The Fox's Secret

I really thought that I was done with dreams about The Fool after I finally confronted this character in the dream I described here.  I should have known better.  Despite an eight month hiatus (he must have been hibernating during the winter), the Trickster invaded yet another dream this past June.  It happened during my vacation.  I was staying at a Travelodge in Ft. Bragg, California in between two travel days.  The dream was so intense that I got out of bed at around 3 a.m., flipped on the lamp and wrote down every detail I could remember in my journal.  So, even though the dream is now two months old, the narrative of this dream is as fresh as they come.  (I have added some additional comments where my night time scribbling might have been hard to decipher otherwise in parentheses.)

Here is what I wrote down in the middle of the night when the Trickster returned to play yet another joke:

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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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