I hope others also sort of make a picture of their subconscious because it is creative and perhaps we will understand each other more. Try to throw in the exact idyllic moments and concepts that recur in your subconscious, the sort of things that lurk on the deepest of your insides and sort of show the dynamicism of your personality and yourself.
I will provide explanations below...
First, the background is an underwater scene. I feel very close to water, and I feel like it provides a sort of suspended, floating feeling; it is also unclear and the sea seems quite unexplored in many senses, and thus it seemed like an appropriate background.
Next:
The bottom left has a child in an octopus costume; it is very light hearted and fun. I love the Octopus and revere it as an intelligent creature and a complicated one, and as such I also view my inner child as perhaps complicated yet as happy-go-lucky as this kid in his costume.I am sort of tangled up like him.
The top left has a photograph of a starved, emaciated north Korean man holding photographs of him when he was younger. I believe this is what I am progressing and what all men are progressing towards: very physically weak, very somber yet full of good memories; there seem sto be a peaceful grieving on his face. Inside of me there is already an old man peacefully grieving, with total dignity and contentedness, remembering the good old days.
Next, in the very center, is Christ being nailed by the Romans to His Cross. I feel like in our life all of us have to suffer and be nailed down by society, by our own feelings, by what tears us up inside; we all suffer likewise. More than this, He is my savior and He is dying for me, and that is what I will never forget. He died for my sins: both so they are forgiven and also because mankind is sinful, and because of our sinful nature when God entered our world we crucified Him because of our ignorance and shallowness and the way our systematic bureaucracies kill everything good about the human heart. Remember, even Pontius Pilate wanted to save Christ but due to bureaucracy was helpless.
Man even chose a murderer to be released for freedom over God.
In the very top right is a blurred propaganda poster of the Nazis, a smiling young brunette German in front of a Nazi flag. I blurred this and put it there because it seems like these terrible moments, htough I never lived through them, molded so much of who I am and what the world is today; it also represents the super dark idealism we all have in us that would turn our back on reason and humanity to erect an idyllic state. I know that it is wrong to do all of that, but in the subconscious unchecked idealism exists.
You are also well aware with my flirtations of fascism, but these are in direct conflict with m y other ideals and can never be acted on. Perhaps this is ultimately the most base Id that I have inside of me: ethnic nationalism, but in the form of a smiling girl. Call this my Id.
The next image should be treated as two and this is the most confusing:
A dead soldier bleeding from his head at the base of the cross. He is a WWII soldier of a nation who is now unidentified to me. This is an important ideal that I have:
to die for my country and my nation, to make a huge sacrifice, to attain martyrdom for justice and sacrifice myself on the alter of Others.
If I could lay my life down in a place where innocents suffer at the hands of others, if I could throw it all away to serve others, I would do so. The dead soldier is a symbol of Honor and Integrity, of Duty and Sacrifice and Courage; these are the most profound ideals manifested in an image. That's what I want. To me, that is glory unending and the very basis of my interpretation of a Christian life ends with me laying my own down in the face of evil as a protest and as an opportunity for others to live.
That is, simply, the unending glory I believe God has planned for me and as God had planned for Himself.
There is no greater deed than for a man to lay down His life for another.
Right next to that is a picture of me during a funny, comical moment with the head of a rose I put on my glasses. I remember this picture: I was doing funny things during a dinner with some close friends.
In death I want to be remembered as a funny guy, and a happy guy, and that funniness, light heartedness and happiness is what I want to rise out of my death. Even in such serious ideals I feel like I embrace an amount of light heartedness. My death, when it comes to me, will not be an occasion of grief. Happiness and laughter and those funny times still exist far beyond that and they exist right next to my ideals. A man who forgets to laugh forgets to live; and a man who always laugh can laugh in the face of death itself.
The image in the bottom far right is a photograph from the happiest day of my life. We went to Chinatown in Incheon and drank from noon that day, we bought Chinese clothes. The picture is from a subway ride across Seoul, getting ready to meet all our best friends for dinner and parties. Everyone laughed at our costumes and we were so thrilled to be alive.
That happiest day of my life is a metaphor for all of my happiness, i tis placed directly in the stone, the hardest part of the ocean, the most secure part of my subconscious. It will be with me forever, in the hardest of times.
The picture in the center, bottom left on the rock is a beautiful woman in a box.
This represents something weird and a part of my psyche since birth:
My mother always told me that one day God would give me a wife, that one day I would meet the perfect woman for myself and have perfect, true love. But over the years, this seems like such a manufactured idea.
Women do not come in boxes from heaven. Women are the comforters and partners of men (and men the same to women), but they do not come in boxes. They are themselves. But in this subconscious there is a strange hope that one day I will meet the most perfect wife and she will be like a gift from Heaven.
That idealism will be with me forever as my mother, in all of her hopes for me, wished only my happiness and to create a family one day (as in our happy family image I cannot imagine, to this date, serene happiness without having such a great family as I had). Being alone all the time in the military really keeps this idea surviving inside of me. The notion of a beautiful woman for me out there.
All of these things make up the subconscious desires and interpretations that I have of the world.