On Life as a Dream

Sometimes life feels like a dream.  Surely everyone can relate to the surprise and confusion Neo feels in The Matrix the first time he spots an instance of deja vu.  In Neo's case, there's a good explanation for deja vu--Trinity tells him that, actually, deja vu occurs when the computer-generated matrix world we live in re-programs or re-writes code--but in our life, unless we subscribe to a real-life matrix philosophy, deja vu and other dream-like qualities are simply confusing, perhaps even frightening or joyous, depending on our perspective.  If we believe in a god who has predestined or fated live events, then good dream-like moments may joyously confirm our belief; if we believe that there's no rhyme or reason for intelligent life, then good and bad dream-like moments may blur together as comical and entirely coincidental, not to be investigated; if we believe in a god who grants free-will or that there's some purpose in living well and spiritually, regardless of any god's existence, then good dream-like moments may serve to encourage us and bad dream-like moments may terrify us out of our belief, may convince us that actually there's no point to living well because the forces of evil are indeed in control.  What we do with the strangest moments in our lives will, then, greatly affect our general outlook on life and, by definition, death as well.  Plenty of reason, then, to explore how life can sometimes feel like a dream, why, and how we should approach that feeling.

An entire book could be written, surely, about one person's experiences in both the good and bad dream-like events categories and then how varying life perspectives and beliefs may react to those events.  Here I do not intend to write a book, thank God, but to clarify, using one instance, how and why life and death themselves are wrapped up in our working through our dream-like moments.  This is the case of a bad dream-like moment which, obviously, could and should be termed as a nightmare.

One of my favorite stories to tell, whether the point is good parenting, how my mother is funny, how I was an idiot kid, or how the woods behind my house growing up are really great, is a story about two of my friends and I, around sixth grade, going into the woods behind my neighborhood and getting lost.  We didn't tell anyone we were going up there.  I mean, obviously, we were kids.  We go out there, walk along a trail or two, and then I recognize a trail from this one time my father took me out to see the stream in the woods.  I convinced my friends that we didn't need to re-trace our steps to get home because we were all of two minutes from my house if we continued down this trail.  Now, one of those two friends of mine lived on the street with me and spent much more time in the woods than I did, and he asked, "Are you sure?"  Damn right I was sure.  Fifteen minutes later we wind up at a pond behind an elementary school, not at my house.  I missed a turn somewhere that I didn't know I should have been looking for.  Once we were there, we decided to play at the pond.  A few minutes after that, the father of the friend who didn't live on the street with us came to pick up his son.  Apparently, and thankfully, he knew that the trails behind my house also led to the pond behind the elementary school and he came found us. 

Imagine for a second that you are a father coming to pick up your son who had been, as far as you knew, innocently playing at a friend's house, only to arrive there to learn that, actually, the other parents had no idea where your son was.  You then frantically visit the house of another kid who lives on the street and learn from that set of parents that, maybe, they think, they heard the three boys trudging off into the woods.  You yell out into the woods and you receive no answer.  The time you were supposed to pick up your son was many minutes ago and you know your son isn't that irresponsible that he'd forget.  We haven't even arrived at the nightmare part of this story and already you're freaking out.  So you leave the mother of your son's friend (that's my mother) who has a bad knee clambering up into the woods while you rush off to the pond behind the elementary school.  It's all a mess.  When you find your son and the other two irresponsible kids who were supposed to know what they were doing in their own woods, you're angry, right?

Wrong.  That father, who had every right to be pissed off at everyone, perhaps including his own son, was extremely patient and kind, though firm, in teaching us all the ways we had messed up and how we could do better in the future.  He didn't want us to feel bad but didn't want us to act so irresponsibly again.  I remember this story well, and I tell it again and again, partly because the image of my mother's climbing up the hill in the woods was funny to me (it shouldn't have been) but mostly because the reaction of my friend's dad was so appropriate that I did feel bad and I never wanted to let him down ever again.  I also remember that story because of the last thing my friend's father said to us: "If you're going to play near water, make sure that everyone can swim or that you can rescue people if necessary.  Did you know that [I'm going to call my friend J] J can't swim?" 

