Have You Ever Been To Lilliput?
What if you caught yourself wiping out an entire population and thinking that you had done nothing wrong? This happened to me in a dream where I was the Giant in the land of Lilliput. In my dream, I was alone on a planet which had some jungle and some cleared land, and I was walking around thinking the planet must be unpopulated, but not noticing much unusual about it. Suddenly, an Upper Voice began to narrate my dream.
I was told that this was a very heavily-populated planet, but the residents were only the size of ants, compared to my size, and that I was a huge and terrifying giant to them because my feet were destroying many people and homes with every step. They were shooting poison darts at my feet and ankles, which registered as flea bites and yet, they were not driving me away. Well, where was I to go? There was no free space for me.
The Voice told me that this dream was a test being administered to me to see what I would do with the knowledge that my every step was killing people. I stayed with the dream long enough to feel puzzled about what to do and scratching a few more “flea bites,” I considered spending my life in a tree. But then realized that these tiny people might be all over the trees, too.
As in most dreams, I took a break from the scene right then and found myself in some train station. Perhaps, I was coming up with my own novel solution of escape. But, that was not to be. Soon, I was back in Lilliput, observing myself lying down asleep. I’m sorry to say that I was not responsible for finding the solution to this problem, though that means that I don’t have to claim responsibility for the wholesale slaughter that ensued because of me. Here’s what happened.
Me, the Giant, fell asleep and some brave, tiny soul had climbed upon my body and found that I was female and therefore, maybe not so fearsome. He discovered a way to communicate with my mind by pressing his head against my third eye and projecting his thoughts to me. Because I’d already been told of their existence by The Voice, this news wasn’t such a shock to me. Perhaps The Voice had also described my dilemma to them, not to have any free land to move about in and being unable to avoid squashing them with every step.
So, these little people had had time to analyze things and the Brave One on my forehead propelled a solution into my sleeping brain. His people were mild and peace-loving, but their enemies in an adjoining territory across the river were warlike and fierce. This people had long been victimized by dreadful terrorism and ongoing raids. If I would agree to become their ultimate weapon, they would clear the path and lead me into enemy territory where I could stamp those fierce ones into oblivion and clear the land for myself. These new friends would even help me to solve my food and shelter problems and we could all co-exist together very well.
Again, my dreaming self fell back into a deeper sleep and when I next found myself in that same dream, I was established in my newly-cleared land and everyone was happy… except for the newly stomped-upon terrorists, who were completely eliminated.
There followed an evaluation by The Dreamweavers Who had designed this test for me. They praised the original population for their courage and ingenuity. These tiny ones had domesticated The Terror (me, the Giant) and used it to solve their own problems. I was happy to have a cleared homeland and not to have suffer more of those irritating “flea bites.”
So often, the status of Friend or Foe is determined by the amount of fear that is present in the situation. They had faced my reality, head-on, and found me not so bad, after all. My towering size and tendency to tramp on homes and populations had originally made me an automatic enemy, even more dangerous than the ferocious hordes across the river. It looked as if Fate had really stacked the cards against them now. They could have given up and resigned themselves to a terrible fate because the very fact that I had, accidentally, landed on their side of the river might have wiped them out, eventually, if they had been paralyzed by their fear of me. However, through courageous investigation, they discovered that I wasn’t “terrible,” and that I was even a reasonable, howbeit large, person who had a serious difficulty of my own, just as they did. Their imaginative cooperation solved both of our problems at the same time, preserving the dignity of each side.
I like to think that their dreadful neighbors could have established the same sort of peace if they had been willing to sit down at the conference table and understand the other side’s needs. Since they had long demonstrated their unwillingness to do that, I don’t feel a bit bad about delivering ultimate justice with my feet and literally “standing up” for my friends.
Elimination of FEAR proved to be the way out of that puzzling dream, but I doubt if things would have turned out the same way if I had landed on the militant side of the river. Though maybe I would have continued to view them as fleas and would have, eventually, taken my own pest control measures.
Tags: 1, dreams, Fear, Giants, Lilliputians, war, Tag Index
lindajbrown