Dream Scapes

This one not two hours old as I write this.

I was down in Tennessee with my old college buddy Billy Evans.  It was about nightfall. We wanted to score some weed.  He handed me a wad of all-mixed-together bills, way more than the $100 that would be his share; he was fine with me hanging onto the whole wad until the deal was done.

The place to buy the weed was a Chinese restaurant that was about a mile walk from where we were.  We started off, soon to be joined by my sister Denise and a bunch of her friends/colleagues in a legal, medicinal marijuana thing that they had going.  Bringing up the rear with that group was a real down home Southern character, probably in his 60s, with a big moustache, horn-rimmed glasses and a ten-gallon hat.  Turns out he was the local sponsor/benefactor/investor that got Denise's business going.

There's more, about a near brush with a squad of young policemen on the porch of the house where the Chinese restaurant was situated, but before that, as we began to troop towards that locale, the benefactor stopped and asked me and Billy to look at his left eye.  Then he peeled back not his eyelid but the skin on the left of that eye.  On the usually unseen part of the eyeball there were thin blue and white stripes running up and down, about fifteen across and of varying lengths.  "Look at this!" he said.  "By the length of these stripes, going left to right, you can tell how rich a man has been over the course of his entire life!"  Clearly, he had been very rich indeed.

This all in the context of me trying for the first time in my life to do a deep dive into the remarkable work of Carl Jung.  In his celebrated "Red Book," which I am now reading, he more or less descends into Hades for a long spell.  (I almost said "a personal Hades" but clearly that is not right, coming from the man who popularized the idea that most of our insights bubble up out of a collective unconscious.)  When he returns, he is a more integrated and whole person.  Indeed, he would have us believe that in the absence of such a harrowing journey we ourselves cannot become integrated and whole.

But the journey to the Underworld and back is not a dream; it is accessed rather via a personal regimen that looks to one like me a lot like a particular form of deep meditation.

Still and all, for Jung dreams are an essential key to self-understanding.  And in this I feel that he must be on to something; he is a man of towering intellect and insight after all.  But it also seems to me beyond belief that the Cracker with the Metric Eyeball has a veiled life lesson for me.  Will a sudden synchronicity yet invade my space and prove me wrong in this?

 

Premonitions of Delirium at the Hour of the Wolf

In November of 1989, we were ensconced in a pleasant, rented apartment on the outskirts of Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, awaiting the completion of all of the paperwork needed to support the adoption of Sam, our first child.  It felt rather like imprisonment, with outside daytime temperatures approaching 100 degs and no real access to transportation.  And so, for long periods between visits with the authorities, we were left with only a TV to keep us company.  There were soap operas, game shows and silly commercials on tap, and also a daily children's extravaganza hosted by a Brazilian former porn star known as "Xuxa" -- "Shoo-sha."

And at every break in the action, an imposing and sonorous voice, almost Darth Vader-ish, sounding to me a caricature of machismo, intoned the same phrase -- "Red Privada de Television!" -- "Private Television Network!", but also perhaps a multilingual play on words insofar as the ruling far-right party of the Paraguayan republic for decades had been the Colorado -- the "Reds."

Now as I lie sleepless at 3:33, the Hour of the Wolf, the phrase repeats itself in my head in the same sonorous voice, like waves booming off of a particular forlorn lighthouse.  And it occurs to me that I might come to repeat it aloud myself in a final delirium, without context for my caregivers, the repetition without context fitting the very definition of raving madness.