Friendship, especially when you're younger, oscillates through stages.  At that particular time in sixth grade, J and I were particularly close, but it only lasted for a few weeks.  We were in the 'really close' stage of friendship where you hang out a lot and have sleepovers for only a few weeks.  Yet in that time we did have a couple of sleepovers.  At one of those sleepovers, which happened either shortly before or after the woods affair, J randomly asked me what I thought I'd be when I grew up.  To be honest, and I told him this, I had never, to that point, ever thought about what I would be when I grew up.  At least not seriously--I may have on occasion thought about being a professional hockey player, but I knew that was silly.  So after admitting to not having given it any thought, I blurted out something like, "But maybe, I guess, I'll be a pastor."  We talked about why--I had no idea why--for a little while, and then talked about how he was asking because he felt pressure to start figuring out his own life trajectory but didn't know where to start, and then we went to sleep and I forgot about the whole evening... until about ten years later when I first started seriously thinking and praying about going to seminary. 

My decision to go to seminary was, in the context of my sleepover with J, perhaps the first time I considered how similar life is to a dream.  In dreams, oftentimes a story is randomly and inexplicably changed by, say, a purple dinosaur rampaging through your house.  The dream may have been about a tea party with historical celebrities and then in comes a purple dinosaur.  Like an Ionesco play.  Then the rest of your dream concerns running away from or stopping the purple dinosaur and you've forgotten all about the tea party and the historical celebrities, unless one of those celebrities was Dr. Grant from Jurassic Park, because now Grant is running the dinosaur rescue effort because somehow the purple dinosaur is now your friend and is drowning.  Dreams are surprisingly orderly and well-written until they are not, until they are dominated by the random.  Studying to become a pastor felt that way, because it was essentially a random remark made to a friend about what I'd be when I grew up that suddenly dominated who I was becoming.  Either it was random, or God or the universe knew all along where I'd end up, but I didn't want to consider that possibility.  I'm a free-will kind of guy.  Now I wonder differently.  Let us continue telling the nightmare story.

Only a few months into my seminary career I got a random call from J.  I say 'random' because around the time of junior or senior year in high school, I distanced myself from our group of friends for a number of good and stupid personal reasons.  J and I had not spoken for any length of time to each other for at least four years, probably five, when he called me.  So long had it been that we had talked that J had to make sure it was still me who used the phone number he had for me in his directory.  He asked me how I was doing and then asked, "Have you heard about Giselle?"  I instantly knew then that 'life is a dream' can also mean it's a nightmare.

Giselle was a friend J and I both had in elementary school.  In elementary school, Giselle was slightly more than a friend to me, though.  She was a kind of goddess to me.  I wanted to be more than friends with her, but I didn't know what that meant, and I was also slightly intimidated by how confident Giselle was.  But she wasn't a jerk.  She was kind-hearted and loving.  After elementary school, I'm not sure I ever saw Giselle again.  I'm sure that we attended the same schools but for some reason I didn't see her and therefore my feelings slowly dwindled and eventually I forgot about her. 

Until seminary.  I received a Facebook friend request from Giselle a couple of months before seminary, which I obviously accepted, and then about a month into seminary her posts started appearing on my Facebook home page.  At first they were posts of relief and freedom, as she shared with the world that she had ended an unhealthy and abusive relationship.  Then her posts turned sour as Giselle shared some fear that she might be in danger.  My first inclination was to send her a message and offer her to come and stay with me at my dorm, hours away and certainly safe.  I decided not to send that message because, I figured, someone else closer would certainly be better suited to helping and protecting her, and surely that someone else would step forward.  It was only a few days after that decision that I got the call from J.  So I knew what he was going to tell me: Giselle had been murdered by her ex-boyfriend. 

Suddenly life was surreal, and not in a good way.  I wondered then as I do know if our brains transform moments that are either too glorious or devastating into surrealism as a survival technique; if our feeling like life is a dream isn't because life is a dream but because we can't handle life's vicissitudes without some power, even if it's our own mind, working to protect us.

