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.

Okay, so it took a little longer to narrate than I originally thought it would.  I try to be thorough and put down in writing every detail I can remember so that the analysis can be that much more thorough.  So what are my thoughts regarding this dream?

First, it reminds me of the scientific aspects of dreaming that I have written about previously.  In one of my first dream posts, I discussed some of the ways in which brain functions are different during dreaming than they are in waking and how these differences can help explain the dream experience.  Two of the brain areas that have low levels of activation during dreaming are the DLPFC (dorso-lateral pre-frontal cortex) and the regions associated with short term memory.  I think this dream is further evidence for how that lower activation comes into play.

The DLPFC acts as a “fact-checker” in waking life.  After receiving an emotional signal from the amygdala that you could basically translate as “Hey!  Something’s wrong!  Figure out what it is!” the DLPFC recruits the efforts of other brain areas to figure it out.  In dreams, things that would seem very odd in waking life don’t seem “out of the ordinary” to us WHILE we are dreaming in part because of the lower activity in this brain area.  But in this dream, it did occur to me that it was odd that Three Rivers Stadium was there.  Why?

One easy explanation would simply be that no two sleep or dream states are alike and that sometimes the DLPFC is a bit more alert than during other dreams.  This is probably true in this dream.  But why was I able to figure out what was wrong and then realize I was dreaming?

Another area that is nearly shut down during dreaming is the area relating to short term memory–the kind of memory that roughly covers the last 30 minutes or so of our conscious experience.  I would need access to this kind of memory to recognize it as out of the ordinary to walk out my front door and end up in Alaska.  Since we don’t have much access to this kind of memory in dreams, bizarre transitions often don’t seem bizarre at all until after we wake up. (Think of all the recounted dreams you’ve heard from people that inexplicably go “and then I was in this place…and then I was in another…and then…and so son without a pause to ask what the heck is going on!)

But we DO have pretty good access to our long term memory.  So while it might not seem strange at all to exit my bedroom and end up in the White House, it could still seem strange to me to be standing outside Three Rivers Stadium.  The fact that this stadium is no longer in existence is available to me even in the dream state, even if I have no idea how I got in that van, who most of the other people in the van were, why we had parked there and so on.  Long term memory intact, I was able to realize that I was standing outside of a building that simply isn’t there anymore.

Moving beyond the science of brain areas and activation levels, though, there are really interesting philosophical questions that come up in this dream.  The most obvious regards the question of “what is real?” or “what can be proved?”  This was a “lucid” dream, a dream in which I realized I was dreaming, and yet there was no evidence I could offer to anyone else in the dream that this was the case.  In fact, the only evidence I had was the anachronistic presence of a building that shouldn’t be there anymore.  Prodded by my dad’s question, I investigated the reality around me for any other signs that it lacked realism.  It did not.  The door of the van, the parking lot, the parking garage, the breeze, even the warmth of the sun was indistinguishable from any ordinary experience of waking life.  I could touch and taste and smell and see and hear just as well as I can right now.

And yet I concluded that it was all a memory.  Or built from a memory.  Memory doesn’t work like a digital video recorder even in waking life.  Memory is all about connections between neurons.  Memory has gaps that are seamlessly filled in by the brain without any conscious effort.  Even our conscious, waking experience has this quality.  They eyes are not capable of taking in enough information each second to produce the seamless “picture” most of us see as we look out at the world.  The brain fills in the gaps.  And it filled in the gaps in the dream as well, without any external input at all.

If you have been watching any of the new series “Caprica” on the Sci-Fi Channel as I have, you might know that there is a virtual world that people can enter that seems just as real as this one even in the absence of physical objects of people.  The more dreams I have like this, dreams where I know that the world I see around me “isn’t real” and yet that world remains indistinguishable from the real, the more I am convinced it is only a matter of time before we create such simulations “for real”.  Perhaps “we” have done so already and we’re living in one right now.  Could you prove that we’re not?

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:

I had a horrible nightmare about a week and a half ago that still is plaguing me. It started that I am very pregnant. My baby was “magically” transferred to my best friend, K, who birthed her. (In my dream, I woke up not-pregnant, and K showed up with my baby.)

The baby looked just like K’s daughter, and I remembered thinking I wasn’t going to be able to get anyone to believe it were my and my husband’s child. She handed her to me, and left.

I never named the baby, but I swaddled her and put her on my nightstand. My husband didn’t come home that night, (???) and I went to bed.

The next morning, I turned to look at the clock and saw that I had slept for 12 hours. I rolled out of bed, got in the shower and prepared for the day completely forgetting about the baby. I left to go meet a friend of mine, M, who I haven’t seen for about a year. When we met, he was excited that my husband and I had a baby, and asked why I didn’t bring her. I panicked and lied to him saying “I thought she would be able to sleep better at home, but we should probably check on her because I don’t know if the babysitter showed up.”

M drove me back to my house, and I ran up to check on the baby. When I picked her up, rigor had set in, and she was very clearly dead. I turned distraught, screaming and crying.

All of this is very bizarre to me. Of course I would never treat a baby like that, I never sleep for 12 hours (!) and my husband is home every night. I have an overwhelming sense of guilt from dreaming something so horrendous, though. Any insight?

Dreams can be confusing, frightening and deeply troubling. We often say and do things that we would never do in real life. But with a little reflection, we are able to look beyond the literal actions of a dream to see what it might be saying about our state of mind. Here was my reply:

Dreams usually speak to us in symbols.  The literal content of the dream, while important, often represents something else.  I don’t think it’s the case that the same dream event always symbolizes the same thing, I think it’s different for each dreamer.  But that being said, babies or pregnancy can often symbolize the “birth” of something that has to “gestate” or that is “coming to be” inside us.  For some, it’s a symbol of a creative breakthrough or a new understanding of something.  It could be a hope or project or career goal.  It could be lots of things, and dreaming of being pregnant or having a child (or killing one) isn’t a reflection on your moral character in waking life.  Heck, I’m a man and I recently had a dream in which I was pregnant–surely that’s not about my fears of getting pregnant literally!  (At least I hope not.)

In the dream, you’re the one who’s first pregnant with something, but then your friend takes it from you and gives birth to it.  You now feel afraid that it’s not really yours, and then you neglect it until it dies.  I would think about this more metaphorically.  What are your feelings about this friend?  Does she often seem to steal your ideas or do you feel like she is better than you at performing certain tasks?  Do you feel that you are jealous of her talents or something like that?  All of this could be way off the mark, but it’s just  a starting place for thinking about it.

What ideas or projects or hopes might you be “pregnant” with right now?  Might your friend have realized one of these hopes while you were still wishing for it?  What is your relationship with this friend like?  (And remember, the brain associates linked things interchangeably in dreams–my best friend from when I was six might stand in for my best friend now, or my girlfriend from high school might stand in for my current girlfriend–it doesn’t mean I’m comparing them or wishing for an old one, it’s just the way dreams work!)

In trying to help taciturnu explore the possible meaning of her dream, I wanted to emphasize not only looking beyond the literal content to the symbolic, I also wanted to discourage her (and all of you!) from turning to some “dream dictionary” that would tell you a “dead baby” always symbolizes “x”. I can only offer helpful questions for reflection. I can’t possibly know what each element of her dream symbolizes or might mean for her. All good dream interpretation should have this conversational and reflective quality to it. Don’t look for a simple, easy, one-size-fits-all answer from someone else.

Taciturnu read my response and did some of her own self-reflection. She then came to these conclusions:

Thanks.

I was under the impression that there was something I needed to “nurture” that I wasn’t. It had never crossed my mind in the slightest that my friend played a part at all! (The dream itself was just so terrible- if you can imagine picking up a dead baby and feeling like it was your fault…)

My friend and I get along great. (She is my best friend for a reason, after all.) As it turns out, she and I were offered the same job. I was offered first, but without me accepting or turning it down, it was offered to her, and she took it (not realizing I hadn’t given an answer).

I didn’t think it affected me, but I am still looking for a job. Perhaps this is my subconscious trying to tell me otherwise.

Thanks for all your insight!! I will think this one over.

