The Fox's Secret

In this post I want to share a very short and memorable part of a longer dream that has already faded from memory.  The narrative itself won’t take much time but I think that there is a great deal to unpack from this very brief moment.  Here is the narrative:

I am sitting in the second row of seats in a van.  I am next to the sliding door to the back part of the van and it is already open.  There are two men and at least one young adult/adolescent.  The two men are in the front two seats and one of them is my dad.  I am not sure who the others are.  Both my dad and I get out of the van and I realize we are in a parking lot on the North Side of Pittsburgh.  We are next to a parking garage on our right.  Looking to the left, I see Three Rivers Stadium.  At first this feels normal, but then it occurs to me that Three Rivers Stadium is “no longer there.”  Of course, it IS there, standing right in front of me.  I try to tell my dad that it’s not there and he laughs at the obviously absurd statement.  I say that I mean it shouldn’t be there, that it’s gone, that this has to be a memory or a dream.  He shakes his head in disbelief and tells me to prove it.  There is a breeze blowing.  ”See,” he says.  ”I feel that.  Do you?  Just like a normal breeze?”  And he is right.  Everything looks and feels perfectly real and normal.  There is no way to prove I am dreaming.  The pavement feels solid under my feet, the breeze I can feel on my face and I can turn in every direction and see what’s around me.  A perfectly seamless world without gaps.  I say, “It’ not a breeze, it’s the memory of a breeze.”  Then I look at the parking garage and the bland N1 sign designating what lot it is expands to more letters and symbols and spells out “A fool parks here.”  I remember the fool being important in my dreams and I hold up my hand to cut off something my dad is saying as I go to find the fool.  I go around the corner of the garage and I hear laughter, but it is a woman’s laughter and not what I had expected.  I then hear another woman laughing.  I look up at the higher levels of the garage and I know it’s coming from up there but I can’t see anything.  Then I wake up. Read more »

So far I’ve posted narratives and interpretations of my own dreams. I’ve tried to demonstrate some of the ways I’ve learned about myself through reflecting on my dreams and the ways I have used dreams as insights into my own life and as inspirations for creativity. It is my hope that others can then find fruitful ways to apply similar methods of interpretation and reflection to their own dreams in order to gain these similar kinds of benefits. But I’ve been writing far too much about me!

It’s far easier to see how this kind of interpretation can be used in general if you can see how it applies to more than one dreamer. Today I want to give special thanks to “taciturnu” over at Beliefnet for allowing me to share her unique dream narrative, the suggestions I made for interpreting it, and the conclusions she reached combining my interpretation with her own self-reflection. I think that it will serve as a good example of the kind of work I hope this blog will allow others to do in the future. Here is the dream as taciturnu described it: Read more »

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve updated the site, in part because I’ve been unable to come up with a satisfying piece reflecting on the previous dream narrative in which the Fool returned for a fifth time in the past year.  So instead of continuing to spin my tires in the mud of that particular dream, I’ve decided to go ahead and post another.  This is a dream I had about a month ago, and I think it’s interesting on a number of levels.  It continues with the theme of religion and religious truth (and falsehood) and it also comes back to a central struggle of mine that increasingly revolves around the seeming futility of academic and or intellectual pursuits.  But now I’m interpreting before I’ve narrated the dream.  So without further ado, here is the dream in which I escape from a cult on a hill:

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The Joker returns.  This marks the fifth dream where this archetypal figure has visited me while I sleep.  My recollections of this dream, and a later dream the same night that seemed to be a continuation, are below.  I apologize if it’s hard to follow.  I will try and fill in some detail with my interpretation which will come later: Read more »

The previous two entries both involved religious themes and the appearance of divine figures.  I’ve decided to stick with that theme tonight and post a dream that I had in the spring of 2002.   It’s a dream that had major ramifications for my waking as well as my sleeping life.  But I’ll say more about that in the next entry.  As usual, I prefer to post the dream narrative itself, leave it open to the reader’s interpretation, and only then post my own.

One night I got home at four in the morning, having been out drinking again. The first part of the night was filled with those bouts of drunken sleep from which you remember absolutely nothing. When I woke up the first time, it was probably around 9 in the morning. The bedroom window was open slightly, enough to see that it was a very overcast day. There was a gentle rain falling. I can still hear the sound of the rain today. When I went back to sleep, I had a dream that forever changed me, in what ways I’m still not sure. Read more »

How do you answer a question like that? Well it’s like…it’s like having the ground taken out from under you. So like floating? No, not really. Like…rushing toward something, knowing it will hurt. Hurt. What is hurt? What is rushing? What is toward?

What is it like to fall?

But the question came to me in a dream. From a baby. Not a real baby . A dream baby. A spirit baby. As the others (who had been watching the baby) drifted away to let the baby sleep, I remained behind, wondering if this baby was having a dream within my dream. Then it opened its eyes and asked, “What is it like to fall?” Read more »

So far I’ve blogged about many different kinds of dreams.  I’ve talked about dreams that had religious significance.  I’ve pondered the philosophical implications of the kinds of altered states of consciousness that are opened up to us in dreams.  I’ve even talked about dreams that had some pretty sinister characters and some scary situations in them.

But it might seem surprising that this blog has been on-line for almost two months now and I have yet to write an account of that most frightening kind of dream that we all dread having–an out and out nightmare.

In my opinion, a nightmare goes beyond the simple occurrence of a frightening situation or two in a dream.  Despite some scary situations, I wouldn’t classify any of the dreams I’ve discussed previously on this site as nightmares mostly because there was too much thinking going on.  There is something, in my opinion, about my nightmares that is much more primal.  Whether it’s being chased by a monster or unseen force, being attacked by strange people or animals, or whether it’s about falling from cliffs or being obliterated by nuclear weapons, a nightmare tends to produce, in me at least, a feeling of being hunted.

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Have you ever had a dream that changed your life?  Or perhaps a dream that crystallized a major change that was already happening in your life?

The first time I had a dream of this kind was during my senior year of high school.  I suppose that as many people approach graduation, there is a sense that the world they know is ending and a great deal of change is to come.  My senior year caused a great deal of reflection on everything from potential college choices to career interests to religious beliefs to the meaning of life.  It was also the first year I remembering having so many personally significant dreams–dreams that literally changed (or made me question) some of my most central beliefs and the ways in which I understood my life and the world around me.  In some ways, you could say my fascination with dreams as having a greater significance than mere fantasy began here, at this point of my life.

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I really thought that I was done with dreams about The Fool after I finally confronted this character in the dream I described here.  I should have known better.  Despite an eight month hiatus (he must have been hibernating during the winter), the Trickster invaded yet another dream this past June.  It happened during my vacation.  I was staying at a Travelodge in Ft. Bragg, California in between two travel days.  The dream was so intense that I got out of bed at around 3 a.m., flipped on the lamp and wrote down every detail I could remember in my journal.  So, even though the dream is now two months old, the narrative of this dream is as fresh as they come.  (I have added some additional comments where my night time scribbling might have been hard to decipher otherwise in parentheses.)

Here is what I wrote down in the middle of the night when the Trickster returned to play yet another joke:

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