Friday, June 24, 2011

Smurfs vs Godzilla

Dear Peregrin,

A recurring childhood dream where I'm Papa Smurf's father or grandather or something, and I can use magic. and Gargamel, the dude with the cat, is attacking, right? so I'm fighting them off with magic, and they run off cuz I'm a badarse. then Godzilla comes around, and I have this long drawn out fight with godzilla, finally killing him and saving all of smurfdom.

The Dude

Good morning, Dude.

I see a great contrast between this dream and your previous one. Before, you were afraid of the power of authority, here you are openly defying it.

Again there's a very strong identification with your peer group. As the grandfather of Papa Smurf, you establish yourself as a leader among others "your size." Gargamel is representative of authority - possibly a parental figure, or perhaps a school figure, but definitely an adult because of the relative size between him and the Smurfs (other kids).

The dream conflict occurs to mirror a waking conflict between yourself and the authority figure. Kids dont' usually win such conflicts, but when you had this dream you were of an age that you deeply desired some kind of empowerment. You felt that you were right in whatever disagreement occurred, and of course we are taught from an early age that justice shall prevail, good will triumph, etc. So in the dream, you win the fight.

Because of the name, when a child dreams of Godzilla they are often associating the monster with God (I find this unfortunate, because it makes God seem very scary to children). So, after your victory over the adult authority figure, you then begin to question religious authority as well. Once again, you display a deep conviction that you are right, by winning this fight too.

I see "saving all of Smurfdom" as a desire to be accepted and respected by your peers. Again - and I'm sorry to keep repeating myself - this is not uncommon among kids. Once we learn that adults will not always take care of us, then acceptance by other children becomes extremely important.

In both your dreams I can see a preference to fantasy over reality. Of course, this is to be expected of childhood dreams, but if you're still dreaming in terms of video games and cartoons, you may want to expand your interests a bit - if for no other reason, then just to have some more interesting dream material to play with.

Pleasant dreams,

Peregrin

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