Thursday 30 August 2007

Pic of the day: Why do I forget most of my dreams? Probably because they aren't all that important?

Dreams

These are two dreams I have had recently. They are both pretty weird and would probably be disturbing to my Christian readers, not from indecency but from the implied heathen content.

I dreamed that I worked for the Norse gods. It was not the safest of workplaces, for they were involved in strange things, and also had a humor that ran toward practical jokes involving explosives. If one of them exploded, he just put himself back together again. I saw this several times. They disliked pretentious and self-centered servants, and expected respect. They were OK with me not worshiping them, though. And they were informal, Odin especially hated bureaucracy. There was also the perk that their divinity tended to rub off on their servants; in fact, some of their oldest servants were hard to tell apart from minor gods by the time I began there.

Given that the Norse gods were rather immature (both in my dream and in the original mythology), you may wonder when I say that I woke up feeling that serving them caused actual spiritual growth. This is certainly not to say that I would do such a thing in real life. But the experience was not entirely unlike reading One Cosmos on a daily basis, no offense intended to Dr Godwin. I disagree with him on various things, but there is no denying that he has a vertical dimension that surpasses most bloggers (not that this says much, I'm afraid, but it is still remarkable). The Norse gods, by their very nature as mythological beings, were thoroughly vertical. You can't work for a bunch of gods and be a materialist, and whatever habits you may have in that direction are likely to fade over time.

Of course I don't recommend that Christians take up the worship of Odin and Thor. But it is not the first time that I have felt a kind of respect for the ancients who did worship these idols. It was what they had in their time, and I believe that those who were pious then would have been pious now. There were certainly those who ignored religion back then as well and believed only in their own strength, as there also are today.

***

In another dream, a male spirit and a female spirit stepped down into the void. Where the female spirit moved, the void was filled with wather; but where the male spirit moved, the void was filled with stone. After a time they began to fight, but they could not win one over the other, and only achieved that the land and the sea were broken and scattered among each other, and so continents and islands and seas and lakes were formed. Seeing that they were equal in might, they ceased fighting, and the female began shaping lifeforms out of the water. But they were flimsy, for they were made mostly of water, and soon fell apart. Seeing this, the male began to craft beings out of stone. These endured, but they were big and heavy and clumsy, dumb giants who pleased not their maker. Grudgingly they each borrowed from the other: The female spirit mixed some earth into the water and made the fishes that swim in the sea. And the male spirit mixed some water into the earth and made from it men who walked upon the earth. But here my dream ended, and I know not what became of them.

OK, this is pure creation myth, like some primitive coming up with an explanation for why the world is the way it is. Completely pointless in our time and age. You know it, I know it. It is kind of pretty, but that is all.

Or is it some kind of deeper meaning here, about the need for both the masculine and feminine principle in order to maintain the world, and thus the self? Well, if so it is a bit too vague to serve its purpose. There isn't a lot of feminine principle around here these days, and I've grown amazingly used to it.