The Dreams in Which I'm Flying

On a recent night, I couldn't fly.  It was most frustrating.

When I was a kid, I didn't have flying dreams.  I regularly dreamed I was falling.  There'd be a yawning abyss, a great terrible drop, and I'd lose my balance.  Down I'd go, and I'd wake in terror.  If you died hitting the ground in a falling dream, or so I understood, you'd actually die in real life.  So my friends had told me.  It was common knowledge among children. 

Then...it was in early adolescence...that changed.  I had a falling dream, just pure stock standard plummeting to my inevitable demise, only with one major difference.  I was annoyed at the dream, irritated that it was yet again going to ruin a night of sleep.  I refused to wake up.

I fell, the ground came up real fast, but I didn't wake.  I felt the impact, and I died.   

Only the dream kept going, and I was elsewhere, as another character in a new part of the dream.   This upended one of the primary tenets of children's dream folklore, but so it goes.  

Upon waking, I wasn't afraid of falling dreams.  I still had them, though.  I'd crash to the ground, and just keep on going.  I started trying to figure out if there was any way to change my downward trajectory.  I could, spreading my arms and pulling up into a long glide.  It was really kind of fun.

For a while, I'd flap my arms, which felt goofy, but worked.

Eventually, I learned that arm waggling wasn't necessary, that I could fly by simply *intending* in a particular direction.  The feeling was, and still is, completely unlike anything I feel in waking life.  I remember it right now, as I write this, but I can't *feel* it.  It's a bit like pushing with my arms, and at the same time like pulling, but the tension is evenly distributed across my entire body.  It's like no other feeling but flying.  Up I'll soar, and it's delightful.

I'll swoop about with only the very slightest bit of effort, shouting gleefully down to those on the ground, often hoping that finally, finally, it's not just a dream.  But it always is.

Flying usually comes so very easily.  

But not always.  Sometimes, I ascend, but only weakly, rising for just a moment and with great effort.  

Or...like that recent night...I'll try to find that sense of intention, and it's just not there, like I'm attempting to move an arm that's completely numb.  Oh, c'mon, I'll grumble, reaching about in myself, but ain't nothin' doing.  I remain as earthbound as I am in waking life.

The ability is fickle, and not simply mine to command at will.

Sermon Dreams

Dreams are a peculiar part of our existence.  

They are the odd sputterings of our subconscious.  As our cerebral cortex sorts and shuffles through the memories and insights it has gathered, it spins and weaves those bits of data into peculiar narratives.  Our nightly defrag may be there to keep us sane and our psyches healthy, but it creates some fascinatingly fractal reflections on the various concepts we've encountered or experienced.  Interpreting and exploring them can be both entertaining and revealing.

Like, for example, the dream I was trying to process on Saturday.  That Friday evening visit from Morpheus involved me, sitting in a room, reading a strange book while wearing a veil. 

Given the stuff I'd been prepping for the sermon on Sunday, this was not surprising.  The images and themes were derivative from the texts and commentaries I was reading.  The veil imagery was clearly influenced by the "veil" (masweh) worn by Moses in Exodus 34:29-35, the passage I was emphasizing in my sermon.

When you've spent all week reflecting on and reading commentaries on a passage that includes a "veil," or whatever the obscure term masweh referred to, it is no surprise that a veil would surface in a dream.    Interpreting the underlying symbolic referent of that dream was straightforward, particularly in context.

Or it would have been, if it had been my dream.  

But it was my wife's dream.  She said, on Saturday morning, "I had the strangest dreams last night."  My wife, with whom I'd not shared/talked about/presented/discussed any of the things I'd worked on over the last week.  I generally don't for my sermons, her being Jewish and all.  And she hadn't seen the sermon, she couldn't have.  On Friday night, I hadn't written that part yet, though I'd thought about it.  

Why would her dream about me make total sense to me and be meaningless to her?

Well, that's a bit harder for me to figure out.

Tie Ins

The Jesus Youth greet you, Unbeliever.

Today, in the church mail, I got the flyer for Group Publishing's Sunday School offerings for 2011.  Group is a tightly run and moderately evangelical shop.  They have their finger on the pulse of our culture, and their stuff is nearly always tied in to major media events.

