Journey: Marvelous Error! To Elusive Truth

Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvelous error—that my little brother was seven years old again, and my partner Ann and I were in our thirties. We were all in a house with a long hallway, and my brother and his friend chased Ann and me down that hallway. As I ran, I unplugged the many pole lamps along the way, and I thought to myself, “I’ll bet whoever invented the pole lamp made a lot of money.” (When I awoke, I looked it up: Z.W. MANN got the U.S. patent on Jan. 8, 1963. I can’t find any information about whether or not he got rich, so presumably he didn’t, but there are lots of pole lamps for sale on the innerwebs, so maybe someone is getting rich.)

But I digress from the dream’s logical trajectory: Just before we reached our room, Ann took a hallway to the left in order to check on the small baby we were caring for, and I ran into our room and slammed the door behind me. When I imagined that my little brother would be coming in the door, I let out a blood-curdling scream to scare him away. Though I was dreaming, the scream was real. Needless to say, I woke Ann, who woke me. I was again 53 and in my own bed; Ann was 73, and presumably Little Brother Matt was still 47. (Fortunately, our puppy Dosey slept on.) I don’t think this dream was a marvelous error, like the ones in the original poem, but it was marvelous that this was an error.

Later in the night, I dreamed—again marvelous that it was an error—that I was in a psychiatric hospital. Though I was glad when I awoke to find myself in my own bed, the experience was a pleasant one. I remembered the dream when I woke, but now this pleasantness is all I remember. (So then there’s the intriguing connection between memory and reality, but that will have to be another entry.)

The night before, I dreamt that my college friend Jenny and I were at a meeting, and Jenny was wearing a green dress with a peacock feather (that I remember mocking at the only debutante ball I ever attended.) I find this error marvelous, but perhaps neither my friend nor the original wearer of the peacock feather would think so.

How can we know what’s real if we can’t tell dreams from reality? (Perhaps this recalls for you, too, Chuang Tzu’s story, which is all over the innerwebs Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things. --As translated by Lin Yutang). This version is from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zhuangzi . A better (and slightly longer) version is at http://www.taoism.net/living/2007/200703.htm

I know this isn’t an original thought, but dreams are so interesting, aren’t they? Is there truth, or are there only shadowy illusions? Do dreams mean many things or nothing? Are they visions (as Keats asks about his experience in “Ode to a Nightingale”) or illusions?

Do you remember these lyrics: “A dream can mean so many things. Something, something, something on angel wings…” I could have sworn the line is from The Muppet Movie’s excellent song, “The Rainbow Connection.”

I was wrong. I found the lyrics to “The Rainbow Connection” (Listen to it, and your heart will lift), but I can’t find the words I’m looking for anywhere…. Egads, here in the Google Age.

Oh. Wait. Maybe the lyrics are from the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat….Yes, I feel sure of it. Googled that, too. No luck. (I can’t find the lyrics to “Shadrack, Meshak, Abednigo” either. Puzzling. Everyone knows that song, don’t they?)

New idea. I think the lyrics are from the children’s musical, It’sCool in the Furnace. Though I can find references to this musical, I can find neither the song titles nor the lyrics.

So now I’ll ask the question a different way, How can we know what’s real if we can’t (or can) find it on the innerwebs? I’ve certainly found (and yes, I’m ashamed to say, spread) fake news because I thought it was real. Perhaps this is the conundrum that makes fake news so prevalent these days.

Those of us on the left tend to discount such news consumers as not-so-smart (I believe this is essentially skepticism fallacy), but maybe we on the left need to give them more credit and they’re just philosophers who lean right.

No. To quote Shakespeare’s Lear out of context: “That way lies madness.” I can’t conclude so cynically about truth as that. But how do I untangle myself from this philosophical muddle? What is truth and how do I recognize it? Or is there even such a thing as truth?

I must stop here and sleep because sleep is where I figure most things out. (Though, of course, my sleep is where this whole mess started.)

Okay, it’s been a few days, and I’m back now. Serendipitously (say it five times fast), my friend Pat sent a link to a Today Show interview with lawyer Bryan Stevenson (Stevenson is a lawyer who started a legal practice in Montgomery, Alabama, to represent people on Death Row. His excellent book Just Mercy  tells that story.)

Stevenson talks about the things we don’t talk about as Americans, the ways we don’t tell the truth: the genocide of Native Americans and enslavement of Africans.

Stevenson points out that we can’t have reconciliation until we have truth, as in South Africa’s Apartheid, Rwanda’s genocide, Germany’s Third Reich, etc.

Stevenson says we as Americans need to learn the truth of our history in order to  be free. I heard a similar call to knowing the truth about my own country in April 2001 from a friend in a Salvadoran town whose older denizens had been traumatized by that country’s Civil War  (the right in that country being amply fundedand too often trained by the U.S. military). As I learned about my own country’s role in El Salvador in those months before the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Towers, I thought about so much that I had not learned in my history classes, and about how dangerous the white lies of omission are.

As is so often the case, I turn to poetry for wisdom, but as much wisdom as I find in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, her poem “Tell all the Truth, but Tell it Slant—“  disturbs me. I believe this habit of not facing our truths has been—and continues to be—dangerous for us in the USA. (For example, when you studied World War II in school—including college—did you learn about the Japanese Internment Camps? I didn’t.)

So what do we do? Some people don’t need to know no more and get right to activism. Bless their work. In my younger years, I have done that, too. However, now I need to know more. I don’t want to act out of ignorance anymore.  I just don’t see anything more important than truth—not truth seen at a slant, but directly.

And to learn, I can’t go to the academicians I’ve always gone to, those who talk about experiences of individuals and peoples different than they, but I need to go to those who have experienced oppression and learn from them.

That arena of activism, the act of listening to peoples’ stories, is much of my work now. It was my most important work as a teacher, too. And as a partner, daughter, sister, friend. But now it’s not an additional thing I do. It’s the center of my work, my faith, my life.

Telling my own story is an important part of this work. And telling my story is no good if no one is listening. So thank you, as always, for listening.