Regardless, J knew that I had a strange relationship with Giselle and he didn't want to leave me in shock.  To end the conversation on a better note, he asked me what I was up to.  I told him, and he said, "Oh, that's awesome, so you're really doing what you thought you might be.  That's really cool."  Now the darkness of life's dreaminess combined with the goodness of life's dreaminess, because I couldn't quite believe J would remember from one off-hand remark I didn't even mean or understand at the time that I 'wanted' to be a pastor.  It felt good to me to know that not only did J remember but that his memory proved that I was on the right path for me.  The only other person in my life who has ever said or suggested that I am doing what they always thought I should or would, or reminded me that I myself said I might, I married. 

Fast forward time again, about eight years this time, to the present day, to the next time I hear someone call me and ask if I had heard about a person close to me in the distant past.  Only a couple of weeks ago my mother called, which is strange because I'm usually the one who calls her, and she asked, "Have you heard about J?"  Perhaps you know where this nightmare is going.

J, I learned, got married and was on his honeymoon when he and his new wife were swept up by a flash flood.  His wife was able to swim out and survive but J did not.  "Did you know J can't swim?" 

Of course, being able to swim may not help when caught by a flash flood, especially if you're in a car, as it seems they were.  I'm also, surely, not the only person who was told J couldn't swim and most definitely not the only person mourning his passing.  J was a great guy.  But the nightmare isn't merely about J's unfortunate and tragic death.  The nightmare is how the story has unfolded, how we got to this point and the memories that life, or my mind, or something, has emphasized over time and recently: from J's dad's comments and question, to the sleepover and random question and my random answer, to my strangely following through on my random answer, to J's memory of that answer while also ruining the happy dream by telling me about the Giselle nightmare, and then full circle with my mother's phone call.  In my head, as soon as I hung up after my mother's phone call, the pieces fit together like a dream, like a nightmare, well-ordered yet tragically random at the same time.

You could now be saying to yourself that this essay reads more like a journal entry than a thoughtful essay.  I understand that.  And since I've given myself an opening for a tangent, I'll take it: I want to make clear that I in no way mean to distract from the very real grief that many are experiencing right now about J's passing if you knew him (which I am experiencing, too, and why I am not using his full name or more details about his death).  But from where I'm standing, this nightmare has taught me two things.  Well, more than two, but my wife only allows me a certain amount of time each week to myself for writing and I want to make sure I finish this.

1.  I don't know why other people use the phrase, seriously or not, "life is a dream."  I do not know why we sing, "row, row, row your boat..." or why de la Barca wrote a landmark play, "Life is a Dream," hundreds of years ago.  I do know, however, that, like in de la Barca's play, the phrase sums up well the mystery and strangeness of life.  Even if we believe in a Creator God, which would, seemingly, nullify the idea of life as a dream, we must still reckon with the concept because there's no question our hearts and minds process life itself like we dream.

Psychologists are rather clear on the fact that dreams are our minds' attempts to process our memories and thoughts.  Mystics would agree, I'm sure, though they may add that dreams are also our attempt to process the more grand spiritual forces, especially in terms of prophecy, at work in our lives.  Whatever the case, the fact that our minds are able to weave all of our most and least pressing thoughts and memories into a story that we can make some amount of sense of night after night is truly amazing.  Dreams are memorable not because of what we process but because of how we process.

How we process our thoughts, feelings, and memories at night is also, clearly, how we process when awake, too.  As soon as I hung up the phone with my mother, my mind had drawn a story-line through all of my experiences with J that made sense of his death.  In my story, in my nightmare, it made absolute sense that he would have died in water, on his honeymoon, and that I found out by a random phone call, while I myself am questioning my role as a pastor--and not only am I questioning my role as a pastor but the day after I received the call I also was set to fulfill a requirement on the process toward ordination that I've just started embarking on.  It all made sense to me.  Obviously these things happened, and obviously they happened when and how they did.  My mind had pieced together a dream out of my life and interactions with J.