As you can see from her answer here, I did not tell her what her dream meant. I just offered some things to think about, and her reply suggests that she did find those suggestions to be insightful. The dream did seem to mirror a situation from her waking life, if inexactly. I was then very happy to see that she would continue to “think this one over.” There could be other meanings that neither one of us had yet considered, and a dream interpretation should never be seen as an open and shut case that can be closed once and for all.  If nothing else, though, she was able to ease the feelings of guilt at having done something terrible!

I would encourage anyone who has been intrigued by the content on this blog to offer his or her own dreams for interpretation. Just click the contact button at the top of the page and e-mail your narrative to the Foxfoot. Please know that I will not share your information publicly without your permission, but I hope that if our exchanges are fruitful, you’d be willing, as taciturnu has been, to share your experiences with others to aid them in finding meaning in their own nighttime visions.

Coming up this month, I plan to offer my interpretation of the “Escape” dream and how I think it relates to the “Ranting at Jesus” dream.  There will also be some new dreams to post and my reviews of a book about the political aspects of dreams and a book chapter that sees dreams as crucial adaptations for human problem-solving.

In the beginning of the dream I’m a passenger in a car, and I’m being driven up a winding road to the top of a hill.  The hill seems to be a kind of campus or compound, and I’m aware as the dream begins that it’s home to some kind of religious group that many would label a “cult.”  Being a good student of religion myself, I generally shy away from using the “c-word” because of its derogatory implications, and in this dream in particular, I seem intent on describing this group with the compound on a hill as a “religious movement” that I’m interested in.  The weird thing is that I’m not sure if I’m there to study the group or perhaps to even join the group.  Something about it has drawn me there, I even have high hopes for what it might offer in the way of a truly spiritual life.  After all, many of the world’s great religions began as “cults” that were scorned and mocked by most of the world.

But when I actually arrive and spend some time there, I realize that the cult is not what I had hoped for.  Many of the followers are genuinely nice people that treat me well.  But I quickly come to realize that the cult leader is not only a fraud, he’s downright evil.  He’s manipulated and taken advantage of his followers.  He’s in this whole thing for the power alone.  And he can brook no threat to his unquestioned authority.

The leader seems to realize that I’m a threat to him–if for no other reason than I’m one of the few people who can see through his outward appearances of holiness.  He fears that I will expose him or try to turn his followers away from or against him.  So he begins to plot to keep me silent.  He doesn’t want to use violence if he doesn’t have to, so he attempts a kind of seduction first.  He assigns one of the middle-aged women in the cult to take me away in private to continue my “preparation” and “initiation.”  I get the sense that she, too, has some inkling of the cult leader’s evil designs, but she thinks of them as a necessary evil.  She sees herself as doing the best she can to keep the community running smoothly despite the maniacal leader by focusing on pragmatic concerns.  In my case, that means helping to “integrate” me into the community by helping me form social bonds  won’t want to break.

That’s a polite way of saying she then brings in a beautiful young woman to be “mine” if I’ll just play nice and belong to the cult.  In this role she’s a bit like a brothel madame as much as she is a marital matchmaker.  She smiles at me and leaves me alone with this very beautiful young woman who sits on a bed with me in this private room that the older woman had brought me to.

This young woman, though, seemingly wants to get away from the cult herself.  She has smuggled in two hand guns and hands me one of them.  “Let’s get away,” she says.  I’m actually torn.  She is very enticing and I want very much to have her for myself, and I get the feeling that she wouldn’t want to be with me in the outside world, where the cult wouldn’t force her to be with me so that I would stay.  I ask her if we can “make out” first and she agrees.  We kiss for a bit and then we stop and head out into the main common area where the cult leader and most of the other cult members are milling around.

I pull out my gun, as we had planned, and tell everyone to stay back because we’re leaving now.  But the young woman bails on me.  She gets a frightened look on her face and pretends that she had no idea I was planning on doing this.  She throws her own gun on the ground as if she didn’t know how she’d gotten ahold of it.  I’m hurt by her betrayal, but I pick up her gun and now aim both of them at the cult members, telling them to get back.

