In Dreams

There is glory in internet messiness. The ‘web’ is sprawling, random, deep, diverse, beautiful and unsettling all at once. One moment I am reading someone’s memories of seeing The Who at Southfield High School in Detroit in the late 1960s. Another moment I read about Leibnitz and Spinoza and their meeting in 1676 in The Hague. Sometimes poetry drops into my lap and sometimes literary tidbits float by. 

This continuous serendipitous discovery of new information is like stumbling upon hidden treasures in a labyrinth. Each unexpected find makes me curious about what will come next. The internet can be an endless adventure.

I offer this caveat. Consider carefully the cute link name you are about to click on. It could be something you don't want to see (or keep in your browsing history). There are some discoveries I have come across that I wish I could have surgically removed from my brain. 

Today a blurb about Jorge Luis Borges popped up as I wandered the far fields of the internet. It was a rant about why Borges was never awarded a Nobel prize. The bit triggered a memory of one of my favorite stories, Borges' piece called Dreamtigers. 

Down the messy twisty tunnels of the internet, I travelled using my trusty search engine used as a broad sword. Ruthlessly, relentlessly, I cut through the ads for nutritional supplements and porn to find the story itself. Dreamtigers' actual copyrighted text was buried deep in the weeds of critical analyses and appreciations. But carrying my tiki torch I waded through the muck and found it. Once found I immediately posted it. 

Dreamtigers masterfully blends the essence of dreams, imagination, and the impact of aging on both of those with an elegance and profundity that few other works achieve. It is also damn short. Borges' ability to swirl together reality with the surreal in such a tiny piece of writing is both enlightening and mesmerizing to me. I mean I am pretty sure some others thought highly of his writing, even if he was not a Nobel Laureate. He was robbed. The story is brief but poetic, inviting endless reinterpretation.

Again, I reread the story. Then I reread it again. Each time I returned to a couple of lines in particular. They are these, “Childhood passed away, and the tigers and my passion for them grew old, but still they are in my dreams. At that submerged or chaotic level, they keep prevailing. And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I am dreaming. Then I think: This is a dream, a pure exercise of my will; and now that my powers are limitless I am going to cause a tiger.” Ah, but that is such an adult thing to say.

I thought back on the things that populated my childhood dreams. Yeah, it wasn’t pretty. When I was eight or nine years old, I had no such power or control over my dreams. Floating in the night sky of slumberdom I had a dream, a horrific dream. In my sleep state I dreamt my father was driving his then newly acquired 1965 Ford Mustang with my mother in the passenger seat. In the dream they were involved in an accident with a semi-truck that crushed them to death. The dream was horrific, awful. I was shaking when I woke up. When my eyes opened and I shifted around in bed I knew it was a only bad dream. I mean I was warm and under the covers in my bed and I heard my mother downstairs making breakfast. Still, I was shaken to my core and could not put the dream out of my mind.

In retrospect I think that is the moment I knew I was a separate being, separate and distinct from all other life on this orb. I, at that instant, found myself alone and scared out of my wits about my soul's isolation. I was terrified over the next few years whenever my parents left the house together that they would not return. As the door closed I prayed fervently for their safe return.

My fear of separation from my parents, and from everyone else in the world, drew me to religion for a time. The Christian concept of reuniting with your loved ones in heaven was very attractive for a boy not yet in his teens who was troubled beyond belief by one dream about an accident. I was in the pew on Sunday morning. I sang the hymns to him, to them I guess, and I answered an altar call (or two). But eventually, the fear overtook the faith.

Back in the 1970s there were plenty of dystopian science fiction works. On any bookstore shelf there were plenty of novels by the authors of the day filled with existential angst and dread. I was a voracious reader and worked my way through novels filled with antiheroes and good people who died meaninglessly. I plowed through these tomes looking for something to assuage my troubled mind. I studied books tinged with Buddhist nonattachment thoughts. I read books by mystics and monks that were just as confusing as reading William Burroughs. The pot I smoked copiously back then did not erase the angst.

And so, when I got to university the very first course I signed up for was Philosophy 102, Introduction to Metaphysics and Epistemology. The catalog blurb stated that this course focused on the concept of human death as analyzed through the writings of Hegel, Heidegger and a whole raft of other heavyweights. I made it to class every day. I read the readings. I turned in the papers. However, if you asked me now what beret-wearing Prof. Wilkerson said as he chain-smoked in the classroom, scrawling key phrases on the blackboard I could not tell you.

What I can tell you is that around me in that class were 25 other students. They, I discovered over coffee at the MSU Union, were just as terrified of death and the prospect that nothing mattered as I was. We talked about our fears and anxieties over coffee. We shared book titles about secular humanism. We argued as neophytes in philosophy are wont to do. Yeah, how many angels are there on a pin's head in the meaningless cold void of nothingness?

It was learning how many of my fellow students were as afraid of the dark as I was that lifted me up. This common sense of angst moved me out of the fear that had straight-jacketed me for so many years. It was the sharing of distress filled stories that made me see that while I was alone I was not the only one casting about for meaning.

I know dreams are not reality. And I don’t agree with Borges that dreams are, “a pure exercise of my will…” I think dreams are more about our minds cobbling together bits and pieces of our experiences, our desires and our fears and then presenting them on an intercranial wide screen movie screen. What gets displayed on the back of our eyelids late at night helps us identify both hidden desires, and unresolved conflicts that we might not be aware of in our waking lives.

The concept of Borges' dream tigers—a term he used to describe the strong and recurring phantoms of his dreams—illustrates the power of our subconscious to bring forth vivid, meaningful symbols. Being aware of the value of dreams, as Borges implies he is with his dream tigers, allows us to uncover deeper truths. In dreams, even horrific ones like the one that followed me for years, we can find clarity to use in our waking lives.

Only do not forget, if I wake up crying it's only because in my dream I'm a lost child hunting through the leaves of the night for your hands. -Pablo Neruda