Randomness, Once Again

Last week on X/Twitter a medical doctor excoriated someone for insinuating that our dreams mean something.  Clearly, she said, they are just a product of the random firing of brain synapses.  And of course she was excoriated in turn.  She would have to eat her words and renounce her materialist fundamentalism, you see, once the veil is torn away, as it soon will be.

I don't know what to think.  Last night was a total phantasmagoria from start to finish.  But first a young missionary gifted me a small marimba, sandlewood in color.  Unlike a real marimba, or a vibraphone for that matter, this did not lay out the bars like the keys of a piano; rather, there was just a straight line of uniform pieces of wood.  It could be played conventionally, with mallets, or, on "auto-play," it could be programmed to play many different tunes.  The missionary demonstrated it to me with great enthusiasm by having it play a short classical piece, one with which he was very enamored.

The gift made me uncomfortable on two levels.  First, it was disproportionate to the scale of our relationship, and that had me thinking that the missionary had a crush on me, one that was unwelcome and could never be reciprocated.  Second, while it was small for a marimba, it monopolized my tiny apartment physically.  I didn't know how I would be able to maneuver around it in my regular daily life.  And yet I did not want to appear ungrateful, so I feigned enthusiam for it, not very well I'm afraid.

At the end of the dream a young woman joined us in the room.  She too found the marimba fascinating, and she lit up when it did its thing.  Then I awoke.

This was all before 10PM, and the fun was just beginning.

And so, in between dreams, I wished once again that I could conjure Prof. Jung, to have him explain to me how this particular narrative might facilitate my integration with the collective consciousness, or maybe just forestall my general personal disintegration.

But perhaps the experience was not about the narrative at all, but the vividness of the details and the overall atmosphere of the dream, which were striking even for me, for whom intense dreams are a nightly phenomenon.