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 »

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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