way humans do.
this in the book is specifically used to pick apart Christian morality and hypocrisy, but i dont think religious morality is very far from ocd (obviously, for some people, they overlap). its an invented system of judgement and punishment that we have no proof of, and we spend all our time worrying about it instead of paying attention to our real values.
at the end of Mysterious Stranger (Satan, 44), the protagonist (whose name may change depending on the version, August, Theodore) is excited to learn that reality isn't what he thinks it is. 44 points out that this system of judgement and punishment is flawed in a very long worded rant that I don't have the time and space for.
"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible, except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present—you should have recognized them earlier"
and i was thinking about this in ocd group today because yeah, it doesn't make sense. it couldn't be how the world works. the world could not function if it worked the way my brain thinks it does, so it must be my brain that has created this dream. "the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks"
but August is excited because this means that he has the ability to change it. because the world exists only through his own perception, he is able to change that perception.
“Life itself is only a vision, a dream." "Dream other dreams, and better!"
in the 1982 movie this is "dream other dreams, better ones". so i have been thinking about this a bit.