To say that life is a dream, then, is not an escape from whatever meaning or purpose we may have in life, if we have meaning and purpose, but rather a statement of fact: we literally have no other way of processing and understanding the happiest and worst moments of our life, and everything in between, except as a dream.  If we deny life's dreaminess then we deny life itself, we become walking idiots with no vision and no understanding of who we are.  We only develop those traits through reflection and examination, and if we are reflecting and examining then we must admit that life is a dream.

Of course, life can feel like a dream for the opposite reason, that we do no reflecting or examining, no processing, and we are confounded later in life as to how we ended up in an office at 43 Main Street talking about loans at 3:23 p.m. on a Tuesday with a stranger.  But the queer thing, here, is that those who do spend time in reflection and prayer often try to deny that life is anything like a dream.  Life is a dream.  Life can't be anything but a dream.  Otherwise, we are not a person, because we are not processing.  I guess we could say it's a paradox of sorts: in order for life to have meaning, in order for our specific lives to have meaning to ourselves, we must think of life as a dream, as if we were/are sleeping.

de la Barca wrote his play to grapple with questions that we humans have been grappling with since our minds were opened, whether that happened as an evolutionary, random event or as God breathed His spirit into us.  Those questions are: what are we doing here?  How did we get here?  Are we alone?  Are we actually living?  Are we in a computer program?  In someone else's dream?  If eternal life is real, then is mortal life just a dream?  Are we pieces in a game (I think of the final shot at the end of Men-in-Black)?  What is the difference between real and surreal, if there is any difference at all?  To say that life is a dream does not to answer these questions philosophically but it does answer these questions existentially.

In other words, "life is a dream" should not be a philosophy that applies universally.  We cannot know whether others are living their life as a dream, in a dream, as they should.  All we can know is whether we, I, am living this life as a dream.  Am I processing the random and obvious as a dream?  Am I taking the highly emotional, good and bad, the ball of life's mess and unraveling that ball into a dreamy story so that I can move on?  Am I stuck in the emotions of the past, or stuck in an unreflective present with no sense of the future?  If we live life as a dream we protect ourselves from the worst of life's curveballs, because they'll no longer be curveballs but rather part of the dream's story-arc; if we live life as a dream, we are not stuck in the emotions of the past because we have processed them into our dream; if we live life as a dream, we are not a pinball living in the present with no sense of the future, because we will have reflected our life into a story-line moving into the future; if we live life as a dream, life becomes a steady stream of nothingness that, in who we are and who we are becoming, can become an everythingness because of how we process, of how we dream.  Life lived as a dream can both be a survival technique in a crazy world and a technique of becoming, free from emotional strings, as long as we do not succumb to the seeming meaninglessness and nothingness of life to translate "life is a dream" into "whatever, man."

2.  Or, life's dreaminess could be sinister.  Admitting that life is a dream could be only a survival technique in a world that has no hope and no meaning.

Remember that I interpreted J's memory of my throw-away, random comment that I might be a pastor when I grew up as a happy moment.  At the time I interpreted that happy moment to perhaps be like a dream in the sense that a random event then affected my later life, but all the while I was still in control.  What if I was wrong on all counts?  What if, actually, J's memory was a sign that I couldn't do anything other than be a pastor?  What if my 'random' comment at the sleepover was not random and instead the universe's, or God's, way of saying through me that I had no choice in the matter?

Here is where one's perspective and approach matter a great deal.  I have said to my churches and to others that know me that I "could do no other than be a pastor."  I tried for a couple of years but discovered that, actually, nothing will make me happy or fulfilled other than being a pastor.  I have told this to people in a mostly grateful way: God has given me gifts to be a pastor and so my choice to use them will be a meaningful and gratifying choice, yet always my choice.  As originally, it is a good dream.  Yet what if, in actual fact, I really couldn't do anything other than be a pastor?  What if the matter isn't so much about meaning and fulfillment but predestined fate?  Even if the end result is the same, not having a choice in the matter would be a nightmare.  Just as we seem to have little to no choice in the stories our dreams tell, so, too, we'd have no choice in life, making life only dark.  "Whatever, man," would then be our only defense against being meaningless pawns in a dream.

