Yume Nikki Chapter 12

I continue my explanation.

“I am more inclined to employing Jung’s theories. He was once Freud’s student, but divorced from him due to some conceptual conflicts.”

As pa.s.sionate my explanation may sound, you have seemed to turned a deaf ear, putting your heart into simply looking out at the sparkling starry night beyond the window.

Bright stars foretell luck, dim stars misfortune.

You shake yourself in your gaze.

“Jung’s theories seem more to be proposed from comparing human psyches.”

To be honest, I don’t have a clear understanding of psychology, but I have worked hard in going through a lot of related information.

I did it to help you.

“If someone happens to have a gentle personality, never having crossed any lines of violence, he is in fact only expressing his first personality of gentleness. Embedded in his heart must be an exact opposing personality of extreme brutality and violence. These opposing poles of inclination are like the reality against the dream, brought forth by the distorted image in a mirror.”

Every inclination exists for its exact opposition.

This is the rule Jung deemed for first and second personalities.

What we are talking here is not an urban legend of multi-personality disorders, and although William Milligan’s story is fascinating, its exaggeration has created bias in us towards the term personality.

In fact, we can find the two reflective personalities, namely externality and internality, in anyone of us.

“We present in our daily lives our first personality, and in some occasions the second. These occasions include the time when we dream, when we sob and rant, depriving us of the ability to control our personality, or when we relax ourselves in front of our close family members.”

We call a person who is normally gentle and calm a changed person when she throw a tantrum.

When it is, in fact, only an alternation to her second personality. This b.u.t.ton that changed her personality might well fit the description of a changed person.

It was only an exactly opposite expression caused by the alternation from the externality to the internality.

“We often hear that a husband do righteous deeds in front of men, but alcohol and violence to his wife, acting outrageously for the male chauvinism he hid. Or should there be one who speak great and inspiring words on the internet, yet becomes low profile and sincere when you meet him in person. We often hear of such internet addicts.”

These people switch their personalities according to their location—from homes to outdoors, from internet to reality.

Jung has an explanation for this: they can relax at home or in front of their computers, switching to a personality different from the one they express outdoors.

But this is by no means a sickness.

Everyone possesses the second personality, the opposition of the first. It sounds like a kind of physical law, where there must be a reaction when there is a force. In this sense, Jung has scientifically examined the sophisticated and ambiguous human psyche, building up a theory that could express the laws of psyches with chemical signs.

“Generally speaking, these two personalities balance each other and remain stable. If the balance is lost, we see a changed person. Like an overturned ship, the interior personality is revealed.”

But this is not a psychological disorder, for it might happen on anyone. We bear emotions, our psyches exhibiting fluctuations that balances itself throughout the day, changing like a Reversi game.

A sudden temper might only be the rare expression of the interior personality.

The real problem is original personality’s inability to recover when it has been overturned. Interior personalities are, basically, all trouble makers in our lives: irascibleness, atrocity, inability to communicate, insidiousness, obscenity, and the list goes on.

Should these personalities keep surfacing, they would wreck havoc in our society.

If someone else notices the aberrance in that person, he can make him receive treatment and return to normal by flipping over his alternated personality once again.

Even if he doesn’t return normal, he can eventually adapt to his alternated personality, for sometimes his other personality might even be brighter, easier to approach, and lovable. The only drawback, however, for others, is that he may not occur to be the same person any longer. This changed person looks the same, but he isn’t the man the others knew of him.

Anyway, this example of personality alternation may mislead one to consider this a result of a psychological disorder, but its weaker version is happening every day in our lives. The excessiveness that could tip off our psyche and alternate our personalities are realized only because of the trouble it makes.

We ought only to maintain our balance, keeping caution not to let our personalities alternate. If we fail to do so by ourselves, we could seek help from a doctor or those around us.

Be that as it may, both our exterior and interior personalities are const.i.tuents of ourselves, so it is difficult to determine whether we are balanced. Psyches are invisible to the eyes. Difficult it is already to diagnose a skin disease or a tooth decay that catches such attention, more it is for something that doesn’t.

As such, we fail to manage even our own condition.

We don’t even know whether we are sick.

“But there’s still a crevice through which you can pry through into your interior personality, and this crevice is your dreams.”

Deciding to cut to the chase, I t.i.tled my body frontwards.

And you just stood there, fazed.

“Human psyches can be divided roughly into the conscious and the unconscious. The exteriority is the conscious connected to reality. But in our psyches lie the unconscious, and there our second personality lingers. It records our memories and our experiences, and then symbolizes them. These symbols of unconscious can be pried into through a crevice, that is, our dreams.”

You are in a dream.

In other words, you are in your unconscious.

“Our conscious cannot work forever. It needs rest, and hence sleep, letting our body and our minds recuperate. Then we dream, where our conscious is replaced by our unconscious. Now you are in your psyche, your unconscious being the protagonist, lingering and pacing. Only when your conscious rest does the unconscious draw stories, that is, our dreams.”

This is where we are.

Memories and emotions are all symbolized in your dreams. Some of them remarkable enough to imprint a strong impression—a small red umbrella, traffic lights, and all sorts of other vibrant symbols that cause minute effects to your unconscious.

They are the sources for the changes of the unconscious.

We can call them effects, for they affect our unconscious.

You must collect these symbols in our unconscious, deciphering them to make peace in your psyche. Act like anyone else in her dreams: compromise to your psyche, float around in the unconscious to your heart’s pleasure, and you will heal the pain within.

Finally, you must come back to reality.

When you have satisfied yourself, having understood and made peace to your psyche, you must wake from your dream.

Otherwise, your reality will crumble.

Your conscious won’t be saved, and never will you be able to return to reality.

You should never let your unconscious drag you around and manipulate you.

The conscious is the connection to the real world. You must wake it up and face reality, for that is the way to live a normal life, and I hope you can.

However cruel your reality may be, an overturned ship still has to navigate in the sea of reality.

I have made such determination to speak to you such emphatic words.

Yet you remain silent, eyeing at me tenaciously.