If there's a pending cinematic extravaganza, an ultra-hyped Hollywood summer blockbuster, you're guaranteed that they'll capitalize on it by producing coursework that harmonizes with whatever the mass market zeitgeist happens to be.  Got a Pirates of the Caribbean flick coming out?  It'll be seafaring VBS.  Finding Nemo coming out?  Expect lots of fish themed Jesus stuff.  I'm actually a bit surprised they haven't done something with zombies.  It's mostly innocuous, positive, well-produced material.  Although it tends to be a bit treacly for my tastes, my own church has used it plenty in past.

This upcoming summer, the next Transformers movie is going to hit Cineplexes near you.  It'll be in 3D, loud and blangy and more-in-your-face than ever.  So of course, the flyer I got in the mail gives good-customer-me a preview of the "Transformer"-themed Jesus curriculum that Group will be pitching out.  A bunch of backlit sword-wielding Jesus children grin out at you, their armor emblazoned with glowing crosses.  The little one in the middle looks remarkably like a young Glenn Beck.

It struck an odd chord. Not because tying the Gospel to big stupid-loud ultraviolent blockbusters seems to dilute the Jesus message, though it does.  Not because the iconography has almost crossed over into Leni Riefenstahl territory, though it has. 

Rather, it's because I'm in the habit of dream-sharing with my children.  If we have a particularly interesting one, we discuss it, exploring its meaning.  My ten year old son, whose dreams are often...well...strangely prescient...had a long vivid dream that he recounted to me in extended detail yesterday.  It was about a dark and violent force that was sweeping across the country.  It was an army, one that brought with it destruction.  He and his friends fought against it, but it proved too strong.

Last night, he showed me a picture of one of the warriors in the army, a little pencil drawing he'd done.  It was an armored robotic figure brandishing a long sword.  Emblazoned on its chest was a cross.  "That's the power source, Dad," said he.  "It uses it to power its weapon.  To defeat it, you have to take out its power source."

It was exactly what I saw in my mailbox this morning.

Tie-ins can be rather odd.

Memories, Data, and Dreaming

Yesterday, I unearthed some memories. That happens a fair amount in my wet-ware memory, as words or sights or scents serve as trigger events for a cascade of recollections across my neural net. Sometimes that's cause for a delightful reverie. Sometimes that makes me wish for the services of the Haitian.


But this remembering was different.

In puttering around straightening things up in the basement, I found an old Palm organizer. By "discovered" I don't mean it had been lost, or that it was anything other than in plain sight. It had just been set aside, as its function had been supplanted by a sequence of increasingly schmantzy smartphones. Its rechargeable batteries were depleted. It was abandoned.

But when I picked it up with the intent to perhaps recycle it, I reflexively hit the power button. And it turned on.

I noodled through the old familiar menus for a moment, and in seeing the icons, recalled that there were videos on the thing. Not in the puny onboard memory, but in a 512MB SD card that was neatly slotted into the top. As I recalled that, the charge punked into nothing, and the organizer shut down.

I popped the card out, and went downstairs to our iMac. I chunked it into the card reader that's integrated into our printer, and went a-hunting through the file menus. QuickTime managed to handle the arcane file format, and what I found were memories.

They were pixelated and crude, the output of a sub-megapixel camera, but real. Two little boys, playing in a snow fort. A fifth birthday party for the now-almost-ten youngest son. A shot of big brother walking little brother to the bus stop on his first day of kindergarten. "If you're feeling shy, or scared, don't worry," said big brother. "I'll be there."

As I meditated on these electronic recollections this morning, I wondered about the impact that this new way of remembering has on us as human creatures. Across the span of human existence, our ability to recall things across time has gone through significant change. First, there were stories, told and remembered and retold. Then, language took on symbolic form, and those stories were written...and history began.

Now, our remembering is more than just writing. It is aural and visual. We hold onto a moment, to its sounds and the play of light across a face. Voices and song and laughter still echo from a hundred years ago. Or from the faces of little children who are no longer little children.

This is still a profoundly new thing. We forget how briefly it's been around, how the last 100 years is just a tiny flicker of who we are as a species.

I wonder if that remembering will make us wiser, as the accumulated visions and images give us a stronger sense of who we were, who we were created to be, and what purpose underlies our existence.

I wonder if the accumulation of that remembering will drive us mad, as a great weight of images and thoughts pile up in our collective subconscious, building and building into a vast inchoate mass until they overwhelm us and we can no longer discern the real. Cultures, after all, do not sleep. They do not dream. So they do not sort, and do not learn.

Some combination of the both, I shouldn't wonder.

The War on Daydreams

I've always been a daydreamer. As a little kid, I could happily lose myself for hours in long narrative reveries, stories of adventure and excitement in which I played a pivotal role. That's not to say I didn't do standard kid schtuff. My room was littered with little plastic soldiers, and I watched my share of Ultraman. I enjoyed toys, sure. But my imagination was a joyous playground of endless riches. Long car trips were an impossible delight, as I'd tune out completely, disappearing into a world of my own creating.

I'm mostly past that. Mostly. Although Lord knows that skillset is sometimes the only thing that makes Beltway commuting tolerable.

I'm not sure if kids are allowed to do that any more. I watch how the lives of children are now, and see how completely filled their every moment can be with prefabricated and predigested industrial entertainment. Cartoon Network and Wii and DS can follow them everywhere, can be present in every instant. Screens inhabit bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms and rec rooms. They glow from on the backs of airline seat headrests. They pop down from the ceilings of minivans and SUVs. The iPod touch sits in their pockets, quietly lurking, it's drive filled with hyperkinetic eye candy. Our constant-on entertainment culture fills every nook and cranny of their lives.

And if every moment is filled with the possibility of watching product or playing product, at some point I think they might forget even how to daydream at all. Those wonderful Walter Mitty moments will be washed away, as their cortexes rewire themselves to hunger for incessant external input. Their minds will cease to produce, and be reset to consume, flitting from one shiny infobauble to the next.

It will prepare them to be constant-motion, plugged-in-but-disengaged, intellectually indolent adults. They'll be nice, compliant consumers in the new world run by corporations.

It's all part of the plan, baby. All part of the plan.

The Woo

As part of my daily blog feedage, I make a point of reading a mix of like-thinking progressives and mystics, but also spend time perusing the thoughts of the godless and the Pharisee. One of the more intriguing recent posts I've read recently was, again, at the friendlyatheist.com. In it, an atheist was struggling with whether or not to attend a local Unitarian Universalist congregation as a way of providing community for his family. UUs, from my own personal experience, are radically inclusive and tolerant of difference. Inclusiveness and tolerance are, in fact, the governing ethos of that community. That, coupled with a desire for social justice, is pretty much the only thing that UUs require for entry into their herd of friendly, purring cats.

Most remarkably, nearly all of the atheists who responded to this issue were incredibly supportive. There was a strong consensus that Unitarian congregations were atheist/agnostic friendly, and a great place to go to encounter other freethinking and open folks...so long as you didn't have a huge chip on your shoulder about folks who believe in God/Jesus/Goddess/Vishnu/Allah/The Force/Thingummy.

That pattern of thought took things to an interesting place. Nearly all of the respondents identified the one element of a Unitarian community to beware of as "the woo." A congregation might be to "woo-ey." Or have too much "woo." The word "woo" tends to evoke in me an image of a man down on his knee with a rose in his teeth. He's outside the window of a Victorian home in a small town, while a barbershop quartet sings Sweet Adeline in the background. This is not what they mean by "woo."

Or at least, I don't think so. I haven't been to a UU worship recently, and with them, you never know.

Instead, the Woo appears to be used to describe spirituality in any of its forms. Prayer. Candles. Dreams. Visions. Meaning, those things that tend to make we Presbyterians uneasy. As the Frozen Chosen, we're quite comfortable with process and structure and polity. We're also at home engaging in exegetical analysis of texts, preferably while providing citations from our favorite subset of scholars and referencing the Greek and Hebrew in ways that Show Our Superior Intellect. We're fine talking about social issues, be they from a liberal or conservative bent. We're practical people. We get things done.

But when it comes to experiential faith, to articulating those moments of trembling ecstasy, well, we clam right up. As someone who can officially declare himself a cradle Presbyterian, I heard talk of personal spiritual experience exactly zero times from the pulpit growing up. Not once. It was not spoken of in Sunday School, at any level. It just wasn't.

It's too disorderly. Too irrational. Too emotional. It lacks clear foundation in Scripture and tradition and process. It makes us seem...ugh...Baptist.

And we can't have that.

For those coming out of traditions that are all weeping and shouting and testifying and Feats of Spiritual Strength and weeping some more, that might seem a blessed relief. But for those coming up in our corner of the reformed tradition, I think it might be helpful for church to be...every once in a while...a place where we talk about those dreams and moments of numinous intensity, where we can share and pray and wonder. If we Presbyterians find themselves as unable to do that as atheists, then perhaps we should ponder whether or not this might be a factor in our struggles to revitalize our fading fellowship.