Changeling

Investigative dream analysis/children's book review

I am reading “the Archetypes and the collective Unconscious” by Carl Jung, and it’s the first primary literature I have ever read of Carl Jung. Many who read these essays and like them enough to write me about it, usually think I’m way more well read than I am, and are usually way more well read than I am.

I came to a chapter detailing the archetype of the dual birth, in the general discussion about the mother archetype, and it made me dot connect a lot of random things I have been saying for the past couple of weeks, as well as some things I have gone into great detail with in my longform writing here. Such as, to the former, tweeting into the void, “If you want to understand everything about me in a sentence, it is simply “I have never felt welcome in this world””, and to the latter, my near death experience as a child, hallucinating a literal death and rebirth by a Great Mother beyond good and evil. And furthermore a children’s book I read, before that event, and how I had recurring nightmares about it.

When I was very small, I was deeply fascinated with an illustrated copy of a book simply called “The Troll Story”. Its a story about a changeling. A boy is stolen by a troll woman, to raise as her own, and she creates a changeling out of a small tree, to swab with the unsuspecting human parents.

You then follow both characters. The boy is raised in Troll-world, the magical forest, Hell, whatever you want to call it, and goes on adventures with the troll children, magical journeys, fooling around and getting into trouble.

The Changeling is autistic and retarded, and can’t speak.

It is a story about sexuality. The inciding incident that resolves the plot, is the sexual awakening of the child. Along with his troll friends, he goes out one evening to dance with nymphs. There we meet a great big Evil Troll, who is extremely horny. He wants to fuck the nymphs, but, being nymphs, they are ethereal and he cant kidnap them.

The boy, having been horny for the first time after seeing and dancing with the nymphs, now sees a human girl in the forest, and of course falls in love with her. The evil Horny Troll monster does the same, and plans to kidnap her and marry her, as she is human and material, and easier to physically kidnap and rape.

The changeling and the boy then have to team up to save their girlfriend from Bowser, and in the process, the autististic changeling gets killed. The Evil Horny Satan falls off a cliff and dies, they bury the autist, and he becomes a tree, and they all live happily ever after.

At the time of reading it, much like I would later get into Marvel comics, I was picking up on the heavy sexual undertones. Although I would argue this is a pretty decent narrative about male sexuality, in contrast to super hero comics where it’s more perverse and indulgent. But after waking up in a hospital bed without the ability to speak, or remember who I was, I think today I’m probably identifying with the wrong character.

But I can’t help it. I feel like I am an intruder into this world, I feel like I was born in that moment, and I inhabited a dead boys body. When I was in my mid twenties, my girlfriend at one time told me, “now you’ve been this person longer than you were the other person”, and we celebrated it like a kind of birthday: Now I am no longer a pretender, because I have squatting rights in this body. Now it’s more “mine” than “his”.

The changeling has to die, to integrate the Boy who grew up in Hell back into the human world. It’s a tall order. I don’t know the boy at all. I don’t know where to begin. I’m scared I’m going to lose my magical powers if I try.

I had recurring nightmares about this page, as a child. All my life, I have been able to remember those dreams. It’s not a recurring dream now, but the memory is vivid, and as a man with very few memories of my life before 13, it stands out. The dream is just this page, except for one small change. Horny Satan was throwing me down the abyss.