I move toward the door bu the cult leader is now in my way.  He seems intent on making me shoot him to get by.  I don’t want to kill him.  I don’t want to become him, getting his way through violence and force.  But at the same time I hate him and this group for tricking me and betraying me.  I flip the gun around in my hand and hit him in the head with the butt end of it.  He falls to the ground and I continue to hit him again and again in the head.  I’m not sure if I want to kill him or not, and I’m not sure if I HAVE killed him or not.   But I don’t have time to think too much about that.

The other cult members, incensed by my attack on their leader, are now coming after me.  I run out the door and see that the cult’s own security officers are driving toward me in a car, guns drawn.  I see a pick-up truck passing by and I quickly point my two guns at the driver to get her to stop.  I open the passenger side door and get in.  I see that she is pregnant and scared.  “It’s okay!” I tell her, “I don’t want to hurt you but we have to get away from here!”  I then look down and see that I am pregnant, too.  (Weird, right?) “See,” I tell her, “I know what it’s like, we’re on the same side here, now drive!”

She does, though whether it’s because I’ve convinced her or because the security guards are now shooting at her vehicle and approaching fast, I’m not sure.  A high speed car chase ensues, and it lasts for quite awhile until she says that she has an idea and veers off of the road and into the woods.  She tells me that she knows how we can get away and she stops the truck amid some trees.  I then follow her as we sprint toward the edge of the woods.  Just beyond them is a clearing with a large mansion.  The grounds of the mansion, including an immaculately green lawn, seem like a kind of ethereal sanctuary that will protect us if we can just reach it.

We get to the mansion and we encounter two very elegantly dressed men.  They’re in uniforms of some kind, and have cigars and tea cups and an air of being from the 19th century. They’re some kind of gentlemanly aristocrats.  I tell them that it’s essential that they protect us from the people who are chasing us, that the people coming after us are cult members and that we just want to be safe.  The two aristocrats nod, taking it all in but make no promises.

It’s then that our pursuers arrive, weapons drawn.  They demand that the aristocrats turn me and the woman I hijacked over to them.  The cult members tell the aristocrats that we are armed and very dangerous and hostile and unstable.  They basically say that we are criminals and terrorists and need to be turned in.

The aristocrats take that in as well, and I protest that the cult leaders are totally wrong.  “We’re innocent!” I say.  “We’re the good guys here!  You can’t believe them, they’re evil!”

But the two aristocrats just puff on their pipes and nod and seem to ponder all of this.  They tell us all that they will think on it and dialog and debate who might happen to be in the right in this situation but that it is all very complicated and that no clear answer presents itself.  I’m left feeling frustrated and angry and helpless as they continue right on debating and pondering in this detached, arrogant manner all the way until the dream ends and I wake up.

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:

Pulling a car out of a parking garage. Coming down the street to find a wrecked purple car blocking the way down a side street. Joker is sitting there. It’s a trap and I can’t get around the purple car and I have to stop my car. I get out of my car, though, and don’t run or do anything like that. He seems taken aback by my directness. “What do you want?” I ask him. He wants the truth. I say “Okay, you can have it. Ask me anything you want. I’ll give you the straight honest truth.” He asks, “Who is Batman?” For some reason I wonder if I’m Batman, that I’ll be giving up “my” secret if I tell him. But then I just shrug and say “Bruce Wayne is Batman.” He looks disappointed again. I tell him all the obvious signs. How else can he afford those gadgets? And then I even tell him, don’t worry, maybe you’re right and Batman’s “real” identity is still that of an evil asshole. After all, I’m sure Wayne Enterprises makes most of its money off the backs of near slave labor in Asia. You can still get the last laugh, I tell him. Then I get in the car and drive away.

The second dream:

Well, I come to the same road/alley/etc. and now there are all kinds of things left behind there–evidence that the Joker was there and laid more of a trap than I thought. There’s like a puzzle to go through to get across this section of road which is now a room. Boards in the floor, some hollow. Climbing up a jungle gym kind of thing made of metal, zip-lining over to a top of a book case. There are all kinds of records of things. Stuff from my grade school days, from my high school and college days. He’s dug them up from somewhere and has them laying in different places around the room. A Commissioner Gordon like figure asks me “What’s he up to?” I shrug and say I don’t know, most of the stuff is just pointless like journals I had to keep for a class or something. I wake up before I can investigate more.

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.


