The Fox's Secret

As you might already know, I’m a graduate student in the Religious Studies Department at UCSB.  In many ways, I ended up here as a result of two dreams–the first one I described here.  The second dream is one I’m sure to blog about in the near future.  It seemed appropriate, therefore, to utilize those dreams in my academic work.  After all, it is my belief that our dreams can help us understand and illustrate in a narrative way the religious and philosophical truths that we are wrestling with while awake.

With that in mind, I have decided to post here on the site, in its entirety, an academic paper I wrote in which I used my dream about rebelling against God at the end of the world to explore the idea of “conscience” as it can be found in the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, as well as in the theology of Augustine.

What follows is not light reading.  But I think you’ll enjoy it, especially if any of those figures are of interest to you.  You’ll also learn a few more biographical details about The Fox Foot, including why he still fears putting cottage cheese and peaches into the same bowl.

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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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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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