Subconscious

Freud was right. There has always been a subconscious in human awareness, but people had only been dimly aware of it and probably not attuned to its workings until Freud came along. He gave it structure and "clarity". Now everybody freely throws the word around along with its cousins like unconscious and projection and displacement.

I had another meaningful dream earlier this morning. It woke me up. I wanted to get out of bed and rush to the computer and record the dream, knowing fully well that if I waited until I was fully awake, my recollection of it would be impaired. But I was dead tired and I needed to get back to sleep. My instinct for survival was stronger than the need to confront myself. Now I am wrecking my brain trying to remember what I was dreaming about.

I vaguely remember that I was in a class. The professor expressed annoyance that nobody had turned in the assignment. That was when I got up and delivered an exemporaneous speech. It is a damn shame I forgot most of the sppech. It had to do with evil, with how the religious conflict in Nigeria accounted for the massacre of the Nigerian Christians over the weekend in the mixed neighborhood near the demarcation line between the largely Muslim North and Christian South, in retaliation for similar slaughter of the Muslims in the same neigborhood in January, 2010. The news mentioned the killers didn't even spare infants. Imagine a human so consumed with hatred that he would raise a machete in his hand and struck it against a terrified crying infant while his mother would wail for mercy, if she was not already dead. How cruel and heartless humans could be when they were in a paroxysm of hate. Hate interests me because I find myself occasionally sucked into its vortex. I know I am capable of higher emotions and sentiments, but at times I wonder why there exists in me such terrifying thoughts of violence.