I was standing outside of what was a kind of large auditorium, or maybe an arena. Outside, everyone was dressed in their finest clothing getting ready to go in. Businessmen in their fanciest suits, military officers in full dress uniform, bishops in cardinals with all the trappings, politicians decked out in suits with the mandatory patriotic lapel pin.


As they were all filing into the auditorium, I began to explore the rest of the building, which was almost like a very large mall. In one room, there were hundreds of men and women trudging away on treadmills, stairsteppers, exercise bikes and the like, all staring up at a series of televisions in front of them with images of glamorous, beautiful people. All working so hard at walking and running and biking and going nowhere. Next I went to what was probably the kitchen area of a restaurant. As I walked in, two people picked up large cutting knives and began threatening each other with them. Intuitively, I knew one was a Palestinian and the other an Israeli. People began to panic, but I stepped in between them. I told them to put the knives down. In turn, they each told me that they would put their knife down when the other put his down. I yelled out “just put the damn knives down!” but no one would listen.There were many more rooms like this, all with some tragic, beautiful, heart-wrenching aspect of humanity.


And then I was back at the auditorium, and now everyone was gathered inside. Up on the stage, politicians and clergy and CEOs, dressed up in their finest, were giving speeches on how to solve all those problems. People approvingly applauded. But almost like I’d been tapped on the shoulder, I felt compelled to turn and walk to the back corner of the auditorium, away from the stage.


There was a whole separate room in the back which no one else had seemed to notice. And I felt something telling me the real answers were in there. The room was round, almost like the inside of an old castle tower. The walls were covered with bookcases that went upward as far up as I could see. And there was a man standing there in the room. I can’t really describe him, in fact, his appearance would often change, but he reminded me a little of Gandalf the Grey in the Lord of the Rings movie. Intuitively again, I realized that, at least in the context of the dream, this was God.I tried to formulate a question, ask him something. But I couldn’t find the words. Somehow, he understood my question anyway. He gave me an almost playful smile, then started waving his arms around like some kind of wizard or magician. By this point, I had already realized I was dreaming, but now a great wind came into the room, and some of the books began fluttering from shelf to shelf.

I didn’t say anything, but being God he must have heard me thinking “is all this really necessary? the cheap magic tricks? i come for divine wisdom and you’re doing this?” The man gave me a look that said, “this is how i wanna do it, ok? just enjoy the ride.”Suddenly, I was being lifted up. I was floating up past shelf after shelf of books. Soon I was hovering there in front of a shelf. I reached out to touch the shelf in front of me. I knew I was dreaming–but I could still touch the shelf. I felt it under my fingertips. I picked up a book. I could FEEL it in my hands. I could see its cover and words. I began to think, what is real? 


I know I’m really in my bed, asleep and dreaming. But I can see and touch and read this book in my hands. Where am I? What does it all mean? God brought me to a library–does he want me to be a scholar, a teacher? I looked back at the old man. Again without speaking, I looked back at him and begged to know “what does it all mean?” The old man didn’t speak and gave me a look that said, “you don’t expect God to answer with words, do you?” Then he winked.

And I was in a different place. A room of some kind. Nothing in it. It was less a room, actually, than it was just a space of some kind that existed. And there was a girl. She had shoulder length brown hair. She was wearing the kind of dress you’d wear to a formal dance. It was a kind of golden/brown color and satiny. She wasn’t “hot,” but she was very beautiful. I had no idea who she was. She could have been a girl I loved in any and every way. She could have been a girlfriend, a sister (though I’m an only child), a daughter, a best friend. And she was crying. The tears had run through her make-up. I didn’t know why she was crying exactly. But here she was, all dressed up, obviously expecting some grand evening, and obviously it had not been so grand. Something had broken her heart. Neither of us said a word. I stepped toward her, took her in my arms, and held her. I just held her as she sobbed into my shoulder, clinging to me for support. I stroked her hair, held her tight, and didn’t say a word.


When I woke up, I could still smell her perfume. And I could hear the softly falling rain.

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.”

