A Hanged Woman
This post presents dark themes, reader’s discretion is advised.
This is one of the weird dreams I had before I quit my job. People say that dreams can reflect things we are processing. But it seems that my brain decided to present them in the most absurd way.
In the house
At the beginning of the dream, I was at home (though it didn’t look like my actual home in real life at all). I was as the balcony, sorting through something. Then I saw a shadow. There was something above my head, and from its shadow, it looked suspiciously like a human. I looked up, oh yes, it was a woman. She was hanged, her head down, her body swaying slightly from side to side.
“What?” I panicked and froze at the spot. My years of watching horror movies didn’t make me braver when encountering the macabre. Though the woman was dead, a natural state following what had happened to her, I thought she would “spot me” if I move, so I dared not, for a long moment.
But eventually, I moved, away from the woman. She didn’t move, staying true to her state. Just when I was thinking what to do with the woman, my mother called.
In the countryside
This part felt like an action movie… or not. The details were lost, but the concept was that my mother and I beat the huge spider demon with some magical power in the countryside at night. No one else was around. Just us, the spider demon, and some grass, and a small abandoned building.
Forgotten task
After we finished the demon thing, I returned home, where the woman was… Oh! Yeah! The woman! I totally forgot to call the police. It’s already night, and I hoped they didn’t mind taking care of her… But when I checked the balcony, she was gone.
GONE.
Why? In real world, there could be more common (not more reasonable or realistic) explanations, such as someone moved her while I was away dealing with the demon, or she became a zombie and left by herself… However, in the dream, my mind didn’t work that way. I thought, the woman was there before I tackled the demon, and after the countryside fight, she was gone. Clearly, she was connected to the demon!
My interpretation of the dream
I had this dream when I was stressed by my work, considering quitting, but still far from making the final decision. The woman in the balcony seems to represent an ongoing (and a huge) stress, but I forgot to call the police. I was avoiding dealing with the problem.
After the countryside fight, I identified the demon as the source of the problem. Or rather, I thought I knew what’s the source of the problem, but maybe I was simply being distracted by a more urgent and superficial matter. Kind of like how I optimized exercise, meditation and working efficiency, but avoided considering the timing of quitting.
So, to put everything together, I was stressed out, the problem was there all the time, but I kept running away from it by distracting myself. My mind was trying to tell me this, but it didn’t know how to be gentle. Instead, it used whatever materials it had in the brain to construct the scenes. My horror movie experiences definitely didn’t help with that.