crucifixion archetype.

As canadian artist and musician martin tielli said, "I find adulthood to be a very black situation."


Tonite, I spent my entire dream state trying to pull a large rusty nail out of my right palm. Each second felt like an hour. And each hour felt like a day. In panic, I ran around the schoolyard of my elementary alma mater looking for someone to help pull the nail from me. Nobody was anywhere to be found. I kept pulling at the nail, as it was stuck in the dense, thick and fibrous bundle of tendons and cartilage. It wouldn’t budge. I could see the sharp edge of the nail pop out on lateral side of my hand. The only way I could think through the pain was too imagine the sunny almost perfect spring days matt and I used to walk around the schoolyard and be the best at doing nothing. As we grew older, it became harder to just simply Be. The very act of deducing your thought process to nothing in adult life is called enlightenment. Children take this for granted. We often let adulthood naturally dissolve into our young solute selves creating a murky mixture leaving us feeling bloated and aimless.

As I continued to run around the schoolyard trying to curtail the immense pain jutting from my hand, I still couldn’t find anyone to help take out the nail. Anger and sadness from isolation began to well up inside of me until I threw my back against a wall and on a three-count I closed my eyes tightly, brought my arm up high in the air and in one quick motion slammed my hand against the wall behind me pushing the nail completely through the other side of my hand. The nail made a piercing sound as hit it the tarmac. It was incredibly loud.

Instead of awaking, in which would normally be the case, my vision had all of the sudden become blurry from the shock of realizing what I had done. I began to see different colors moving around in front of me. Yellow, blue, red, and pink. As I further came to, I realized they were the colors of shirts inhabited by the bodies of my schoolmates. As the bodies became clearer and the haziness of my vision subsided, I realized that they were all looking towards me in what is best described as wryly (blankly). The pain was gone. My hand wasn’t a bloody mess nor did the large nail leave a gaping hole.

There are times in your life when you will have no one else. You have deal with pain and sometimes we are all off at war fighting our own battles. This dream is clearly a sign that my subconscious is coming to terms with the colorlessness, monotony and alienation of adulthood. How the nail ended up in my hand is irrelevant, what is relevant is the resolve that came out of the struggle. When you are able to deal with your own inner demons, I clearly and firmly believe that is a step that can make you an incredible person. Relying on others and acts of altruism are special human traits, however, dealing with ones own self is an attribute that is being further underplayed in our society.

Adulthood can be colorful if you allow it. Just don’t forget how to jump on beds, play with lego, throw a few snowballs and never forget that you have an imagination. This dream came very close to having biblical undertones, but since religion is a concrete part of our consciousness, there is no way around that. We are all our own Jesus Christ’s. Salvation is just that calm incredible silence before the sigh of relief. When you can deny the existence of every other human being on this earth and find yourself truly alone, then and only then when you bring these people back one by one do you start feeling like an individual. You can only be an individual amongst others.