At first, I’m willing to accept this judgment but then I start making all the excuses I can think of.  The fact that Jesus is gone at this point, though, seems to me to represent the fact that I’m not really ranting at HIM when I’m saying these things.  I don’t believe Jesus taught anything about a virgin birth or any other set of strict dogmas that would get in the way of living the spiritual life–a huge amount of what he said was aimed at tearing down the legalism of the Pharisees.  And it’s not Jesus who abused children or covered it up or who adopted policies and rules in response that rarely protect children and more often just sow more mistrust, fear and suffering.  I believe within myself that too often the major concern with policies that react to these big events are about reducing “liability” and have little or nothing to do with correcting major problems–it’s only to correct getting blamed next time.  But that’s the institutional church and the other institutions that surround me every day that are at fault there–not Jesus.

I think that the dream shows a struggle withing myself that takes place because there is a part of me that thinks if I could only get the institutional church out of the way I would want to be a Catholic priest.  “If only” priests were allowed to marry and occasionally disagree with the official teaching and have the ability to nudge the church this or that way on this or that issue, THEN I would want to be a priest.  The truth is that I end up feeling that way about most organizations.  “If only” the Democratic party lived up to its ideals more or “if only” the academic world applied itself to real life now and then and didn’t require you to cite the whole library every time you write something and “if only” law wasn’t so full of legalism and “if only” this and that and every other thing, THEN I would get off my butt and really devote myself to something.

But as it is, everything seems tainted.  Everywhere I turn, I feel like something is holding me back.  There is a little girl sitting there in need of help (be she me or anyone else) and I don’t help because I’m afraid of how it will look or of getting sued or going to jail or because I have this idea that “the world” has made it impossible for me to help her.  But I think the dream contains some wisdom on a way forward.  In the dream I’m able to overcome those inhibitions and just get down on the ground and help her.  And then, if the world wants to punish me for it…so be it.

But in waking life, I still find myself mostly inhibited.  I tend to be an “all or nothing” kind of person.  If I really “believe” in the Catholic church, then I want to be a priest, I don’t want to just show up on Sundays.  If I really “believe” in a political candidate, I want to volunteer as much time as I can to getting that person elected.  But there always seems to be that dogma or seedy underside or selfish interests or whatever else that “taints” whatever it is and I end up refusing to get involved AT ALL.

Anyone else have thoughts on that?

This was a very bizarre dream on the surface, but I have my own thoughts on the “meaning” of it.  I just thought I would post it here because the content was explicitly about religion and this is beliefnet and all.  So here’s what happened:

I’m in a room of some kind and there are other people around.  I see Jesus walk into the room.  He looks just like he would on a “sacred heart of Jesus” painting, with the big heart right on the outside of these big flowing robes and it’s even got the little flame coming out of it and everything.  So he walks in and my initial feeling is “Oh crap…Jesus is here.  I am not ready to see Jesus.”  I’m not a “Left Behind” kind of guy, so I’m not worried that the rapture is here and I’m not saved.  Well, not exactly anyway.  It’s more like the feeling you had when you were a kid and you told your mom you’d clean your room while she was at work and then you see her car pull up in the driveway and you realize you haven’t cleaned your room.  That sort of thing.  I feel like I haven’t lived up to my own religious/spiritual expectations.  But I try and play if off.  I put on a big smile and say “Hey, Jesus!” and extend my hand to shake his.

But he’s not buying it.  He doesn’t take my hand.  Instead, he reaches out and grabs the back of my neck with a big, powerful hand.  He doesn’t push me all the way down to my knees but does make me bend over a bit, and then he shoves me aside as he walks up the stairs.

At first, I think something like, “Well I guess I deserved that…” but then I start going off on this adolescent-like rant.  “What’s your problem Jesus?  I thought you were all-loving?”  And as I keep saying things like that I’m now outside, up on a raised platform of sorts under a big canopy.  It’s like a picnic shelter or something, and I realize that my “family” is there.  (No recognizable people, but I feel like I know they are my family.)  But I keep on ranting, basically talking smack to Jesus, who I assume can hear me even if he’s no longer there.

