#10: Dismantling the Puptriarchy
DREAM JOURNAL
Happy Pride month, y’all! Love is love is love is love.
To celebrate our tenth installment, I’m analyzing a dream sent in by my dear friend. Hannah’s dream is from March 2021, and it’s weird and sweet just like her. If you would like your dream analyzed, you can comment below, reply to this email, or fill out this form.
Here’s Hannah’s dream:
There was a puppy overlord who would inject himself with peanut butter and could control you by biting his tail to initiate transformation into being one of his puppy followers. The transformation was completed by a purple box appearing and you needing to do everything in your power to open the purple box. The puppy got me and so my friends were running around hiding the purple box so that I wouldn’t touch it. Then one of his puppy friends was Fenway (my first dog, a goldendoodle) as a puppy and I was like OMG FENWAY and then I started to cry but it wasn’t Fenway it was a white lab named Alexandra and then puppy overload started to make her into one of his higher level minions and he told me that I needed to cooperate otherwise he would hurt my friends.
Hannah, what a beautiful mind!
Firstly, thank you for sharing this dream. I appreciate the window into your psyche and the generosity and vulnerability it takes to share that with the larger group that is the Respectful Smartass community. You are so brave. Brave enough to hold your own against a puppy overlord, I should think.
Let’s dive in.
It is truly hilarious to me that even the villains in your head are puppies. For those of you who don’t know Hannah, she is basically a golden retriever in human form (smart, friendly, playful, reliable, etc.), so this is really on brand.
The empath in me wants to point out that dogs often bite their tails to alleviate pain and bring on some temporary relief. It may help to know that this puppy overlord, however cruel, was acting from a place of pain himself. Classic displacement of trauma by numbing with substances (injecting that sweet PB) then further numbing the pain by transforming humans into other evil puppies. I mean, we’ve all been there, right?
Facing an evil dog in a dream can symbolize facing a problem head-on. It can also nod to an underlying desire for more connection. In March 2021, we were a year into the throes of the pandemic, an evil much harder to face head-on, seeing as the only real way to deal with it was head-in(side). We were still pretty isolated societally, and I can only imagine that had something to do with this big scary puppy power that you had to face even though it was widely out of your control.
The color purple can sometimes represent powerlessness in dreams. And unopened boxes are generally associated with concealment. In this case, I think the closed purple box symbolized a point of no return. To open it for the puppy overlord would have been to lose your friends and your sense of self in exchange for puppy miniondom. To leave it unopened was to save yourself as you are now, to be spared whatever evil you are currently sheltered from.
Emerging into adulthood during a global pandemic and other general world shittiness has been filled with boxes like this for me. Things I sometimes wish I could unknow. I wonder if that’s why Fenway showed up. A reminder of childhood love and innocence you miss and will never truly be able to get back.
YIKES. This got kinda sad?
The purple box could have also been a receptacle for the musical genius of Prince. Maybe the puppy overlord wasn’t really so bad at all. He just had a dream to sing the heck out of Purple Rain, and his puppy paws couldn’t get the box open so he tried to force humans to do it. Who knows!
It sounds like, pandemic and puppy overlord aside, you have faith in and highly value your friends. They took great pains to save you from the purple box. And I assume, had you not woken up, that you likely would’ve cooperated with the puppy transformation to save them. If only you could’ve saved them all from the isolation they (WE!) were feeling in real life at the time.
I know this dream is from over a year ago, but regardless, I hope you hug your friends tightly this week, basking in the knowledge that they would totally hide a purple box for you. They’re keepers.
I hope your dreams are a little happier next time you close your peepers.
Thanks for reading! If you would like to have a dream analyzed or you’re looking for some snarky advice or you’d like to submit a happy moment/thought/picture/tiktok/etc for our Dopamine Dumps or you’d like to write a guest post for this newsletter, please check out this form.
I want you to be as much a part of this as you want to be! I welcome any and all feedback and calls to action. Tell me what you want! I’m a people pleaser! I’ll totally give it to you!
Don’t forget you can always reply to these emails as well. Until next week!
Down with the puptriarchy,
Ariana 💜