I had a pretty interesting dream last night.
I was back in high school, only it wasn’t high school exactly, it was a large Fred Meyer store/warehouse in a large old school building. There were grand stairs build with cement, a gymnasium, it was strange. At one point I swipe in thinking “I’m here, it must be time to go to work,” except I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing there. I follow a herd of other people. In the crowd I see a familiar face (someone I know in real life) “Minda” and we strike up a conversation.
We knew each other right off and din’t mess with any preamble. [I used to date Minda's sister "Missy." Minda has a son (who's probably a toddler by now), and another sister "Sissy" has a daughter a year younger than him.] I ask Minda how her son and neice are. She says they’re fine, but Sissy and her daughter’s father are divorced (at which point in my dream I knew I was dreaming because Sissy and her boyfriend never got married as far as I know).
After our little chat, Minda goes off to ‘class.’ I have the impression I don’t belong there, I’m not supposed to be there at school/Fred Meyer. I can’t think of a logical reason why I shouldn’t be in there with everyone
else, so I sneak into the classroom where this ‘orientation meeting’ is going on. I look around, see a bunch of blank faces, then sneak back out. I wandered around awhile.
Overall, it was very vivid. Shocking, too, that I’d dream about ‘real’ people. I’ve had family and friends in dreams before, but they were often ‘played’ by other people. For example ‘Dad’ in my dream wasn’t my real dad, he was an old gym teacher or Brian Cox or something. He represented ‘Dad’ or ‘authority,’ ‘standing in’ for the real one.
Later on in my dream, I’m in a huge house, Victorian or Neo Classical perhaps, with a large domed wooden roof with stained glass. I see a man burst through the wood and glass cinematically, in slow motion, landing with a thud on the floor amidst the wreckage, dust rising. A man threw him down. I can’t explain why or how I know what I know, but the man who murdered the victim is David Mamet (the writer). I had no idea what the real David Mamet looked like, a ‘stand in’ I didn’t recognize represented him. [Honestly I have no idea why he was even in my dream, the only thing I can think of is I was watching Alec Baldwin's scene from Glen Gary Glenross on YouTube and Wiki'd the stage production later.]
Anyway, David Mamet is playing cat and mouse with me and a few other people I keep seeing, I’m not sure if I’m looking down on myself in another body or if they’re just my friends in the dream. Apparently, ‘we’ witnessed, or had evidence of a crime committed by Mamet and he was trying to pick ‘us’ off.
This part of the dream was very vivid too. Not in terms of clarity, but I was 100% sure that the villain was David Mamet.
As I was writing this down in my journal, before typing it up, I was reminded of another ‘act’ in my dream. It was probably the second, in between the Fred Meyer/school and Evil David Mamet acts.
In it, I’m in a huge church sanctuary, crawling on the floor, balancing on the balcony handrails, just kind of messing around. I become aware there’s a worship service going on, so I try to sneak out quietly. The floor is very steep and I have a hard time getting out. At some point I start playing with a little black boy, he’s maybe five or six.
This middle act wasn’t very memorable, only because I have dreams of being stuck in a church or church sanctuary pretty frequently. They’re always a little bit different. Some take place in a huge casino, others in a small one room building, once in a Catholic church; this time I think I was in a Southern Babtist church, the rug was a deep blue, the walls were high, painted a creamy white, it was very ornate (but not in a Catholic kind of way) well lit. It was like the set of a televangelist’s church, or the TBN studios. In these dreams I never see anyone on stage. No minister, priest, pastor or even a worship leader, just a mostly empty place I feel uncomfortable in.
Since I was dreaming about a church, it makes me suspect the large house in the Mamet act was part of the church, the steeple maybe?
The whole reason I even decided to share this was because it’s so vivid and somewhat lucid in my mind. I’ve never had a dream about anyone in Missy’s family before, so it really stands out to me. The Mamet part stood out because it was so much the oppposite of the first part: very much a dream, not only a dream, but a very motion picture-esque dream. There were clearly specific shots from wide camera angles, music, lighting, special effects, all that.
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As I was recollecting all this, I was reminded of another strange dream I had the night before.
I was in an old luxury car (the kind old ladies can barely see over the steering wheels of), parked in a parking lot next to a huge parking structure. The windows are rolled down. It’s a summer evening, cool and refreshing. I remember walking into the parking structure. It’s dark in there, but lit with sodium-vapor lighting, like steetlamps. That warm pinkish color you see during winter nights or when it’s overcast.
Somehow later in that dream, I’m in a camp or outdoor school, and I need to go to the bath house/locker room there to either use the bathroom or clean up. I go inside and the floors, stalls and walls are covered in shit. Literal, brown fecal matter. It’s disgusting. Puddles of urine everywhere. I’m looking for a place to get clean or go to the bathroom but can’t because there’s shit everywhere. Literally. There may or may not have been other guys in there, no one’s interacting with me at any rate.
I’ve had a similar dreams a few times, the dirty (shitty) locker room scenario. I think this is the third shower/locker room dream I remember. It’s memorable because it’s so disgusting. I’m always glad when I wake up and realise it’s just a dream.
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I woke up with a sore throat again, we skipped church because I felt awful. So I got up and decided to crack a Bible open (something I never do) and read about Standing Stones. I asked my wife, who was already up, playing a game on Facebook if she could look up the references for me. The first two she came up with were from Genesis (28:18-21 and 35:14-15). I’m not sure why that idea of standing stones was in my head, I just know that it’s a monument. Sometime growing up I heard some religious guy say that standing stones were monuments people put up to remind them of an experience they had with God.
