In dreams there is often an image of a person or an object disappearing. This can be in reference to your fears and anxiety about certain people or things disappearing or dying in your waking life or aspects of yourself or your life that you have ignored and that may be disappearing. The images may actually be trying to bring your attention to what you are not seeing in the world around you or in yourself. Nightmares are often the penultimate attention-getter in ones dreams if what you are not seeing threatens your well-being.
A form of disappearing in ones dreams is the act of “fading” and may be symbolic of a loss of energy being felt but not being attended to adequately. One’s drive or motivation may be fading or disappearing altogether. This symbolism has shown up in the dreams of some people during the Covid-19 lock down.
The phenomenon of disappearance also shows up in the waking world and I bring it up here so as to bring your attention to it. As an educator and psychologist I knew that it was important to keep certain points of view such as behavior rules present and conscious to the students. This is why teachers occasionally go over class rules beyond their initial presentation, why the students often participate in the process of creating the rules, and why they are often posted on the classroom wall. However, it has been shown that if a posted set of rules stays fixed they disappear from the student’s consciousness. This is why some teachers know to periodically move the rules posters and bring the student’s attention to it.
We of course don’t always see what is right in front of us. In fact we probably miss most of what is out there however, the unconscious mind will often pick up on what we are not attending to and it’s from the unconscious mind that our dreams are generated.
When it comes to visual recognition the brain needs among other things context for the object to be recognized that is how an object resembles previous objects and whether recognition is important enough for the brain to devote energy to the process. Attention slips or is never engaged if the object doesn’t demand enough attention. Also if the object is embedded with too many other objects e.g., your kitchen tools drawer, the brain needs to work harder and the risk for missing certain objects even the one being looked for increases. Also if there is no context for an object that is if there is nothing for the brain to compare it with i.e., something that is so alien to experience it may not be seen by the brain and therefor does not exist to that individual or collectively to any number of individuals.
In short, there are probably many things in our visual experience that we do not see that are functionally invisible or that have disappeared from sight but that are actually there.
Though this may heighten one’s sense of the mysterious it can also actually affect the choices we make and how some of those choices may seem irrational (rational output depends on rational input). If something is truly not visible to us our decisions can be adversely affected. Advertisers and politicians use this fact to emphasize what they want people to see so that their decision-making regarding the object or concept or person is directed along a pathway of the advertiser’s or politician’s choosing versus that of the person being manipulated.
A good technique for making activities and events disappear is to continuously bombard the populace with outrageous visual and cognitive stimuli so that they become overwhelmed and cannot focus properly, this is what certain political factions are doing. In this way they can hide in plain sight the questionable activities they use to manipulate people to their advantage. To overcome this one needs to be aware of what is behind the curtain in this fantasy land of OZ in order to see what is really there. But be careful the Wizard doesn’t want you to pay any attention to the man behind the curtain for if you do the whole fantasy will collapse and the Wizard will lose his power.
We need to pay attention to our dreams and to what we are not seeing in the current crises, ignore the redirection and deliberate Tweeted misdirection of the political “wizards” and focus on what they’re are actually doing behind the curtain. What do “they” want you to focus on i.e., what do they agree you should focus on for that agreement or direction is a ruse and only meant to obfuscate. We need to pay closer attention to what’s actually out there in both our dream and our waking realities. Our very lives depend on it.
The Book of Dreams 