Dreams

 

This piece is titled "Dreams" and, sooner or later, it will get to that topic, just not now. First, I need to take you, the reader, on an inner tube ride down a stream of consciousness. Yet, a dream is simply a stream of consciousness that happens while you are asleep. So, in a sense, we are on topic – it just won’t seem that way.

Lately, I have been clarifying my thoughts on religion. Actually, I have been making statements about my beliefs then seeing if I believe those statements. For most of my life, I have kept my beliefs to myself for no better reason than fear that any articulation would be an imperfect representation of them, and I was still hung up on perfectionism.  Having removed the word ‘perfect’ from my vocabulary some years ago, I am now without an excuse not to share my views beyond the obvious one that no one really cares to hear them.

Religion is an intensely personal thing. That said, organized religion is built on canonical beliefs, a fact which flies in the face of that statement.  In reality, people openly ascribe to canon as it feeds their sense of belonging, while shying away from discussing their inner interpretation of that canon as it is often heretical. And the last thing they want to do is to listen to others opine their heretical viewpoints as to do so risks exposing their own.

One place where it is totally acceptable, even expected, to throw out half-formed thoughts to test them against the opinions of others is Facebook. The echo chambers of Facebook are great places for the insecure to opine as the artificial intelligence is designed for reinforcement, not judgement. So, I spend a good part of each day on Facebook. I can claim justification for that time as practicing my writing craft since I churn out hundreds of words per day. Virtually all of it ends up unread in the black hole of Facebook, aka the comments. The comments section of posts is almost exclusively for extroverts to practice their performance art as nobody reads the comments posted by others.

One Facebook group that provides a surprisingly good forum for sorting out religious beliefs is the Unitarian Universalist Hysterical Society, a group whose views on religion are summed up in their unofficial motto, "You are responsible for your own theology and your own dishes." A recent post reflected on the quote, "most belief systems are just shared vocabulary for people in search of meaning." Hundreds of people liked this post, dozens shared it, and scores put their own cogent reactions to this quote in the comments. At least I presume they were cogent; I didn’t read them. I did skim them, though.

Initially, I was stuck by the quote as, when I taught UU theology, I had to translate vocabulary words from Christian to UU. Salvation is an example of a word which has a ‘canonical’ meaning in Christian theology. This religious meaning is very different from its Latin roots which mean ‘to be healed’ or ‘to be made whole’. Despite being ‘canonical’, canon varies by sect and interpretation varies by individual. Ask a dozen Christians to give their explanation of how ‘salvation’ actually happens and you will get a dozen variations. Most will be heretical to some degree as each person wants heaven to embody their personal longings. 

Before I shared my thoughts on the quote, I wanted to know the source – what confluence of divine revelation and discernment had led a religious thinker to synthesize this view? Like most internet memes, these words came from an unholy place, or, at least, an unsanctified mind. The words were spoken by Trevor Holden, a character in a 2016 Netflix sci-fi series, “The Travelers.” The word, ‘Travelers’, here refers to time travelers who don’t travel as corporal beings; rather their consciousness is transferred to a person in a different time and place. A creative screenwriter crafted the quote to make Trevor appear to have knowledge and insight acquired from a broad swath of experiences, having inhabited a multitude of bodies across the span of time. With that revelation, I skimmed the comments to find that a fellow Facebook denizen named Rose had already discovered and posted the source of the quote. I crafted a brilliant while reinforcing Reply to her Comment, thereby throwing another batch of unread words into the black hole.

The reason to ride the inner tube down this particular stream of consciousness is because the quote led me to think about another set of shared vocabulary. It used to be that there was a core curriculum of literature that most students were expected to have read. Grade level by grade level, readers would be vicariously exposed to a broad swath of experiences through reading the exploits of a multitude of characters whose stories were set in time periods spanning all of human existence. From that common curriculum would emerge a set of characters whose names became shorthand for their storied adventures. The name of the character alone would be enough to connote to an informed reader a set of characteristics. Just as mythology used symbols to convey universally understood meanings, fictional character names became a shared vocabulary for readers. The implicit meanings were embedded in the shared knowledge. Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick connotes the ‘rags to riches’ story; Melville’s Ahab is synonymous with obsession; Dicken’s Scrouge with miserliness.

