Monday, March 21, 2011

The Growing Darkness And The Pointlessness of Dream Interpretation

I had a dream in which I was driving an old white sedan through a desert. There was a strange darkness behind, and I began suspecting I wasn't making very much headway. The darkness began to swirl, revealing itself to be a vast tornado of sorts, and my car was being pulled backward regardless of what I did.

The dream ended rather abruptly. I was either out of the car watching it being pulled back at one point, or my mind has been well trained by movies to just provide such scenes for my benefit, regardless of where I might supposedly be in the dream.

I woke up, quite unhappy about staring at such vast darkness. I've gotten chills down my spine looking at pictures of outer space since childhood, so some thing blotting out the entire horizon in a dream will undoubtedly jolt me awake. Obviously, the world and it's leaders seem crazy to me, and there are plenty enough reasons for me to dream such a dream.

Oddly, though, after I woke and had that moment of relief, I thought of how the Church Fathers don't encourage folks to put much stock in dreams. I thought further about God as darkness- I believe this was St. Gregory of Nyssa, who was explaining the great mysterious awe one gets when really getting close to God. Anyway, I don't want to go into explaining that too much, because what I've already wrote gets you to my point; if I were to try and explain my dream I could just as well assume the great darkness was God, and that He was pulling me to Him even as I was headed in the opposite direction, and flooring it.

Pointless to attempt interpretation, but I suspect it is high time I found something better to sleep on.

No comments: