Capybara Rescue

I just dreamed that I came home for lunch and found my brother Ryan sitting in an armchair, watching three capybaras napping on a greasy blanket on the couch.

I say to him, "There seem to be three capybaras on the couch." He says, "I know." I say, "Why are there three capybaras on the couch?" He says, "I saw an ad that (name of community) Capybara Rescue was having a fostering program and I thought it sounded great." I said, "Sure it'll be great, until the living room starts to smell like an Iowa feed lot." Then I woke up mad at my brother.

The truly daft part about this dream is that I don't actually have an armchair.

Now to see if I can get back to sleep again. ...

Art: Photo by Karoly Lorentey, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Dreaming in Reverse

Yesterday morning, I awoke from a dream that's been stuck in my head since then. I was a passenger in a minivan along with my current work supervisor and the lady who served as rehearsal accompanist for the St. Louis Symphony Chorus during the years I sang with that group. The pianist was at the wheel of the car and for some reason, she was driving entirely in reverse, at full speed, maneuvering around corners and whatnot. It was kind of a thrill ride, actually, and I felt a sense of danger. I'm not asking what such a dream might signify. Most likely, it signifies nothing. But it sure was weird.

Monday Morning Dreams

I woke up this morning from another really weird dream. I was a member of a delegation to some foreign culture. Our group seemed to be left waiting over-long in some kind of anteroom before being ushered into a banquet area where the tables were really low to the floor, which was smooth hardwood but, for some reason, wasn't level.

In fact, on my side of the table, the floor started sloping steeply downhill, so that I had a hard time kneeling without sliding away from the table. I don't remember exactly what the food was like, except that there were several varieties of finger food being served from communal plates and that I quickly became frustrated with the difficulty of picking up a piece of food while still remaining in control of my kneeling position. It seems like the kind of scenario that would make for a good fish-out-of-water, slapstick comedy.

Also, and I feel bad about this, I seem to have banged a member of my group in the face with a door while being ushered into dinner. Once again, exactly what skills my brain is trying to develop with this dream curriculum, I can't even begin to guess.

Potty dream

A few nights ago – actually, during a Saturday morning lie-in – I had a couple of memorable but goofy dreams. The kind of dreams I have to call my mother about so she can laugh at them. And she did laugh when I called her.

In the first dream, I had a new baby brother and I was tasked with changing its diaper. Of course, being a dream task, this turned out to be frustrating and fraught with chaotic impediments, like the baby's clothing changing from moment to moment all by itself. While this was going on, I recall telling the baby not to mess his life up like his older brothers. (If Ryan and Jake are reading this, I'm sure I was including myself in that comment, so give me a break.) Also, at some point, I dropped baby on the floor, but he didn't seem to take any serious harm from it. Oh, and by the way, the baby could talk like a grown-up, which didn't totally freak me out in the moment. I suppose that's the weirdest bit of all.

I must have gotten up to pee, or turned over in bed, or something because some time passed and I found myself having a completely separate dream and it went like this: I was walking around a small town, possibly a bit like the last town I lived in before where I live now, and it was late evening so nothing was open. The trouble was, I really had to pee. So I was looking for any place with a public bathroom that was open, and I was running out of options. Then I noticed that the vestibule door to city hall was unlocked, so I went in. Behind a plexiglas barrier was the city clerk's desk, with only a small opening to pass utility payments through. So, as one does, I unzipped and started peeing through the opening ... then looked up and noticed that my performance was being recorded by a video camera.

Obviously, when I woke up from that dream, I immediately had to go to the bathroom again.

They say that nightmares are supposed to teach you how to deal with a crisis, and good dreams have something to do with writing your previous day's experiences into long-term memory. But I don't know what these kinds of dreams are trying to teach me, unless it's "always have a ride home after having too many at the downtown bar" and "be careful how you handle newborns who can talk like a grown-up."

Creepy Dream

About a week ago, I woke up from a really weird dream and wrote down a note about it, to remind myself about it later. I didn't really need the reminder; it's been on my mind a lot. What a creepy dream!

I dreamed that I was attending a conference with some old schoolfellows, staying at the kind of motel where guests' rooms open straight out onto the parking lot. As I approached my room, I noticed something hanging on the door that I took at first for a decorative bundle of straw or fine sticks. Then I recognized it as an enormous, daddy long-legs type spider that immediately started chasing me.

As I ran for it, I gradually realized that my initial guess was closer to the truth, and my pursuer was really more of a kind of hollow tumbleweed. It outwardly seemed to be just rolling around, but it really was following me everywhere I went and even seemed to be trying to head me off. It had intelligence and intent. Somehow I realized that allowing it to touch me would be disaster.

I don't know what would have happened when it caught me – whether it was trying to bite me or snag on my clothing or steal my car keys or what – but I woke up pretty freaked out. I also remember that my chase covered some interesting dream terrain.