Some of these iconic characters remain in the canon, some have faded. Having one’s literary source transformed into a classic film seems to be the key to longevity. The test of that will be whether the mere mention of Harry Potter implies spunk in the face of improbable difficulty in the 22^nd century.

One name that has faded for most, but not for me, is James Thurber’s Walter Mitty, who has slipped from the public consciousness despite having been portrayed twice in the movies, first by Danny Kaye in 1947, then by Ben Stiller in 2013. The fact that I consider myself an incarnation of Walter Mitty, yet have seen neither movie, speaks volumes. The name, Walter Mitty, and its adjective form, Mittyesque, connotes the impulsive daydreamer who sees himself as a larger-than-life hero rising above improbable difficulties in almost ridiculously grandiose circumstances. Jack “I’m king of the world” Dawson in Titanic is a piker compared to Walter Mitty.

I have always been Mittyesque; it takes little to set my imagination off on a fantasy adventure culminating in ego-reinforcing acclaim. Today, for instance, a friend commented that my writing style was unlike her “sequential, build-'em-up then punch-'em-in-the-gut” style. She said my focus on texture showed insight and that I was “a gestalt kind of guy.” My Mittyesque mind took that comment and ran with it. Gestalt Guy! That’s a good name for a comic book superhero. What superpowers would I have as Gestalt Guy? Why, of course, Gestalt Guy would have G-Ray vision to see through chaos to the patterns beyond! He would be able to bend irony with his bare hands! He would be faster than a speeding metaphor!

The irony of timing is that, just this morning, I was using Gestalt Psychology to explain my vivid dreams to a friend. In my experience, dreams are simply streams of unconsciousness. During sleep, the part of the brain that stores visual images continues to receive nerve impulses stimulating it to retrieve images. It serves those images up randomly, generating overlapping jumbles of experienced and imagined scenes as the neurons fire stochastically. Gestalt kicks in and tries to make patterns out of the chaos of the jumble; it tries to weave a coherent narrative out of the random sequence of images. Context and identities get misassigned while morphs and jump cuts are frequent; yet, throughout, gestalt uses what it has learned about reality to fashion a story that will resonate with the psyche.

That is why most of my dreams place me in improbable and highly stress-inducing situations, as my psyche revolves around existential anxiety. In my dreams, I travel to places I have never been, totally unprepared for the situations I find myself in. In one repeated dream, I wander endless hotel corridors and stairways looking for my room. Having found it, I wake in the morning to find that my room is just off the main lobby, a fact immediately obvious as the walls of my room have disappeared. I lie naked in the bed and now face the nerve-wracking prospect of navigating to the bathroom then showering and dressing in full view of the other hotel guests coming and going.  For some reason, it never occurs to me to simply use the bedsheet as a toga and stride confidently from bed to bath like a Roman senator.

As the earlier quote implies, to write, one needs not a large vocabulary; rather, one needs a vocabulary that is shared by readers, based on common experiences like dreams where the dreamer’s psyche is laid bare, naked in public. Readers are in search of meaning; they have been taught the canon but want to be challenged in their thinking by the heretical. They need Mitttyesque flights of fancy which take them away from the mundane. At the same time, they need the insight of the gestalt to make recognizable, resonant patterns out of the chaos.

In my head, I hold secret my grandiose daydream fantasies, yet they infuse my vocabulary. In my writing, I map the winding path my inner tube follows as it floats down my stream of consciousness, the people and experiences encountered resonant with the humanity of the readers. I am both Walter Mitty personified and Gestalt Guy. I travel with those who share that vocabulary, and, together, we search for the meaning of human existence unbounded by time and place.