I say things like “Well I’m not the one who couldn’t handle the fact his mom had sex so told everyone she was a virgin!” and “Sure, James was just your half-brother from one of Joseph’s earlier marriages!” and so on.  My “family” gets sick of my ranting and tells me to shut up (mostly with looks) and so I do.  Then I see there’s a 10-year old girl who’s down on the ground and can’t get up on the platform with the table.  So I hop down to pick her up, only to think that everyone will assume I’m trying to molest her like a Catholic priest would.  (not that I think in waking life that’s what Catholic priests do with their time)  I feel disgusted and then I even have the feeling like maybe I’m supposed to want to molest her, since that’s what everyone expects, and then I just shake my head at the thought, think that it’s stupid and pick her up and take her up to the table.  I decide I don’t car what anyone thinks it looks like, I’m actually doing the right thing and we all sit down to eat.
Weird, huh?

What is it like to fall?

Life is a falling. We fall into it. We do not bring about our own being. We are created by the acts of others, out of other substances, out of the matter of dead plants and animals that have become our living mothers and fathers. Matter made of atoms formed by the death of stars. We are star dust.

We fall into a world. A world that is already here. Laws and institutions. A body structure not of our own, a very form that is unfamiliar to us as we begin having to figure out how to move this skin we’re in. And then it keeps changing anyway. All of the cells that made up your physical body ten years ago are dead. There is literally no-thing left of what you call you ten years ago.

To be born is to be given life, but it is also to be given death. A non-living thing can’t die. I’ve known this since I was five years old. That story I already blogged.

We are dust, we are star dust, we are fallen and falling. And the inevitable end awaits us at the end of our fall through space and time.

But the dream says to me what Soren Kierkegaard said…or I think is what he was trying to say, when he said that in the end life asks you only one question–have you lived in despair–or not?

The baby in the dream, the baby that is me, that is you, that is all human beings who fall into this living death. And the baby chooses life. Chooses to fall. And in the end, he says thank you. And each of us must find the hope and faith within ourselves to do the same. To see the suffering, the pain, the despair, the ouches and the heartbreaks and the inevitable crumbling of even our own bodies it took us so long to get comfortable in. It will all fall away. Ashes to ashes, we all fall down.

Is it worth it? Is it worth that falling apart, that falling away, that falling down to feel the wind against your face, the touch of another, the revelations of the world for the few brief frames our eyes glimpse and the few brief notes we hear between being dropped into this existence and passing out of it once again?

Is it worth it?

Can any of us, at the end, bloodied and broken on the floor, still smile and with faith say yes?

For now, I can only hope so.

Shouldn’t we look at our life from both ends? Shouldn’t we marvel that we get to experience anything at all? Imagine asking yourself, if you had the power of speech, newly born and fallen into the world, wouldn’t you like to EXPERIENCE? Wouldn’t you like to EXIST? Wouldn’t you be curious? Wouldn’t you want to KNOW? Yes, joy and laughter and love. But wouldn’t you want to know the rest? Sorrow and failure and heartbreak and despair? Wouldn’t you be curious? Wouldn’t you insist that your creator give you the chance? The opportunity? Wouldn’t you insist on a universe or a force or a God or random chance that didn’t always catch you? That let you fall? So that you could know the most exquisite existing of all–that of the bittersweet. The mixing of memory and desire, joy and its loss.

I’m that curious. I would have asked for this. All of this. So thank you to whatever or whoever dropped me into this existence, falling and fallen.

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?”

I opened my mouth try to answer, but realized that I could not. One can only describe experience with reference to other experience. One can only explain the meaning of words with other words. And even though this child somehow had access to words, the emptiness of words not grounded in experience was more apparent than ever. Any words that I used would just refer to more experiences this new being had not yet had.

“I can’t describe it,” I told him finally. But his curiosity wasn’t satisfied.

“Then show me.”

Show him? How can you show a baby what it is like to fall? I could drop him, I suppose, but as I looked over at the others huddled in the other corner of the room, casting occasional glances in our direction, the thought of legal action being taken against me was the least of my concerns. Vigilante justice would be more likely.

“I can’t do that,” I told him. “I’d have to drop you. You might get hurt. Seriously hurt. You’re young and fragile. You might die. They’d be very mad at me.”

He seemed to consider these things, then replied with the determination, “I want to know what it is like to fall. Show me.” It wasn’t a question. It was a demand.

