I have been having nightmares. Rather, a recurring nightmare. I have not had this nightmare when at home alone. I have this nightmare on nights when I am with D, when I feel heightened emotional levels, or feel very close to him. As I see the dream, I am searching through a house, and as soon as I see the thing I am looking for (usually a small, ornate, solid gold treasure chest), this beast appears and begins chasing/hunting me. It does not want me to have the thing.
I have had this nightmare explained by someone who knows (long story, irrelevant story, but I trust this person & their opinion) and this person believes that I am seeing the dream from D’s perspective. It is D that is searching, and I am both the beast and the thing.
Bottom line is, I am stopping him from getting what he wants (me). Apparently, (I am told) I need to give the thing to him, but I am not sure that I am ready for that, and I am not certain that he knows what he is getting yet…
Sometimes hideous things can be kept in beautiful little boxes… and sometimes hideous creatures can have the best of intentions at heart.
Image is nothing.
Am I nuts, or what?
Not nuts, but you have found a very articulate way of expressing the little bit of jouissance at the heart of your fundamental fantasy — the bit that makes you You.
To my mind there are a multitude of approaches you could take to this, but in my philosopher/psychoanalyst way I’d be inclined to say the latent concern of the dream is at the level of meaning and its distortion (the thing) is the intrusion of the everyday ontic dimension on the frame of universal meaning; i.e. the point where your search is soiled in the worst possible way a la the inversion (not reversal) of the search into a hunt.
Your being both the beast and the thing shows up, to my mind, the fundamental incompatibility of meaning and objects. Perception being the place where we endow the world with meaning at the same time that we jealously horde our precious X, “I exist!”