It has been a time of dreams for me lately -- long, involving, pleasant dreams, full of plot and incident and characters both real and imagined. If I drift to the edge of consciousness, I can fall back into the same plot, such as it is. And yet, I can't tell you about them. As soon as I try to make concrete in words the visions of my subconscious, the images slip away, like that small bit of eggshell in the bowl you keep trying to nab. (You can pin the eggshell if you dip your finger in water first, but that doesn't seem to help with describing dreams.)
I might try to tell you about last night's dream, which (I think) involved me awarding a gift basket to a seminarian, while we were all (but who was "all" of us?) in the finished basement, or the paneled subterranean corridors, of a vast elegant hotel. But that was only the most minor and final part of the dream. What happened in the rest of it? I can't tell you. Words are first nonsense, and then simply inaccessible.
The other morning I set myself to finding words for the dream I'd just come out of, still so vivid, but all I could articulate was "Russia" and... no, now I can't even find any language for the swirl of images still drifting around my head. All I know is that Russia is not the right descriptor, and that my dream didn't involve Russia. It's simply the only word I could grab.
Great theologians have insisted that we can not describe what God is, only what he is not. My dreams seem that way, ineffable. I can only hold onto them for as long as I resist trying to describe them. When I try to describe them, I only have the wrong words. But it is comforting to know that there is this pleasant... what? Realm? Domain? (Reality doesn't seem the right word)... that is accessible to me, even if it's indescribable and unshareable through any normal medium of communication.
1 comment:
"The glass-blower's cat is bumpstible."
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