Everything is about interpretation.  We could go on.  In fact, I will go on with this, pointing out that maybe I didn't have a choice in saving, or not saving, Giselle.  Perhaps I want and wanted to be a good person but that's not in the cards for me.  So when that desire came to the fore, the universe, or God, or the evil forces running our dream, suppressed that desire, not just because I shouldn't save Giselle but because she needed to die, like in Final Destination.  In that movie, a guy has a dream that everyone on the plane they've just boarded will blow up, so he causes a ruckus and he and a bunch of others leave the plane, watching it blow up a few minutes later; then the universe comes to kill them in a whole host of ways, in the same order they would have died on the plane.  What if that movie is on to something?  Whenever I tell the story about Giselle, as I still carry significant guilt around with me, usually the first and often the only thing people to say to me as a means of consolation is, "If you had reached out to her, then maybe her ex-boyfriend would have found her anyway and killed not only her but you, too.  Perhaps would have killed anyone in the dorm on the way.  Maybe God wanted to save you for other purposes."  Friends, that is not consolation, because essentially we are then admitting our choices don't matter, that if someone is meant to die at a certain time then they will die, no matter what we do to save them.  If that is true, then it serves no purpose trying to better our natural instincts, trying to make ourselves or others better, trying to offer succor and security and refuge, because in the end, those who are meant to be murdered or swept away in a flood will be and nothing matters.  This is a way to interpret these dream-like events: yes, it's a dream, concocted by the mind of some higher power, and so we're screwed and we better screw everything except trying to enjoy the good moments that come our way.  As far as I see it, that would be truly a nightmare.

Another interpretation is that I simply screwed up with Giselle.  And, rather than J's death being an exclamation point to the end of a chapter in this dream that I cannot control and have no free-will in, J's death is simply a coincidental, random happening that only calls to attention Giselle and the other moments I've shared here as a means of free-will processing so that I can have greater power and grace to act better in the future.

Essentially, the choice is between being caught up in a dream or writing a dream for the purpose of becoming; between having no choice but to f*** it or making sense of our life in a dream-like way to give us greater power to choose in the future; between a nightmare or a dream that has no objective measure of good or bad. 

We could say that somehow or another I knew things I should not have known in sixth grade, that somehow or another I knew that I'd become a pastor and that I knew J would die in a water accident, and that's why I said what I did and remembered that woods affair the way I did.  We could say that either I or my Facebook or Giselle, or whatever combination of factors, knew that Giselle would need help and that I'd be in a position to help, and that's why her posts started showing up on my page, and why J was the one to call me.  We could say the universe somehow knew that the two times I'd hear about someone I cared for in my distant past would be Giselle and J, so the universe had J be the one to call me about Giselle.  We could say that what I have processed as a dream is actually a sign that we able to connect to a higher understanding of some sort.  We could say that, but I'm not sure it would be helpful because at some point we still need to choose.  We need to choose how we are going to interpret life as a dream--as nightmare or as a means of processing for becoming; either we have no choice or the choice to write our dream story.

Currently, it's hard not to perceive life as nightmare in the wake of J's death, particularly because I am unable to attend his wake or service (for other dream-like reasons).  His passing alone is a nightmare.  Adding to it the book-ending of my memories is not necessary but certainly contributes to the nightmare atmosphere.  But it seems rather depressing to me to understand life as a rolling dream down a stream whose path and origin we do not know.  I simply cannot go there.  I would break as a person if I interpreted life as a nightmare leaving me with no control or choice.  I'd rather feel guilt about Giselle and feel the full force of the tragedy around J's passing than think that it was all pre-ordained. 

And in feeling the guilt and tragedy, I can process and unravel the mystery of life in my dream, I can make sense of it, no matter how wrong or right my dream story is, and thus move on into the future.  I think that's what dreams are meant for.  Not merely processing but preparing--preparing us for the new day to come.