Well, sweet dreams, y'all!

Word Coining Dream

In the past week or two, I've posted a couple of whimsical word coinages on Facebook:

Boinkruptcy: n. financial ruin resulting from sexual misconduct.
Pressert: n. dessert eaten before the meal.
Priesta: n. a nap taken before a meal.

Last night, or early this morning, I had a dream in which I subconsciously coined a new word – unless it's a foreign word that I'm not aware that I'm aware of. The latter has happened before, you know. I had a dream once from which I awoke and wrote down a marvelous line that I had heard coming out of my own mouth, thinking that a portion of it was just beautiful gibberish, only to realize in the morning that it was ancient Greek. (And before you go woo-woo, I studied Greek in college.) So, I'm not ruling out the possibility that this might mean something in a real language, but at the moment I can't find any evidence of that.

Then again, as this blog elsewhere bears witness, I have coined words before – I seem to remember "uplight" and "downlight" being among them – even sometimes in my dreams, such as "relect" and "prelect."

So, back to this morning's dream. I was listening to some guy with an Irish accent, who I believed to be a highly cultured person – maybe an author, like James Joyce or Patrick O'Brian – talk about horrible places he'd been to as a child. For imagery, I seemed to be looking at a slideshow of more or less abstract images illustrating the horribleness of those places. At one point, he mentioned the airport of a certain city in Ireland and added, with tones of disgust, a word that sounded like either ometha or olmatha – with accent on the initial o – then repeated the word with emphasis. At once, I understood that it was a rarely used but beautiful word that somehow combined the meanings "a ruin," "a shambles," "a labyrinth" and "a place whose ugliness traumatized me for life." It described somewhere badly designed, badly maintained, full of disorder and ugliness; a place where one could get lost and feel damned.

The image that went with the disembodied voice's description of yon horrible airport was something like this. Very helpful, eh?

So, I suppose, my imaginary Irish author friend may have been lamenting the brutality of brutalist architecture. But I awoke only a moment after his remark, still impressed by the vehemence with which he cried, "Ometha! Ometha!" I was so impressed that I got right up, though it was 5 a.m., and searched Google and Merriam-Webster for it, using various spellings. No luck. Can anyone tell me whether I dreamed this word up or whether it's really out there somewhere?

Inadequacy Dreams

I spent a couple of days sick this past week. I took an afternoon off one day, and a couple of hours out of the next afternoon, to get a little extra sleep during the day. I think it did me good. But it also did a number on my head, to judge by the weird dreams I had, both during those naps and toward the end of both nights’ sleep.

I’ve referred to some of my past, recurring types of dreams as frustration dreams, job stress dreams, embarrassment dreams and so on. There were the entertaining dreams, inspired by whatever I’ve been reading or watching onscreen. There were the “get up and pee, stupid” dreams, in which I find myself searching in vain for bladder relief. But these last few dreams are in a class by themselves. Let’s call them inadequacy dreams.

They’re the sort of plot-heavy scenarios in which everything I do falls short of the expectation. They’re full of characters who are continually turning to look at me with pity, exasperation or (my least favorite of all) a smug little smile. Triumph. Schadenfreude. You name it, eyefuls of it were hurled my way, often because of mistakes I could only have avoided if someone had given me better information before I acted.

Literally everything I did, large or small, was inadequate. In some episodes, it might be merely reaching for the wrong taco on a platterful of them and taking a bite out of it before anyone told me that, on the side of the wrappers facing away from me, they had specific people’s names written on them. At other times, it was due to my capacity for getting lost in a weirdly laid out four-story building in which, for some reason, I was supposed to run a line of garden hose up from the ground floor to the roof – possibly (but don’t quote me on this) to fight off a dragon attack. Nobody was there to guide me through floorplans that were different on each level, and no stairwell went straight up all four levels, and one stairwell ended in thin air, and by the time I got there the show was over because some other guy with a line of hose had come up the other end of the building and did the job himself. Is it not enough that I must endure a dream about being lost in a labyrinthine building, but I must then go on to dream about people staring at me incredulously, clearly amazed at my uselessness, and (in one guy’s case) even lying about where he saw me and when?

Another vignette I remember from those dreams is one where I come home to find my front door wide open. Someone has been inside and looked around, but nothing has been taken. The house is a mess, but only its usual mess. I feel judged, ashamed, exposed, caught in the act of being an abject slob who couldn’t decorate an interior if his eternal soul depended on it. Upon waking, it actually takes me a few moments to sort out the dream from real life – the last indignity.

Maybe inadequacy is on my mind. Disappointment with my life. Unease about the future. But really – can’t a guy get some rest from these things, at least in sleep? What ever happened to those dreams where I was Jack Aubrey on the quarterdeck of the H.M.S. Surprise? Fighting off dragon attacks might be good – if only I got there on time to see the dragon! But sneering looks, eye-rolls and a little blond girl giving me that “you’re in for it now” smirk? Not my thing!

