Putin's Dilemma
This is one of those dreams that gets interrupted by someone wanting to give me a message. As usual, I’m not interested in the message or the intrusion, and have to figure it out after I wake.
September 17, 2024:
I was outside painting. I'm not sure what I was painting, at least not exactly. It is kind of like the paintings I made in Arizona titled Call to Prayer and Remember When. It reminded me quite a bit of Remember When. However the aspect ratio is different.
While I was painting, two young men approached me. They appear to be college age. I believe they carried clipboards with forms on them.
They asked if I am willing to answer some questions. I was busy painting and didn't want to stop.
However one or both of these guys really wanted me to take a survey of some kind. I was thinking as they asked, "this won't take very long, maybe I can just do it, get it over with and get back to my painting and then they won't bother me because they're satisfied".
It sounded like it might have something to do with an aptitude test for my writing. At least, it involved me writing something. That got my attention. I thought, "Hey, these guys are going to evaluate my writing skill". That didn't sound too bad to me. For that reason I decided to go with them.
The men brought me to a room in a nearby building. There is a woman in the room taking the same test, or so I assumed. They handed me several papers and I realized this will take longer than I thought. This isn't going to be 5 minutes.
The reason is that the very first question essentially asked me to write an essay. The question had a moral component to it: it asked for a description of difficult decision, and its resolution. A dilemma.
As I recall, I was immediately thinking, OK I’ll give them some shocking real event from my childhood that'll really knock their socks off. So I was going through my mind trying to come up with an incident that I could use as the basis for this short essay question.
As I was doing this the two men left the room. The young woman stayed. I had thought she was taking the test too, but now she seems to want to help me. My impression is that she is aware of my effort to come up with the right incident to describe, a moral dilemma of some kind. In that context, she asked me how I felt about Vladimir Putin's response to the terrorist attack at Moscow’s DubrovkaTheater that happened in 2002.
In that incident, 40 terrorists broke into the opera house and took 912 theater-goers hostage. Putin's reaction was to gas the Opera House to knock out the terrorists.
The gas killed all of the terrorists and 132 hostages. So this woman was asking me how I felt about that response. Namely whether I thought it was justified and if I had any other comments about it.
I said that I thought Putin didn't have any good options. He was looking at almost 1000 hostages and 40 terrorists.
No matter what Putin did, people were going to be killed. So I felt he probably took the safest way to resolve the situation without giving the terrorists what they wanted.
After she asked this question, the two men came back and brought me to where I'd left my easel.
Now that I'm awake, I think the painting portion of this was me minding my own business in the dream. The two men were independent of my dream and wanted to communicate it to me. They first took me out of my dream (a beautiful mountain landscape) by bringing me into the non-descript interior. Then, they had to communicate the message. The essay question wasn't a reference to my past, and knew that in the dream, but I wanted to answer it that way because I figured any example would do.
Looking at it now, the moral dilemma it presented was similar to the Putin example the woman mentioned. Perhaps because I didn't see that, or "go there," she spoke up and mentioned Putin specifically. Looking at it now, I'm not sure if the point was to get me thinking about dilemmas such as the one faced by Putin, or that specific dilemma, or Putin (and how he solves problems).
Comment:
It often takes me a few hours of wakefulness before I understand a message in a dream. This is because I am paying attention to the way it is delivered or the setting instead of the message itself. In this dream, there are two “messages”:
1) I was asked to consider a moral dilemma
2) The dilemma faced by Putin was provided as an example
Last, I was asked my opinion of Putin’s choice.
With this in mind, I think the dream was about Putin’s choice in that incident, and not the generic concept of a dilemma. It reminds me that Putin has a similar dilemma now. The US is effectively at War with Russia right now, using Ukraine as a proxy. Neither side has acknowledged this yet, which contains the war within Ukraine.
However, Putin can’t win in Ukraine without dealing with the US. What does he do?