Dream 4/21/12

Had a dream just before waking up that Carmie and I were trying to get out of a house in which we didn’t belong. We were in the basement inside the house and Cedar was with us. Looking out the back window, we could see the backyard ranged away from the home and merged with the yards of the surrounding homes. I saw that one neighbor was outside relaxing in a lawn chair. We needed to find a way to get off the property as soon as possible and undetected. There were also two dogs tied to a stake in the grass, who I knew would sound off as soon as we emerged, especially with Cedar, who gets the attention of every dog everywhere. We slid open the door and began to walk with Cedar on a leash towards the dogs. Of course, they began to bark, but we managed to walk past the dogs with out any engagement. I think I began waking up at this point, but I do remember the idea flashing at me that this was not an entirely different situation from the one we are now in with the [omitted].

So there it is, another dream that reveals itself only in the telling. So much of what I think I think is unwritten and therefore never revealed. Faulkner supposedly said “I don’t know what I think until I write it.” This is certainly the case with me. I try to impress on my students the need to write as an expression of thought, as thinking itself. I tell them writing is thinking. We are often imprisoned by our own ideas and opinions when we do not give them the light of day. By letting our creatures of the mind out onto the paper, or into another medium, such as painting or music, we find not only the relief of expression but we gain something else in this release; we gain the upper hand on the vague negarities that threaten to void our imagination, to veto our creativity, to null our sense of individual being. So here I am, once again struggling to place my ideas into some form of expression, something that makes sense and is relevant to the world I see. 

The world I see. It is at its core a tragic world. Comic, but tragic. Violence and deceit and grief lurk in every shadow. The world is heating up with this tragedy, even though we know that the rate of violence is dramatically low when looking at the history of mankind. What we see is that violence is of course much increased due to the available sources and modes of delivery. What we see are such acts of amorality, lechery and greed that we stop in our tracks to gawk, like traffic nearing an accident scene. We can’t help ourselves. The spectacle is the story of ourselves. There but for the grace go I, we say, clutching what’s ours and hurrying away into our respective mirages.

It’s only when disaster strikes our lives personally that we begin to grasp our vulnerability. A father dying slow, a brother gone missing, the creep of middle age toward the realization that at the world’s core, there is tragedy, there is death, and there is the undeniable happiness that arises from cheating it.