These dreams seem designed to crush the spirit out of me. I don’t know why my subconscious chose those sick-day naptimes and morning lie-ins to afflict me this way. Maybe it was a combination of the drugs I was on. Or maybe I was having a premonition of a book I started reading after the illness broke, which is totally about the kind of hopeless bloke I kept dreaming I was. Or am. It can be funny when it’s somebody else, someone fictional. But boy, does that kind of storyline take the fun out of being sick.

Fronday Morning Dream

Today is Fronday at the newspaper where I work. That is to say, our regular Monday deadline for next week's paper has been pushed up to Friday, because of the Labor Day holiday. Friday + Monday = Fronday. The phenomenon is also known as "the dread week of two Mondays." Get it? Good.

So, early this morning, with the prospect of Fronday looming in my subconscious, I had an interesting journalism-related stress dream.

In my dream, I was sent on a photography assignment to a high school dance, where I was somehow dragooned into shooting a picture of each couple attending the dance. First in line was a quadriplegic boy in a wheelchair, who was accompanied by a male caregiver. I pulled out my pen and reporter's notebook and asked for their names, but the caregiver insisted his name was "88 Colt" and launched into a long-winded, melodramatic story about how he came by it - probably something to do with a Dodge subcompact car, I suppose - but I interrupted him and politely asked him to save it for later. Then I tried lining up the shot, but one of the bulbs on this sort of track-light fixture above the dais was pointed in my direction and it was causing a lens flare. So, I started looking for a chair or something to stand on, so I could adjust the angle of the light, and started to get flustered by the evident impatience of the long line of dance-goers waiting to be photographed...

Yeah, it was a pretty miserable dream. It made me glad to wake up and realize that I only have to deal with Fronday.

Some bizarre dreams

During two of the last three nights, I had dreams that embedded themselves in my memory. I'm not sure what to make of them, other than to say, "Stick these in your pipe and smoke them, Dr. Freud!"

Three nights ago, I dreamed that I had changed careers so that it was now my job to capture escaped animals, and my current assignment was to retrieve an elephant that had gotten loose. I caught the elephant, all right, but I could not coax it onto a trailer so it could be hauled back to wherever it belonged. Though not very large as elephants go, it was very independent-minded. Instead, I had to cling to the wiry hairs on its back and hang off its side while it ran down the road. I can't remember feeling particularly afraid, only annoyed. It was the kind of dream that made it feel good to go back to my real job in the waking world.

Two nights ago, as I hovered between waking and sleeping, my semi-coherent mind coined two new words, apropos of God knows what. The first word, I recall, was "relect" - a noun, or perhaps substantive adjective, which, according to my dream etymology, literally meant "written out loud," but in general usage meant "a mode of speech or writing imprinting what it describes indelibly on one's memory." Related to it was the term "prelect," describing "a mode of speech or writing that erases whatever it describes from one's memory." Upon realizing what I had stumbled upon, I woke up and repeated the words and their definitions to myself, saving them for later. At the time, I thought they might come in handy for a science-fiction story. Looking back, I'm not sure they would hold even that much water.

How I Woke Up This Morning

Last night I set my alarm for 6:45 a.m. and went to sleep.

At 4:17 a.m., I was awakened out of an engaging dream by the distinct sound of a woman's voice in the next room, calling my first name.

It took me a few minutes to gather up the presence of mind to realize it was very unlikely there was anyone in my living room at that hour, after which I was able to verify there was no one there. It then occurred to me that very few women who know me locally would call me by my first name, in a community where nearly everyone knows me as "R.D." (This is in an area where I moved two years ago when I was hired to work at the same newspaper office as my dad, who has the same first name. So unofficially, but effectively, I changed my name to the initials to make it easier to distinguish between us.)

While the dream - I quickly decided it was that - was still very vivid in my memory, I thought about who I know who has a voice like the one I heard calling my name. At first I was inclined to consider a teacher at one of the local schools. I finally decided it was most like the voice of the local agent who sold me my health insurance. A very clear, assertive, carrying voice in a mezzosoprano range. And I suppose my insurance agent must know my real first name, since I use it when I fill out important paperwork. But she was no more likely to be in my living room at 0417 Central than anybody else who knows me by name, and I doubt that my hallucination of a voice like hers indicates any kind of wishful thinking on my part.

It was a creepy dream. Even after I had explained it away to my own satisfaction, I had trouble settling down to sleep again. After a while I gave it up, turned off my wake-up alarm, shaved, ate breakfast, and puttered around, looking for some way to blow time until I had to go to work.

At last, around 5:30 a.m., I decided I might lie down for a nap. I fell right asleep and started having more dreams, none of which I remember except for the very last bit. That's when a "mostly sunny" graphic popped up in the lower right corner of my dream, accompanied by time and temperature indicating it was 6:45 a.m. I dismissed it, reasoning that my alarm would have gone off if it was really that time... but a minute later I asked myself, "Did I re-set my alarm after I turned it off?"