“But you’ll get hurt,” I said. “Pain. Crying.” How do you explain this to this brand new being? “Bad feelings. Bad. Ouch.”

But the dream baby looked at me blankly. Those words had no meaning. “Then I will be hurt, if that is what happens when you fall. Let me fall.”

I nervously glanced over at the distracted others, took the baby up in my hands, perhaps a mere inch or two off of the surface on which he lay, and dropped him. He was rather unaffected and his look might even be described as one of disappointment.

“Hurt isn’t so bad,” he told me. “You made it sound bad.”

“Well it is. I didn’t really drop you,” I told him. I didn’t want my honesty impugned. “You didn’t fall very far. So it didn’t hurt very much.”

“So there are different kinds of falling?” he said. “Are you saying I could feel more than I did?”

“Well yes,” I said. “But I don’t think you want to. Or…you wouldn’t want to, if you knew what it meant. You could even die,” I emphasized again, looking at this little warped head from the skull that was not yet fully formed. The brain has too much growing to do for the human skull to be solid at birth.

“I want to fall….for real,” he told me.

I started to speak but fell silent. Shouldn’t I protect him? Let the benefit of my own experience guide him? Or at least, in that favorite phrase of “grown ups” to kids everywhere, “wait until he’s older.” “You don’t want to,” I told him. “You think you want to, but you don’t. Just trust me. You’re too young. You are too fragile. You might die.”

“I will die.” He said it with an unafraid certainty that came from the unshakable truth of what he was saying.

I couldn’t refute that. Yes. You will die. And yet he was unafraid of that reality. Maybe it was because he had just been born. He hadn’t existed until a few moments ago. He had no accumulated memory to lose. What would it matter to not exist again? How can one fear an experience one never had? An experience one never CAN have?

“Well yes, you’ll die. But not right now. You don’t want to now. Or for a very long time.”

“Time?”

Oh, Jesus. What was this, a Heidegger seminar? “I don’t think I can explain that either.”

The baby actually huffed at me. “Then let me fall.”

Another nervous glance to the others. Then I picked him up. “Okay, here goes.” I tossed him up in the air a foot or so and then caught him in my hands. In that brief moment from my hands and back to my hands, he bore an expression of unbridled joy.

He laughed, but then looked at me like a stern school teacher. “That was fun. But it wasn’t falling. I want to know what it is like to fall.”

“Once you know, you may regret it.” The baby was nonplussed, despite not knowing what nonplussed meant. Or, I suppose he knew what nonplussed meant, he just didn’t know to call it being nonplussed.

“What is it like to fall?” he asked one final time.

I wrestled with my doubts, my uncertainties. I would feel guilty showing him. I would feel guilty withholding it from him. But if he wanted to fall, who was I to stop him? Even if, paradoxically, I was the only one who could let him.

“I’ll show you,” I said.

I picked him up, and this time took him away from the surface on which he was laying, where the floor was much further down.

“This is what it is to fall.”

I said, and I tossed him high up over my head. Time seemed to slow down as the first thing I noticed was the gaze of the others, looking over in horror, already rushing toward me to stop my insanity. I watched the baby’s face as it seemed to be taking everything in. The rush of air, the loss of support, the freedom of movement. The same look of joy as before, only now it intensified and brightened as my arms did not interrupt the process. Shrieks of horror from across the room as they realized I was not going to catch him, but let him fall all the way to the ground. A look of concern on the baby’s face as it fell through space and time and had a sudden doubt, wondering if I was right, if what was coming would be something bad. Something that would teach him also the meaning of regret. My heart went out to him as I knew what was coming, braced myself for the possibility he would turn against me at the moment of contact, blame me for the pain he was about to experience, as the others already were.

And as he hit the ground there came the inevitable grimace, the contorted face, the shrieking cry as the dream baby experienced pain and fear and hurt for the very first time. The others were still charging toward me to scoop him up and put him back in the care of the doctors who could extend his once again safe life.

But it was too late. The wounds were fatal. And the dream baby who had just become conscious a short time before began to slip out of consciousness forever. The crowd was close in, ready to wreak their vengeance upon me. But in its last waking moment, the dream baby looked up, and he smiled at me.

“Thank you. I know what it is to fall.”