The Fox's Secret

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve updated the site, in part because I’ve been unable to come up with a satisfying piece reflecting on the previous dream narrative in which the Fool returned for a fifth time in the past year.  So instead of continuing to spin my tires in the mud of that particular dream, I’ve decided to go ahead and post another.  This is a dream I had about a month ago, and I think it’s interesting on a number of levels.  It continues with the theme of religion and religious truth (and falsehood) and it also comes back to a central struggle of mine that increasingly revolves around the seeming futility of academic and or intellectual pursuits.  But now I’m interpreting before I’ve narrated the dream.  So without further ado, here is the dream in which I escape from a cult on a hill:

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After reading the dream from the previous post, you might ask yourself how I could start to write a story from it.  After all, it would be an odd story indeed that took place during the aftermath of a nuclear war that took place during the Clinton presidency.  What would I need to explain something like that?  Some weird time travel or alternate universe timeline?  That’s a bit far-fetched, even for me.  If you’re writing a poem, some bizarre juxtapositions might help you out.  But if you want to write a story, it’s best if you at least make it plausible.

So the first thing you need to do in writing a dream story is to discard anything that you just can’t find an explanation for at all.  The next thing to do is focus not so much on the events but on the overall feel of the dream–what emotions did it evoke.  In the dream that I had, the primary feelings I felt were about fearing death and doing whatever it took to survive.  That’s what I decided to make my story about.  And the most critical event that brought all of those feelings to a head was the point where I had to drown another human being to save my own life.  So that’s where I started.  And this was the beginning of a story I came up with:

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