I opened my eyes and looked at my alarm clock. It read 6:46 a.m., and the alarm was turned off.

Noncompliant Dream

Early this morning I had a dream that broke all the rules of the "showed up in school in your tighty-whities" genre.

Rule 1: Without any explanation, you suddenly find yourself at school in the middle of the day wearing nothing but undies. Me? I showed up early for school in my undies, reckoning it was due to some kind of hazing ritual or a handicap in a game. I was just glad to get ahead of the morning rush.

Rule 2: Your response to the looks everyone gives you is to wish you could die of embarrassment. Me? I gave anyone who looked in my direction the "Got a problem with that?" stare.

Rule 3: You remain paralyzed with horror until the dream ends or you wake up. Me? I went to my locker, rummaged around in it and brought forth a T-shirt and a pair of sweat pants I had discarded there on some previous occasion. Not a perfect solution, still a horrible outfit, but at least it was one I could lie low in. Then the dream moved on to another challenge.

It would be nice to feel so in-control of the everyday crises in my waking life.

Baseball Dream

Last night I dreamed that I was playing right field in a baseball game. The fact that I was terrible at it made the dream realistic. The bizarre part was that nobody else seemed to mind. Everybody on the other side seemed to be hitting into right field, though. I guess they knew a good thing when they saw it.

At one point in the game, I must have floated closer to the surface because it suddenly seemed that I was playing right field from a pile of pillows, identical to the pillows I was actually sleeping on, and not even attempting to go after the balls that rained down around me.

Then the dream changed into one where I was a father attempting to potty-train a toddler. The poor mite seemed to be suffering from an intestinal bug, to judge by the sounds, smells, and mess. When the kid rose from the seat, I noticed that he also had a great big hairless tail attached to his rear end. Unsurprisingly, I awoke with a cat nestled against my chest, and the smell from the next room suggested that his litter box needed to be scooped.

This Morning's Dreams

This morning, before my alarm clock put an end to a night's sleep foreshortened by illness, I dreamed (again) that I had gone back to high school. I have had this type of dream before, at times quite often. I have previously guessed at the reasons for this—such as a sensibility that I haven't fulfilled the career potential that I seemed to have when I was half the age I am now. Perhaps this particular rerun was scheduled, in part, because I am leaving one job and starting another within the next week—a small, cautious step up a career ladder I never planned to climb at all—and I'm on fairly low rungs yet. Or maybe it's just because I've recently looked back over earlier stages of my life and wished I could do them over.

It was an interesting version of the familiar dream. I don't remember any of that nonsense about being unable to find my way to class, or realizing near the end of term that I had completely forgotten to study one of my subjects, etc. I only remember being conscious that I had been through high school and college before (which is true), and that I was able to do some of it over again because I didn't show my age (which is not true). I don't know why I was doing this, but something in the plot and dialogue of the scene suggested that I was attending school under a false identity. This, in turn, suggests that I must have been either an undercover cop collecting evidence of a suspected crime, a "secret shopper" evaluating the school system, a journalist pulling a research stunt, or one of the vampires from Twilight.

Not that any of these possibilities crossed my mind during the dream; I thought of them after I woke up. In the dream itself, I only remember being quizzed by the school principal or superintendent—a man who looked more like my real appearance than my point-of-view avatar in the dream—and I worried that he was on to me. He asked me something like, "Don't I know you from somewhere?" I told him I had just graduated from his school, but he interrupted whatever I meant to say about being excited to go to college with, "No, I think I remember seeing you somewhere else..."

This could be the germ of a scene in a fun story. But it's probably been done before. There are already movies and TV shows about cops, writers, and vampires pretending to be high school kids. One wonders how they could possibly have gotten away with it. Whether played by Arliss Howard, Drew Barrymore, or Robert Pattinson, they all looked way too mature to be mistaken, even casually, for a high school student. In the real world, their cover would have been blown in a New York minute.

But then, when you think about it (and I did, I did), they could have no intelligent reason even to try. If anyone is going to write a story about what it is like to be a student here and now, it might as well be an actual student; the only thing an embedded journalist is going to find out about is what it feels like to stick out as an obvious phony. If the police need an undercover cop to infiltrate a high school, he's going to do it like Tom Berenger in The Substitute.

And as for a sparkly vampire frozen forever at an apparent age of somewhere between 17 and 23... what, is he stupid? Why would he even need this cover? Who is going to call a truant officer on a bunch of college-aged young adults who, after all, live so far out in the sticks that nobody ever sees them anyway? What are they really getting out of this endless, purgatorial repetition of secondary education, when they aren't even into human blood? I went back to my high school once, after a semester in college, and I was amazed at how awful it was. I had somehow forgotten the regimentation and restriction of every moment of the student's day—conditioned to jump up and run to the next task at the ringing of a bell, forced to participate in some class (even if only study hall) every hour of the day, monitored by the faculty during lunch period, needing permission to enter the library or use the bathroom... Gaaah!! If these people wanted knowledge, why didn't they just use their identity-forging superpowers to register for night classes at some university? Did their "vegetarianism" soften their brains?

