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 »

After a good bit of reflection, I think I have a pretty good handle on what I can take away from the dream I described in the previous entry.

I do feel disappointed in myself spiritually.  I have many values that I do not live up to and feel that I am often wasting away a great deal of potential.  In some ways, the rejection itself is not done in anger, but in a “tough love” sort of way.  It’s my spiritual self saying “No, it’s not okay that you’re not living up to these ideals–or even trying hard to live up to them.  Falling short is one thing, but you’re not even trying.” Read more »

So in my previous entry I described a dream. Since there is a danger that some people (who will remain anonymous) might take it too literally, I’ve decided to offer up my own beginning (or continuation) of an interpretation that will never really end. The reason I left it un-interpreted to begin with was so that any readers out there in the world could interpret it themselves, maybe even suggest interpretations (non-literal ones) that I hadn’t thought of. In fact, if you haven’t read the previous entry, do that now, then read the rest of this one.

What is it like to fall?

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In my previous entry, I described a dream in which I decided to take issue with an omnipotent being over the fate of my friend, Debbie.  Toward the end of the dream, I was about to face the presumably very painful consequences of that rebellious choice.  And yet, when I woke, even knowing that the rebels I had led into battle had been defeated, I still felt a great deal of pride over the choice I made.  And I would later realize that the dream itself signaled some big changes in my life and in the way I saw the world.

Does it sound strange to feel proud of oneself for actions taken in a dream?  Maybe it does.  But while I was dreaming, I did not know it was a dream.  I thought the world really had ended, and events really were playing out as described by the more fundamentalist interpreters of the Book of Revelation.  I knew that it was hopeless to rebel against an omnipotent being and that there was absolutely nothing in it for me if I chose not to accept the fact that my friend was going to be sent to hell.  But I stood up for her–and for my ideals–anyway.

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I spent a lot of time thinking on the images, sounds, emotions and events of the Fool’s fourth entry into my dreams in less than year.  I think that in many ways it sums up the most fundamental inner conflict of my life.  At heart, I have been and maybe I still am an idealist.  A dreamer.  A believer.  I still find great wisdom in the secret that the fictional Little Prince learns from his friend, the fox: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.  What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

On the other hand, faith has never come easy for me.  I’m also a seeker.  I question everything and I’m curious to no end.  And in many cases, my searching has not led me to deeper faith, but to ever increasing doubt.  I believed in Santa longer than anyone in my class at school, even into the 5th grade.  Why?  Because I believed, very firmly, that my parents would never lie to me about something so important.  From the time I found out they had, I rarely trusted what I was told by anyone again.  I felt like a fool for having believed for so long.  I was embarrassed and ashamed and realized why so many people had made fun of me for being so naive.  There’s a part of me that never wants to be taken for that kind of fool again.

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Who are you?

Who am I?

I finally got ahold of that trickster figure when he showed up in my dreams for the third time in a month’s time.  I wanted to know who he was.  I wanted to know what he was doing in my dreams.  And I thought the best way to find out would be to ask him and demand an answer.  But my question only caused him to laugh hysterically.  “I’m you,” he said to me, and then changed form two more times.  Is he me in every form?  Weird Al the hospice doctor, The Joker as circus trapeze act, a clown with oversized shoes running from a tidal wave, my college friend Darius, a hot girl in revealing clothing?  Can these all be me?

How can they not be?  Each dream took place inside my head.  Each character you encounter in a dream is generated by your own mind.  How can they not be you?  And yet…they certainly don’t feel like they’re you.  Or me.  Or…this is getting confusing.  But maybe it should be confusing.  After all, have you ever stopped to ask yourself why it is you can ask a character in a dream something, not know how they are going to answer, and then listen to their answer?  If that character is also you, how can it be possible that you can ask a question to which you do not have an answer, and then the dream character replies with an answer that you did not know until he spoke it?

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I was never very good at basketball (I collected more fouls than points) and I can’t stand the Los Angeles Lakers, so I would not have guessed that I ever would have dreamed up a scenario in which I was playing professional basketball for that very team.  While Sigmund Freud used to believe that all dreams were “wish-fulfillment”, I can definitively say that this particular dream was not.

What I do see in this dream, however, is a lived out dream experience of two of the charges that are often leveled at academics and scholars: 1) that their research is “reductionistic” and 2) that their research is “deconstructionist”.  It should be noted, before continuing, that some researchers would wear these labels with pride.  However, it seems to be the case that both of these terms have come to have a negative connotation, and I suspect that the negative connotation has the same underlying cause in both cases.  When someone uses these terms in a negative way, what he is really trying to say is that “x” method of study or analysis breaks something down to the point where it loses all human meaning and value. The dream vividly illustrates what is often meant by both charges.

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In this post I’ll be discussing ways that I might analyze and interpret the dream described here.  In short, I began the dream as a WWII-era soldier in the wrong place, trying to blend in with the German army.  Then I was in a terminal-care facility or hospice, telling all the patients that things would “be okay.”  Then one of the other workers, who looked like Weird Al Yankovic, caught on to the fact I was becoming afraid that things weren’t okay and decided to scare the hell out of me.  The lights go out, everything’s pitch black, the bottom drops out and I fell into a void of swirling lights and heat and panicked until I woke up.  That should serve as a good refresher for those who’ve read it already while remaining confusing enough to those who have not read it that they will click on the link above and read it for a first time now!

First off, a good question to ask is why I might try and find some meaning in any of this at all.  After all, it is a rather bizarre series of events that don’t form a terribly coherent plot.  Weird Al is transformed into a demonic figure.  I spend part of the dream wondering why everyone speaks Russian and German in English.  There’s a creepy hospital where my job is to tell dying old people it’s all okay.  Then the falling…shouldn’t I just be glad I woke up and forget all about it!?

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Now that I’ve narrated a specific dream that I have had, I want to break it down a bit and see some of the many things that the dream might have to tell us.  If you haven’t read the story of the dream, that’s probably okay because I’ll be quoting the relevant excerpts, but it would definitely help to put it all in context by reading it here.

Before I get into finding a particular meaning or set of meanings to the dream, I first want to use this post to point out a couple of features that are relevant to what the science of dreaming has taught us in recent years.  My next entry will look at possible symbolic interpretations.  Let’s take a look at the beginning of the dream and see how it reflects the state of the brain during REM sleep:

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