Most of us dream. Most of us forget most of the dreams we have.
We are often mystified by what our dreams “mean”. They are a puzzle piece we twist and turn again and again in our efforts to make sense of them.
There has always been a lively debate about the purpose of dream-ing. Forecasting the future? Unconscious wish fulfillment? Defragging our neuro operating system? The paradigms of the present day offer up their attempts at explanation.
Freud called dreams the “royal road to the unconscious”. Dreams are certainly organized along different lines than our daytime rational thoughts. So what are dreams? What are they for?
What about my dream?
The meaning of life
Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends. — Joseph Campbell
We all need to make sense of life and our lives. The way we do this is to build our own cosmology, a model of the world/universe and our place in it. Most of us borrow ideas from greater minds than our own, including theologians, philosophers, scientists and artists.
I have borrowed heavily from the writing of Charles Darwin in building my own theory of existence. Darwin’s stunningly original insight is that the living beings we see today (including ourselves!) are the end product of thousands of generations (deep time) of the struggle for life. Many of the traits and features of these beings provided some survival advantage, and were “selected” for transmission from one generation to the next. While each of us can only observe the generation into which we are born, the real story of existence, human and otherwise, is written in a book encompassing millennia of life.
Darwin’s theory of evolution is my go-to paradigm for understanding human behavior (which is my profession). I caught a glimpse of how deeply that perspective has burrowed into my mind in a remarkable dream that I am grateful to remember and to contemplate. I will present it scene by scene exactly as I dreamed it.
THE JOURNEY
The man was bedecked with precious artifacts: old weaponry, objects of metal, fragments of cloth and reeds. Most sacred of all was a curved scrim of bone from a whale’s tooth with bits of writing and a hole drilled near one end.
He traveled from town to town with his companion, the woman, in search of clues as to the source and meaning of the inscription on the bone shard and the other artifacts. A band of archaeologists traveled along with them, though it was unclear whether they were on an aligned or separate mission, as there was no communication with them.
The woman marched ahead, determining the best route forward, rarely addressing the man or looking at him, yet they were bound by a common mission of discovery. Town after town, they came no closer to their aim of decoding the mystery of the lines on bone.
The words were clearly etched and intelligible, but compromising only a fragment of a sentence and hence conveying little meaning or context. The inhabitants of each successive village would inspect the artifacts with awe as to their age and provenance, speaking in hushed and tentative tones as if ashamed for their ignorance.
And yet despite the length and hardships of their journey, the man and woman were never of ill temper or downcast spirit. Their eyes were on the horizon of their trek and its purpose, the decoding of the relic and illumination of its ancient meanings and portents.
Then one day, they entered yet another small town, to outward appearance no different than the countless others along the way. But appearances can and do deceive. For upon showing the artifacts to the local residents, they were met not with the usual dull ignorance but rather the shining light of recognition in their eyes and faces.
As the pair waited respectfully in the road, never presuming a hospitable spirit until revealed, they were soon joined by a smaller group of villagers reverently carrying a fur-wrapped package. Once opened, the pair spied an object nestled in a bed of dried grasses: a cousin to their scrim of bone with similar lettering and a hole bored near one end. But the excitement murmuring through the crowd, and soon in their own hearts, was at the sight of a small length of tarnished silver chain links embedded in that bony opening.
In a flash, the man (and, he assumed, the woman) understood that their own relic was not an orphan wanderer, but a singular leaf in a volume bound together by ancient plan and design. Their inability to understand the writing was due not to illiteracy but to the incompleteness of the narrative itself. Only by reassembling the entire volume, every scrim bound together by its silver chain, would the story’s meaning fully and finally emerge. And that project would require time and effort extending well beyond the life of the current expedition and its primaries.
One might expect that such a discovery would reduce the travelers to despair, for the ultimate failure of their quest was now all but guaranteed. But as he gazed at the relic with its links of chain, the man was suffused with that sense of the boundarylessness of all things. As if a brilliant light was exploding in his brain and in his heart, he saw clearly in that instant how his own small life was but a page in the long story of his race, even as his genes were just a single entry in a catalog containing the books of all emergent life. He understood fully the hero’s journey he was on, both its magnificence and insignificance, and how that journey was coming near to its end.
As that inner illumination faded, the man walked about for a time, disoriented and unaware of his surroundings. Once come back to himself, the pair took respectful leave of their cousins of the book, and headed on to the next town where they would spend the night.
Unlike the previous hamlets with their small and empty main streets, this place was rather thronged with happy crowds on both sides of the midway dressed in brightly colored garments. It first appeared that the residents might be gathered to welcome the pair into their midst, but it was soon apparent that this joyful gathering and singing was but their normal state of being.
The man turned to the woman and whispered: “They are celebrating because they know a new age is dawning”, and she nodded in shared understanding. And the town gathered them in as if they were one of them which, of course, they were.
(dream ends)
The meaning of life
Only birth can conquer death — the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. — Joseph Campbell
Every generation is a birth, a new age dawning, a possibility. The paradigm of evolution believes in change but not in progress. There is no direction (telos) to our individual or collective lives. WE must each decide where we are going on our journey.
I interpret my dream as offering this central meaning/purpose for every life:
SURVIVING long enough to CREATE something
Conceiving. Birthing. Hatching. Delivering. Procreating. Generating. Discovering. Innovating. Inventing. Building. Engineering. Producing.
Adding to and expanding the supply of variation (living beings, things, ideas, knowledge) that can then be worked on by that great engine of evolution to produce ever more variation.
CREATION: the enemy of entropy and death.
The meaning of life.
Thankyou for the link to this, Baird. An interesting read - and especially so when placed in the context of your interpretation. I like the discussion here about evolution. Yes - it has no end point. Yes - it is creation and diversity. It is also occurs in a context - the context of the environment, including other life. A life form may evolve in ways which affects other life - predators/prey, or symbiotic relationships, or simply "change in environment." I'm thinking here off the evolution of cyanobacteria - when life began creating free oxygen, resulting in "the great oxidation event" - which probably caused a massive extinction of anaerobic life forms, but which also led to the profusion of life as we know it now - including ourselves - and even changes in the geology of our planet. Knowledge itself is collaborative, as your dream also points out.
Fabulous. That phrase magnificence and insignificance captures our life, our little, but oh so precious and miraculous life.