Rant over.

Another part of my dream featured a really cool idea that somebody else has probably already patented. They'll make millions, no doubt. The concept: a video yearbook. I don't remember if it was an actual book, using that special computerized paper I've heard of, or an app loaded onto a notepad computer, with a graphic "page turn" effect between segments. Either way, it combined video clips with still photos, audio narration with animated titles, to tell stories about an institution—in this case, I think it was the St. Louis Symphony Chorus. One of my former colleagues in that group was featured in a video clip showing his interested reaction when a group of attractive female singers walked by. The narration/titles drew the reader's attention to his reaction and commented on the number of women in the group (which, in the dream, was greater than the total number of singers in the real Symphony Chorus). It was really in bad taste, but the concept stuck with me after I woke up.

More Weird Dreams

The other night, I awoke after a series of really interesting dreams, and they have stuck in my memory since then. I guess it was all one dream, but I can remember three segments of it.

In the first segment, I was preparing to play the organ at a wedding, picking out pieces and marking books of music. It was a happy dream, because I felt confident about what I was doing; but it was also a frustrating dream, because I couldn't seem to follow through on my intentions to grab a certain book and mark a certain piece.

Then it seemed to me that I was catching a ride home from a Symphony Chorus practice with one of the guys in the bass section (I can remember who he was, but it's not your business). He seemed to be driving a really fancy, super-compact car, like a Cooper Mini. And about halfway through the trip, we encountered a flooded street and had to back out of it in order to avoid stalling the car.

As we continued moving backward, we somehow became airborne and the scene changed. Below us, and from behind, scrolled the scene of a huge, lavish banquet combined with some kind of public ceremony in which some of the participants were those blue-skinned aliens from the sci-fi program Farscape. The last thing I remember was watching a tableful of these Delvians throwing their heads back in a roar of laughter. I guess that's when I woke up.

Far out, eh?

Dreaming Back to School

My second time through...

This late little while, I've been suffering from a nasty recurring dream. Conscious of my college degrees, my professional experience, and my forty-plus years of age, I find myself enrolling in high school again. And not the nice, small-town high school where I was somewhat happy and graduated with honors, but the inner-city educational slum where I pouted, grumbled, and wasted a couple of the unhappiest years of my teenage life.

These are not the dreams I had back then, and through college—the dreams of being lost in the labyrinthine halls of my own school, missing deadlines, missing classes, missing exams, missing entire terms, and being helpless to catch up. Nothing like that. These dreams depict mundane, everyday school work, extracurricular activities, and research. These things, in themselves, are all right. The trouble comes while I try to fit in among students of a younger generation, and move among them undetected, and justify to myself this return to an educational level I have long since moved past. The thing that makes me wake up with a shudder of horror and despair is the sense that everything I have already achieved is going to waste.

And that pretty much sums up where I'm at in life, and my state of mind as I reflect on it.

The old dreams of failing and falling short, losing my way in the academic jungle, were appropriate when I was still in the striving-for-success phase of my career. Now the vocation(s) that represented my highest achievement in life have rolled up like a scroll, and I find myself in my forty-first year of existence, overqualified, under-employed, and getting chewed out by my hourly supervisor at the discount retail chain where I enjoy what gainful employment I have been able to find. A job to which I could have aspired even if I had dropped out of high school at age 16.

I guess that shows how well one's dreams reflect one's conscience...

A Very Absinthe Christmas

How did I spend my Christmas vacation? Well, teacher (and fellow classmates), I applied myself energetically to accompanying three Divine Services, complete with vocal solos, choir numbers, and more than the usual quantity of hymns. Then I set the cats up for a few days on their own (putting out extra food and water), gathered up a few things, and hit the road.

Sunday the 25th was a beautiful day to drive from Saint Louis to the Lake of the Ozarks. Ideal, in fact: the temperatures were cool but not cold, the sky was a bright clear blue, the traffic was within mental-health tolerances, and I managed not to get ticketed for speeding this time.

I arrived at my parents' lovely home around three in the afternoon. I enjoyed playing Santa Claus, contributing to their nicely-stocked minibar a bottle of Glendronach 12-year-old single malt Scotch and a selection of beer bottle bracelets to help keep track of whose beer is whose at any reasonably-sized convivial gathering. I also brought along a bottle of 110-proof absinthe, a box of sugar cubes, and a slotted spoon designed to rest on top of a glass, so that we could experiment with that oft-romanticized, and sometimes demonized, herbal spirit.