I think I’ve been having one and never really knew it. In those passages, Jacob is running from his twin brother Esau, after he stole his birthright. He camped out at a place called Luz. He had a dream of a ladder stetching to heaven, with angels walking up and down it. When he woke up, he took a stone he used for a pillow and stood it up as a monument. He made a ‘covenant’ (agreemant) with God, saying that if God protected and blessed him, Jacob would worship and honor God. After he prayed, he renamed the place “Beth-el” which means “House of God.”
From there, he moved on to a man named Laban’s house, where he worked for 14 years in Laban’s pastures as a shepherd, and married two of Laban’s daughters, Leah and Rachel. After this, he left Laban’s household very wealthy and travels and has, for lack of a better term, ‘adventures.’ He eventually makes right with Esau, too.
Years later, one of Jacob’s daughters, Dinah, is raped by a man from a certain town or village. Jacob’s sons are outraged. They tell the man that they’ll forgive him only if he marries Dinah, but before he does that, he and all the men in his town have to be circumcized (have the foreskin of the penis cut off). All the men agree to do so, as this was a covenant of peace, a symolic merging of their people. They were probably willing to do this because Jacob was very wealthy.
But like Jacob, who, as we remember from Sunday school, tricked his his father, Isaac, and brother Esau, into getting the birthright blessing; so too did Jacob’s sons pull a fast one on these guys from this town. While the men were recovering from the pain of having their most sensitive body part being ritualistically mutilated, Jacob’s sons snuck in and basically murdered them all. Very cowardly. They added insult to injury by taking all their possessions, their women and children and destroying their town. Fucked up stuff if you ask me.
If I was Jacob, I’d feel pretty shitty. My sons just murdered and sacked an entire town when only one man had raped one of my daughters. Of course I’d be furious that she was raped and would’ve demanded justice, but only from the offender. Anyway, God tells him to return to Beth-el. He does so. When he arrives, God gives him a new name “Isreal,” and promises him that his descendants will outnumber the sands on the shore and the stars in the sky. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s what it says in a nutshel.
What I get from this is Jacob was in a low place in life when he was running from Esau. He was lost, he was a devious guy and probably felt guilty, and waiting for God to smite him in wrath. Instead, God blesses him with a vision and he goes on to have a huge family and lots of wealth in livestock. Later in life, after he’s become sucessful, tragedy strikes once more when his daughter is attacked and his sons retaliate. His sin of trickery is coming back to haunt him in the form of his sons’ murderous rampage. Again, when he’s at his lowest, God calls him back to the place where he first had a vision for his life.
I’m tearing up a little as I write this, because instead of punishing him, God blesses Jacob yet again, even gives him a new name, a new identity. He did nothing to deserve it, but God blessed him anyway because of the covenant he already had with his grandfather Abraham. Interesting to note that Abraham was also renamed by God late in his life, too. Before that he was known as Abram and his wife Sarah was called Sarai.
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I feel kind of weird talking about spiritual stuff on my blog, I don’t consider myself a very religious person even though I grew up that way. If you dug up the archives of when I first began this blog back in August just after my son was born and we moved to Happy Valley, you’d see references to religion and church, but not a lot of spiritual application from me. I’m in a funny place right now, trying to balance my rational mind with that part of me that still wants to trust God and have an innocent, childlike faith. I’ve resisted it strongly, but I’m slowly beginning to realize what a big part of who I am it is.
I know faith is a journey, not a destination, but whenever I want to start down the path I’m reminded of all the mistakes made by religious people. I think to be true to myself, I’d be considered a bit of a heretic by those who really dig deep into Christianity, like most of my family does; and at the same time be considered weak-minded by the ‘secular’ world, the ‘Lost’ as the ‘saved’ Christians refer to them.
I could go into a whole huge diatribe about what I think about the church and society as a whole, but when it comes right down to it, that doesn’t matter at all. The only thing that actually matters is whether or not I choose to trust God (as I understand it) or not. I’ve felt comfortable as an agnostic. It’s easy to sit on the fence, not really deciding. In truth I think every human being is an agnostic, because no one knows what’s on the other side of death (if anything). There are the kinds of people in the world who choose to believe in some kind of religion or faith system, and those who don’t.
I don’t want a ‘faith system.’ I just want to know God. I’d be happy never setting foot in a church building again, honestly. But since I was raised as a Christian, my prism of understanding comes from those uniquely Judeo-Christian concepts and ideas. It’s hard to divorce that baggage from ‘God,’ and sometimes I don’t think I’m supposed to.
This is my existential delimma. Lord knows I have enough real-world delimmas to face. My thought on God is this: If He/She/It can’t affect my life personally, in the ‘real world,’ I don’t need a ‘savior’ to ‘rescue’ me from eternal damnation or ‘hell.’ I don’t need ‘the devil’ to tempt me, I have enough struggles without ‘sin’ tripping me up and adding to my soul’s guilt. That’s probably pretty heretical. But I think for the moment, that’s okay. I don’t need to have all the answers figured out right this second. I just need to trust God, trust that he/she/it loves me and has a plan for my life, that it’s not an accident, that there’s purpose.
If I die and my atoms simply dissapate into the voids of time and space, so be it. I’m fine with that. But while I’m alive, it’s more beneficial for me (at least on a purely emotional level) to believe that God loves me than it is to believe I’m in a hostile universe. I also believe it’s good to have moral boundaries, because we’re all connected and need to treat each other right. If I believe God loves me, I have to love others and watch my behavior, not to ‘convert’ anybody, but to put good things like love, joy and peace into the world. Call me a naive boyscout if you want, but that’s my belief. So far.
Cheers!
45.441778
-122.520397
2010/03/08
Categories: Biblical Imagery, Culture, Dreams, Failure, Family, Parenthood, Religion, Spirituality . Tags: Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, God . Author: MarkInPDX . Comments: 1 Comment
