The Oppressor and the Oppressed
It was a dusty dimly lit house. Doorways separated by hanging clothes, I was walking through it unsure of what I was going to discover next or what I was looking for to start with.
I entered a room to find my younger brother sitting on his computer chair, head hanging low, despondent. My father enters the room carrying a machine gun in one hand and casually begins to shower bullets towards my brother. He does not resist or rebel, simply sits there as bullets lodge themselves into every part of him. I scream and run over, crying and begging that the horror show stop. My voice is barely audible among the sound of war. I dropped down to the foot of the chair embracing my brother. The bullets do not touch me.
I sit there crying helplessly until the bullets run out. And just as casually as my father had entered the room he makes his exit. My brother continues to lie there, nonchalant and unaffected by this onslaught. After a moment, he too, stands up and leave.
I wake up with a jolt.
My heart is racing and my mind is spinning. This dream was more real than many of my actual memories. I knew it had tremendous significance, but it made very little sense. My father and brother never got along too well, but the scale of violence that my mind depicted could not be literally about them. So what was this about?
I searched Google to come up with metaphors that family members represent — Father, Brother. What did the gun represent? What was my role? It was 5:30am — I needed to start my morning routine if I was to get to work by 8. I woke up and started my meditation and like a highly intelligent filing system — the pieces started to fall in place.
This dream was a depiction of my highly simplistic worldview and the message that it was entirely an illusion.
Our home life and family is the first world that we enter into — which goes on to frame the concepts of the larger world that we find ourselves in as adults. Father symbolizes authority, power, the decision maker in the house. Brother is the youngest and quietest in the household, symbolizing the resourceless, impoverished and disempowered. My mother was missing in this house altogether — showing a lack of the nurturer, carer, lover. The house itself was derelict — depicting a world where much has been destroyed, one without light but overrun with debris and dust.
My mind was showing me my own worldview in plain black and white. I had consumed the information around me rather unconsciously and landed on this narrative of the Oppressor and the Oppressed. As though, there are two groups of people in the world — the ones with power — and the ones without. The former gain power through exploitation of those without power. No matter what changes, this dynamic remains constant. My worldview was about the conflict, not of Good and Evil but about power/wealth imbalance. But the conflict is just as static as that of Good and Evil. What was perhaps most interesting was my own role in this drama. I was a helpless bystander. In this world, I did not wish to partake in the drama as I wanted to be neither the Oppressed nor the Oppressor. All I could do was oscillate between outrage, confusion and sadness. The only way to perhaps survive was to numb myself to it all, and I was reaching numbness right when the final reveal happened.
My brother getting up from the chair and walking away. It was all a lie.
Since this dream, I have actively examined my emotions and thoughts to detect when I was painting a picture of a world that was controlled by the powerful at the cost of the less powerful. Given the news channels, story arcs and the way history is told, its very easy to have this model be one through which we intellectualize about social and political dynamics. However, when this concept seeps into our day-to-day, we may begin to see things that are not there, or explain small behaviors or events through the lens of an imagined power imbalance. In doing so we can limit our experiences and and our responses — and its in these kinds of conclusions and limitations that we might kill the everyday magic of life.