Well, I'm no wiser as to what wormwood tastes like, but the herbal blend of which it is a part tasted to me a lot like licorice. Licorice with a kick. After sipping it straight, mixing it in the wrong proportions, and then mixing it right (with two parts absinthe to three of water and a sugar cube), my father and I both concluded that one was too many, and two was not enough. We were pretty well buzzed after having two absinthes each for lunch on Tuesday.

We enjoyed food as much as drink. For Christmas Day's supper, Stepmum cooked up a wonderful shank-cut, hickory-smoked ham and served it with crusty bread, scalloped potatoes, and an off-the-beaten-path green bean casserole made in the style of cauliflower casserole (with cheese and biscuit crumbs and... heck, I'm going to need to get that recipe!). Monday night's feast focused on homemade pizza whose crust was made with beer, and topped with a generous mixture of shredded mozzarella and fontina, plus a sprinkling of Grana Padano. One pie was dressed in black olive which we all found very yummy, the other in a combination of pepperoni, onion, and mushrooms which might be frankly dangerous. And finally, Tuesday night we dined out at a Mexican joint that served $1.50 margaritas and cuisine that sets one's mouth on fire so that it isn't hard to down three margaritas in an hour.

Besides watching whatever was on TV, we spent our time in a variety of amusements. Dad and I went out to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie and to consume mass quantities of popcorn. One day we also watched a DVD of District 9 while Stepmom was at work, and we agreed that she wouldn't have liked it. I particularly enjoyed the cheese flight we shared over lunch on Monday, and the return flight on Tuesday, when the main attractions were taleggio (a soft, strong-flavored Italian cheese), manchego (a hard, flavorful Spanish sheep's-milk variety), and a nice safe English favorite, Double Gloucester. Cut into hunks, they all went nicely when eaten alone or on a cracker.

The days I spent relaxing with my folks were very restorative. I didn't mind being indoors while it rained, froze, and frosted up over the successive days and nights, so long as it always seemed to be sunny or at least clear when we went out, and I had good weather for driving home again. I got a bit of reading done too, both in audio-book form (with a couple of Neil Gaiman novels on my CD player) and on paper (as I've been working my way through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And I'll soon be spending more time reading books in electronic format, now that my boss & his wife have given me a sleek Kindle for Christmas. I've already "bought" a couple dozen free books in Kindle format.

But, after all, it's nice to be home. I started to miss my cats, painfully, last night when something on my parents' TV reminded me of them. And I've been missing my very own, familiar bed on which I seem to get more sleep, and better sleep, than anywhere else on average. I had fun with my parents, and their hospitality is wonderful, but there's no pillow like your own pillow!

Anime Dream

I just woke from an anime dream in which the character I identified with, similar to a house spirit or genius of a place, led a conga-line of customers to a struggling restaurant and the neighboring shop. Other than that I remember a lot of bowing and scraping, Japanese manner, and an earlier scene (now only vaguely remembered) in which I resigned from my previous establishment because the owner did not properly appreciate all that I did.

Adding to the interest of my mental screenplay was a gimmick in which each character described how he would depict the Sun as a cartoon character, sort of like a temperamentally opposite ripoff of the moon gimmick in Wilde's Salome. One character, I remember, would have painted the sun as a yellow cake with green seeds in it. Another wanted to paint it as a face with the smile, for some reason, on one side rather than at the bottom.

The overall texture of the dream was very paint-y. It was well lit and colorful, and the conga-line bit was fun. I could really feel my body moving to the beat, and enjoyed the looks I got from lookers-on. The ruse worked, the businesses overflowed with patrons, and when my bladder woke me, I was reluctant to let go of the dream, in spite of its naughty animistic theology. I must be more excited than I realized about the upcoming Studio Ghibli film The Secret World of Arrietty.

IMAGE: A still from Spirited Away, in which my character from tonight's dream may be seen crossing the bridge at right, somewhere among his own kind.

Virtual Reality Holographic Phone Call Dream

I just woke up from the weirdest dream ever. I dreamt that I was spending the Thanksgiving holiday with my West Coast friends (people I have actually spent Thanksgiving with, so it wasn't totally surreal). Something really tragic had happened but none of us were talking about it.

Another guest who showed up for dinner was a guy named Dan that we all knew in college, who was the best man at my friends' wedding but with whom I had never been at all close. I remember at one point that he introduced himself to me and shook my hand as though we had never met before, all while I'm thinking, "What a dick. He's got to be kidding me."

Then it came time to call the family and say Happy Thanksgiving to them. I stepped into a type of telephone that enabled me to appear as a hologram before the people I was calling, and to interact with them in a real-time, virtual-reality experience of where they were at. I have no idea how this would work outside of Star Trek.

First I called my Dad and Stepmom. I think I appeared in the backseat of their car while they were driving home from dinner with another couple. This is the part of the dream I remember least clearly, but it was full of warmth and humor, and there was something in it about a gift exchange in which Dad had gotten her an electronic toy that he really wanted rather than the new TV she had been expecting, but the way Dad facetiously made a note of the TV idea suggested to me that he had one more surprise in store for her.

