Picture from the so-called “real” world today.  Not a bad place, I guess. At least for me.

This morning I woke up before 7.  I am not built to get up at this time, but that’s what happens when I go to bed before midnight. I woke up from a dream, and in the interest of checking on the status of my soul, I tried to remember it.  I only got the last part though:

Together with a female friend, I went into a shop where I hoped to get a job, as they were looking for a new employee and I felt that I might be qualified. However, the woman in charge rejected me out of hand, because I owed them money for stuff I had bought there and not paid.  She immediately produced a paper detailing the goods and the amount.  I had no memory of this, but started to explain that I had not intended to cheat them and of course I would pay it at once.  Then I looked at the amount and did a doubletake.  It was way too high, thousands of dollars, and when I looked at the specification, there were several TVs.  I haven’t had a TV in my lifetime.  In fact, it was all consumer electronics, and the shop was a clothes shop for men. For good measure, there was no name anywhere on the paper.  It had nothing to do with me at all.

At that point, I realized that I had not been rejected for the job – I had disqualified myself.  It was a test:  If I was honest enough for the job, I would immediately have realized that it could not possibly be true under any circumstances, and would not have started to think of excuses or reasons, I would just simply have stated that it could not possibly be true.  Because I had reacted differently, they knew that I was the kind of person who had problems with money, and they could not safely hire a person like that.

By the time this all sank in, I was already awake.

So yeah, still not Heaven I guess.  Although I suppose the Hell of Rejected Job Seekers is rather a pleasant stay compared to the Hells of classic lore with their pitchfork-equipped demons and stuff like that. Still probably depressing if you stay there long – I have a good friend who is depressed and going through that experience in real life now, and I remember collecting a couple hundred rejections myself when I was young.  It wasn’t particularly pleasant in itself, but not a Hell in any meaningful sense.  At least not in Norway, and at least not to me.

The world of dreams reminds me again of the expression “Land of Mass Confusion”, which I heard in Chris de Burgh’s When I think of you, the song where he portrays an infatuated, inexperienced and quite possibly insane (or at least mentally challenged) person in love.  Of course, it is hard enough for normal people to tell infatuation and insanity apart. And in a sense, each of us is also insane every night, unless your dreams are enormously more boring than mine.

Huston Smith is also convinced that our dreams take place in a real but different plane of existence.  Our subtle (“energy”) body parts way with the gross (physical) body and goes on to have its own adventures in its home realm.  Of course I don’t mean energy in the scientific sense, but the word “energy” has been used in the other sense long before modern science.  So let us not mix these up.

Anyway, that is just one way of seeing it.  Biologically, dreams are caused by a bioelectric storm in a small part of the limbic system. As it spreads outward from there, it stirs up all kinds of activity, first in the instinctual deep parts of the brain which we share more or less with reptiles and birds, then with the emotional brain that is approximately like that of our furry friends, and finally all the way to the “big brain”, the neocortex that has our personal memories and tendencies stored.  This is also true.  But this is like looking at how electricity moves through a computer, and make conclusions from this about the nature of Windows or iTunes.  The software is not really part of the computer, and the mind is not really part of the brain, even though each of them would be pretty useless to us without their hardware.

Huston Smith points out that the impact of dreams is largely their intensity, as each dream is the first.  There is no habituation, we experience everything as if for the first time.  Even when a dream repeats, we usually don’t notice until afterwards. Inside the dream, it is still new, whether it be pleasure or terror. They take us unaware, and that is their strength. Their weakness is that they are disconnected, fragmented, unmoored.  They take us away to a land of mass confusion, and we don’t know what to say when they are there.  Like infatuation or insanity.

The same is my impression of childhood, from my memory of it. It was a time of mass confusion, but also of mass novelty.  I am probably still very childish for someone my age, but it is not as if each day is filled with confusion anymore.  But when I look around, I see confused people everywhere. Mostly the young, of course, but not only them.  Some of my best friends are confused on a regular basis. I wish I could do something about it.  I wish I could help them wake up.  But I probably need some more waking up myself first.  “The obscurely spoken is the obscurely thought” after all.

Perhaps I can say something more systematic tomorrow. Then again, that was what I thought today too.