Dreams of Crabs

In the first few days of my recovery, I dreamed vividly twice of crabs – teeming, busy, furtive, obscure mounds of crabs with their eyes on stalks and claws opening and closing and legs moving, scrabbling over each other.  In one dream I notice the crabs slowly, seeing them at first dimly and then as I look more closely more distinctly.  They are beneath water, climbing over one another on the walls of a large sea-pool.  They are a wonder to behold and I call the attention of others to see them.  I am excited by and joyful of their appearance and existence.  In the second dream, the crabs are piled on the beach in long, writhing mounds and threatened by bull-dozers clearing them for progress.

            The crabs for me symbolize my unconscious or sub-conscious feelings and desires, old, primitive motivations that I share with such creatures.  In part, I think that the dreams signify my sudden new awareness of parts of myself, my mind and experience, that I have previously been largely ignorant of, both willfully and unwittingly.  My alcoholic behavior, itself a part of a broad set of behaviors and experiences, has suddenly been revealed to me, and I am noticing it for what it in part is – the expression of certain basic and old feelings and desires.  My alcoholic tendencies were in many ways expressions of primitive desires and fears – desires for ascendency, fame, power, and sensuous gratification, fear of scorn, humiliation, subservience, exposure.  These powers are primitive and conscious at a low level, like a crab’s consciousness – awake, but largely ignorant of anything beyond its self and own welfare.

Crabs are interesting, powerful, implacable, relentless, but also smelly, sharp-edged, suspicious, and prone to inflicting a painful pinch, much like the desires that they represent in these dreams.  My alcoholic self was also interesting (perhaps), powerful, implacable, relentless, repellant, sharp-edged, suspicious, and prone to inflicting pain.  It is notable too that I feel affection for the crabs in the dreams – not for these effects but for their beautiful expression of an intricate and exotic form of life.  I can say the same about my primitive life-urges without endorsing their unchecked expression.  At present, however, this is largely an abstract, objective affection.  Having given unchecked expression to these urges, I am now mistrustful of them – of my capacity to express them responsibly, where this responsibility is to both others and myself.  At the same time, I fear their being scraped away in the misguided name of progress.  Don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath-water.

A final point about this pair of dreams:  there is a joy in discovery of the subterranean (or submerged).  It is a joy in the dreams to discover these teeming masses of primordial life, just as it is a joy in my life to discover new depths of my mind and self, even as I work to correct or repair them.  Where we find new, complex and fertile ground, we find opportunity for development and growth.  We experience joy in such discovery, excitement at the prospect of new strength and new joy facilitated by a newly acquired form of being.  This idea recalls Nietzsche’s Will to Power doctrine:  life-forms develop by growth, expansion, acquisition, appropriation.  The object being acquired and appropriated, in this case, would appear to be these powerful, primitive urges.  They are to be assimilated into a more mannered form of conscious, deliberate being.