Then I called my Mom. With her were my half-brother Jake, my uncle Mark, and (I kid you not) my Stepdad, notwithstanding the fact that he died in 2004. Perhaps he was a feature of the VR. I noticed that he didn't say anything to me, and I didn't say anything to him, yet within the context of the dream I didn't consider it strange to see him there.

My Mom was having a fit because the boys weren't cooperating with her idea of a happy family holiday. They had started painting a mural together, which was supposed to show a cart full of the things they were thankful for, but after painting the cart they had started to argue, and so nothing else had been added. I tried to cheer Mom up, first with a holographic hug (in which I could have sworn I felt my fingers touch her back) and then by offering Jake a holographic kick in the ass, which made my Mom laugh for a moment.

But as she went on describing what was going on, my Mom began to cry and I didn't know what to say, so I walked away to follow Jake and see what he was doing in the next room. He was standing in front of the unfinished mural with paints and a brush, undecided about what to do. As I passed him, I said for his ears alone: "Hint: paint people."

Then, just to appear as cool as I felt, I kept walking, right out the side door (taking some satisfaction in how the screen slammed behind me) and down the sidewalk toward the street. It wasn't exactly where my Mom lives now. Maybe she had moved to Miami or something. The neighborhood was all lit up with decorations. But I only had eyes for the palms of my hands, which (in the VR simulation) were covered with labeled buttons controlling different aspects of the call. To my frustration, I couldn't find one that said "Hang up."

Plus, as sirens approached, I grew increasingly concerned that I may have accidentally pushed the "extreme emergency call" button and that my Mom would think I had prank-called 911 on her house. As the embarrassment reached dream-engulfing levels, I woke up and decided to write this. After taking a pee, that is.

And now that I've written it, I'm going to pick a couple of goofy pictures to stick with it, and click "publish post," so you can read it. And now you've read it, which catches us up to the present moment. So what do you think? Was that a weird dream, or what?

One Night's Dreams

I've had an interesting, dream-filled night, frequently waking so that I can remember much that I have dreamed.

To start with, I dreamed passages from Prokofiev's Second Symphony, which I had listened to before I went to bed. In fact, I heard the first movement three times yesterday, liking it more each time in spite of its tumultous, thick-textured, violently rhythmic character of "iron and steel."

Then for a while I dreamed scenes from War and Peace, which I am again listening to on audio CD, having just reached the part where Andrei Bolkonsky proposes to Natasha Rostov; I think this was the part I dreamed about. A little later I found myself caught up in a surprisingly enjoyable dream about a zombie apocalypse. Then I felt that I was a journalist interviewing a king while he and his retinue were in a large garden, or perhaps a golf course—an interview interrupted by an assassination attempt, a bombing, and the spanking of an adolescent prince wearing a yellow uniform.

Further on, I dreamt that I was a photographer in the 1960s, taking posed portraits first of the Kennedy family, then of the Beatles and some of their friends. I sensed that the latter session was meant for the cover of one of their albums, but that things were not going well and that my photos would never be published.

Lastly, I dreamed a cameraman's view of two celebrity talk shows. One of them was a 1970-ish program featuring Chevy Chase as the host, and he was very rude to his guest, a curly-haired woman who seemed to be a fitness instructor and who punished him by refusing to speak. Then, jumping ahead to the 1980s, on a set decorated in shades of white, the program switched to a talk-show vehicle for sometime Cheers star Shelly Long—though I can't remember any guests. Finally, I woke up when my subconscious started replaying the song "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper, which I had heard piped into the laundromat where I spent part of Saturday afternoon.

So there you have a slice of my subconscious. Good luck finding the chain of associations in it...

EDIT: I now also recall a dream episode in which my right arm had been amputated and I had to learn to make do with my left. I believe this idea came from another book I have been reading, Ramage at Trafalgar, featuring Admiral Lord Nelson. Or maybe it just comes of lying on my arm wrong...

Why the Liturgy?

A little while ago, I had a dream in which I received an unexpected answer to the question, "Why do we observe the church year?" The answer, which I heard come out of my own mouth just as I woke up, was: "It is not our time; it is God's time. We do not give it to Him; He gives it to us."

A sense of the strangeness, yet aptness, of this answer still lingers in my mind. Consciously, I would have come up with a number of other answers to the question, "Why do we use the liturgy?" (Specifically, the traditional Lutheran liturgy, substantially as passed down from Catholic Christianity before the Reformation. More generally, this includes the Church Year and its cycle of Scripture readings.) Those words from my dream would answer this question just as well. Still, I have been spurred by conversation with other bright lights in the Lutheran Church to give additional answers that also suit the question, "Why use the liturgy?"

