There Be Dragons

Aye, and they be real, me hearties! Medieval maps showed them far from shore, at the edge of the world where you don't want to go, lest you fall to your doom.

Call it 'negative energy', or the 'shadow self', or your 'personal demons', or your 'darkness', or that scary corner in the back of the closet. Winston Churchill called it his 'black dog'. Most people these days use the popular clinical term 'depression'. Rev. Susan, in a sermon a year or more ago, used the image of the dragon, which strikes me as more balanced and multifaceted.

The dragon might not be empirically known by Doctor Science or even acknowledged by others, but you know it when you encounter it. Like in the children's story, if you (or your mother) deny its existence, it gets bigger and bigger until it fills up the house.

It can be a metaphor for any number of powerful entities: a dangerous challenge ahead, a traumatic experience past, untapped internal energy, a source of creative/destructive power, or just some weird shit lurking just outside cognition. No doubt Freudians and Jungians and Adlerians all have taken their turn trying to slay or embrace or harness the dragon.

When I was little I had what in a later era would have been called a sleep disorder. I slept deeply, so when I was out, I was out. I had quite a few major league nightmares; some I remembered and some I didn't. My parents and siblings told me I would sleepwalk and do nutty things that I didn't recall in the morning. I guess that was my childhood dragon.

You can try to kill it or try to tame it, slay it or dance with it, fence it in or wall it out, appease it, drug it, give it space or try to channel it where you want it. Easier said than done, since the dragon is elusive, evasive, sneaky, inconsistent, and unpredictable as well as invisible.

I suspect that some dragons are manic; when they visit there is no stopping the energy and activity, it's go go go. Other dragons are depressive; there's no go at all, nothing much to do, and what's the point anyway. Maybe the dragon is bipolar. Like magnets, batteries, neurons, thunderstorms, the tao, digital technology, and a lot of other contained, high-energy entities.

I have a feeling I'm going to revisit this topic.