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 »

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: Read more »

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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When you start dreaming about the same person, place or event over and over again, it really starts to get your attention.  In less than a month, I encountered a figure in my dreams that I felt was the same character in each instance, despite the fact that it appeared in slightly altered ways each time.  I have already described the first two dreams in which I encountered the archetypal figure of The Fool, the Trickster or the Joker here and here.

This dream marked a real turning point.  In the first two dreams in which I encountered this trickster figure, I ended up afraid, panicked and wanted desperately to escape.  In this third dream, however, I finally summoned the courage to confront the danger, run toward the trickster and confront him directly.  While this could represent some kind of psychological breakthrough, I would find that the trickster would ultimately remain ever so frustratingly out of reach as something I could confront but could not yet fully comprehend.  I will write more on the possible meaning of the dream later, but for now I want to concentrate on describing the dream as it happened:

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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 dream I encountered the same Trickster figure from “The Bottom Falls Out” but he took a very different form.  This is the second dream as it happened:

I’m wearing basketball warm-ups. I’m in the locker room, wearing purple and gold basketball warm-ups. And I realize that I am a bench player for the Los Angeles Lakers. In waking life, this would be odd on multiple levels. But in the dream it makes perfect sense. The coach gave me a chance and I showed what I could do. I knew that he had taken a chance on me, but when I got the chance to play I had not disappointed so far. Never mind the fact that I was a bench player even when I used to play the game back in the 9th grade. Never mind the fact that the last team I would ever want to play for would be the Los Angeles Lakers. I was proud to don the purple and gold.

It’s now time to take the court and as I stand in the tunnel leading out to the arena with the rest of the team we can hear the pounding music and the cheering crowd ready to welcome us. The announcer comes over the loudspeaker and shouts out each of our names and hometowns and positions one at a time as we jog out of the concrete tunnel and into an artificial one made with cheerleader pom-poms as the fans scream at the top of their lungs amid a laser light show.

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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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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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