The Fox's Secret

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 »

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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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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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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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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In what follows I describe one of several dreams in which I encounter what feels like the same character even if he appears differently in all of them.  To date there have been five such dreams, but I would not be surprised if dreams involving this figure crop up again in the future.

Who is this figure?  Well, his character evolves a bit over the many dreams but I might describe him, in short, as The Fool, The Trickster or The Joker.  He’s not a light-hearted comedian or naive adventurer, however.  He has a decidedly sinister aspect to him (it’s alwayas been a “him” so far) and despite his foolish appearance always seems to be one step ahead of me with yet another card up his sleeve.  This dream marked his first appearance and it occurred early last fall–just a little less than a year ago.  The dream happened as follows:

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