1. The liturgy, by its repetitive nature, is an aid to memory: a teaching tool. The more repetitive it is, the better it serves this function. So, in my opinion, a one-year lectionary is more useful than a three-year lectionary. The more deeply its contents are ingrained in our hearts, the more it can provide us comfort in times of trouble, answers when our faith is questioned, and confidence in the face of death.
2. The liturgy is the shape of our faith: a confession, a kind of creed. It is easy to say that the church believes and teaches according to the Bible. What can be much harder is to pin down exactly what that belief and teaching is. Groups claiming to believe what the Bible says have taught all kinds of things. What we believe and confess takes particular shape in the way we worship. What we mean by "what the Bible teaches" becomes evident in our liturgy.
3. The liturgy proclaims the whole counsel of God. It protects us from our own itching ears, as well as our preacher's pet ideas, provided that (again) we use the lectionary as the basis for our proclamation. In particular, the liturgy proclaims Law and Gospel. It ensures that we invariably hear a call to repentance. It is also, however, filled with the healing power of God's forgiveness.
4. The liturgy is a setting for the jewels of Baptism, Lord's Supper, and Absolution. The words and actions of the liturgy show what regard we have for the Sacraments, and what we believe about them. The liturgy instructs us in how to think about these means of grace, how to prepare ourselves to use them, what benefits to expect from them, and who is acting in them. The liturgy convinces us that the Sacraments are the Gospel, giving us forgiveness and faith.
5. The liturgy is saturated with the Word of God. It is made not of the word of men, but of God's Word. Nearly every phrase of the liturgy comes directly from Scripture. Its primary focus is on the reading and teaching of the Word, which is living and powerful, nourishing and life-giving, and which armors us against the power of Satan and the poison of sin. We do not know for certain whether any strategy or program devised by men will succeed; but we believe that God's Word (and Sacraments) will go to work and do what He promises, according to His gracious will.
   
6. The liturgy is a mark of distinction. It sets aside the worship hour, the worship place, and the worshipers as holy time, holy space, and holy people, devoted to the Lord alone. It separates us from those who believe and teach otherwise. At the same time, it unites us with those around the world, and across the ages, who teach and believe as we do. It makes our faithfulness to the Word of Christ evident to anyone who cares to know where such a community of faith can be found.
7. The liturgy glorifies the one true God. It directs our prayers and praises to the God revealed in Christ: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It honors Christ, specifically as He has been revealed on the cross. It directs our hearts, ears, minds, and lips toward the present Christ, placing our trust in His promises as to where He is to be found. And since it takes, by and large, from His Word the words that we say back to Him in worship and prayer, the liturgy gives us a firm basis for our confidence that God is pleased to receive it.
8. The liturgy does evangelism and mission work. Don't be fooled. Missionaries have been visiting some countries for decades, almost a century even, while nothing like a church has taken root. A week, a month, a year after the last missionary has been recalled from a given field, and the sands will close without a mark over the church where they have been leading Bible studies, or teaching English as a second language, or giving malaria shots, or what have you, for howsoever many years. But let the local leaders begin to preach, baptize, absolve, and commune—especially when they can train and ordain their own pastors—and there will be a church. When you can visit a country you have scarcely heard of and find a congregation singing hymns you recognize, and using a worship form you can follow by heart even though you don't understand the language, then you too will bear witness that wherever the liturgy spreads, so spreads the church.
9. The liturgy is a demon repellent. It is difficult for one who is fully occupied in the liturgy to entertain evil in his heart. Not that it's impossible; Martin Luther himself could not say an Our Father straight through without noticing that his mind was wandering, even into impure thoughts. Nor does the performing of the liturgy make us holy or righteous as such. But since it is God's Word (which combats sin and the devil), and especially insofar as it is set to music (which also, according to Scripture, drives away foul spirits), we can enjoy in the liturgy a certain shelter, even if only for a short time, against the daily darts of the devil.

And of course, by way of bringing these theses to a nice, round, Reformational number, I will go back to the words of my dream and anoint them as Thesis 9.5: We use the liturgy, after all, not because we created it, or because we chose it, or because it pleases us, but because it is a blessing freely given to us by God. He does not call us to be equals with Himself, or as individuals into a one-on-one relationship with Him, but as subjects—all together in one body—of His Kingdom, Dominion, and Headship. It is not for us to fashion our own "style" or "mode" of interfacing with God. Rather, we receive together the form of worship that has been passed down to us, and we pass it on in turn, as the manner in which we have been called to meet Him as members of one body, whose Head is Christ.

NOTE: The images are from LCMS churches in Fort Wayne, Ind., that I have visited and admired. From the top: Zion, St. Paul, and Redeemer; I think the statues of the Apostles are also from St. Paul's. And yes, I know that I have done a "Why liturgy?" post before. At that time, Thesis #1 (Liturgy is an aid to memory) was all I had to say about it.