The Fox's Secret

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:

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.