“I had a Dream too”- The Crown of Creation and a moment of marvel
I realized only in hindsight that giving anything the title “I had a dream too” had its own bold, perhaps disrespectful connotations. Nonetheless, the dream I had a couple of weeks ago has nothing to do with MLK Jr., race, or the best aspirations humanity might rally, that King called us to in his dream. I share, my weird dream because it does have to do with how miraculously marvelous we can be.
See, my dream was a real dream that took place somewhere between 5:20 and 7am on a recent Thursday morning. I was feeling the need for another stretch of sleep, and found it. What happened between my ears that morning reminds me of how miraculous all our minds are. I thought I would share it.
In that stretch of REM time, I found myself dreaming that I was creating a movie that I simultaneously found myself watching. It starts with a very Matthew Broderick like lead character trying to de-fog his window with his sleeve while driving. FYI- I do this hasty task myself from time to time.
Anyway, in this movie, I had dreamed up where that I was seemingly the writer, director, and even audience, Broderick (unable to fully see through the glass) watches his car slide slowly off a snowy road, up, and then over the crest of a beautiful long hill near a house. I remember there being a comic absurdity to how far Matthew Broderick drives off the road. In this movie/dream scene we never really see the end; I presumably crash to a halt that again we never see. Somehow, wordlessly, this is the point in my mental movie that I, its very author discover to be a comedy. How one can surprise oneself in a dream that we ourselves create is pretty amazing.
The next scene my mind entertained myself with involved the introduction of a character that seemed to be Matthew Broderick girlfriend. She was played by Christa Miller, the brunette actress who played Kate on the Drew Carey show. (I remembered after waking that I had watched a speck of that show in re-runs just two nights before). I have a little crush on her.
In scene two, we find her lying face down in an uncomfortable prone position in the cab of an old truck. She is trying to fix something under the dashboard so she can leave Matthew Broderick and go live on the Northern Coast, presumably somewhere like Northern Washington. I don’t know how this news is conveyed to the audience, only that in my dream I understood it as her goal. Moreover, I have no idea what any of it means, it is a dream after all.
Anyway, in the next scene in my dream/movie we find her beginning to be harassed in a comical over-the-top way by a low-grade moronic cop played by the scruffy but affable Ryan Reynolds. I’m not kidding these actors were in my dream. Why? I’ll never know. It’s a dream. Who do I look like, Carl Jung? In this scene, there was a funny encounter and a disagreement between them. Frustrated by their encounter, Drew Cary’s Kate proceeds to ignore his plea that she leave the truck and returns back to uncomfortably lying down, head under the dashboard to fix something. We never see what?
The conclusion of this scene involves the rube cop Ryan Reynolds duct-taping the doors and windows of her truck so solidly that she cannot easily get out. Interestingly, I had just watched a PBS program on the ingenuity of honey badgers, and this scene was reminiscent of something they did. However, again, I have no idea why my mind took me on this journey. Nobody does, or likely ever will.
This is not about foggy car windows, duct tape, or TV crushes. It is about the capacity of our brains- which as far as we can tell are the crown of creation.
I woke up shortly after that. Pleased, amazed, wanting to remember and really share the marvel of just how cool it is that we have such imaginative capacity built into our very bodies. We are remarkably our own universes, and yet hardly know the basics of how we work. Damn! Wow!
Somehow in that early morning in a way nobody can explain, I was watching a movie that my own head was making. And, seemingly for its own playful purpose. So cool! We have the most powerful tool in the known universe, the (known) crown of creation right between our ears that seems capable of understanding nearly all things except itself. Damn, life is interesting.
There are lots of theories about dreams. One African tribe believes that dreams are the real reality and that our conscious lives are essentially the illusions. Freud called dreams the royal road to our unconscious selves. Jung says that via dreams we connect to a broader more singular consciousness. Another of the more recent working theories is that dreaming is the act and the result of the brain organizing our conscious experiences into memories.
The accuracy of any of these theories is not my point. My point is that we are amazing. That amazing isn’t always pleasant, but good or bad it is always amazing.
That’s all, just a moment of wonder at who we are.
~ Steve Wilson