From Daughter Number One
I had a dream last night. In the dream I was someone who resented and didn’t understand commandments. The stated purpose of the dream was to teach me why the commandments were necessary.
This post starts with a dream I had about being an Inkling, and ends with I don’t know what.
For those who are not full blown sufferers of Anglo-Catholic Fiction Disorder, the Inklings were an informal discussion group with Lewis and Tolkien and a number of others at various times.
I dreamed I was ripped through time and woke up in the Oxford area in the 30s.
This is another dream post, so skip it if you aren’t in the mood. Also, my Puritan conscience impels me to tell you that this dream does not have social value, great wisdom, or an improving message. (more…)
Many years ago I had a dream. I suppose I must have read Folk of the Fringe at the time.
In the dream Deseret was an Empire in the inner mountain west. It was a vaguely post apocalyptic setting. At least, there was no hint that anything else existed besides us fading off into wastelands and wilderness.
The empire was pretty loose but it did use access to temple rites as a means of keeping the periphery tied in. A hydraulic despotism but with living water.
C.S. Lewis once said something like the essence of myth is that the person who makes it doesn’t see it as an allegory, but the hearer keeps seeing hints of allegories in it.
He is technically wrong, but substantially right. A mythmaker can have an allegorical meaning in mind. But the myth has to be stronger than their allegory for it to work.
Take Mr. Lewis’ own allegory, Pilgrim’s Regress. Its nothing but allegory and pleasant enough in its way. I can speak, though, of three different passages which I keep coming back to. They have that kind of force. For some of them, I don’t even remember what the original allegorical meaning was supposed to be.
The first is the giant whose sight turns people transparent so that you can see their bowels and their bones.
The second is the parable of the man closely pursued by enemies. His wife sees him coming and is perplexed. If she cuts down the bridge that leads to their home, he will be stranded on the other side with his enemies. If she doesn’t, his enemies will cross with him.
Those two I don’t really recall the allegorical point Lewis was making, at least not off the top of my head.
The third passage proves my point the best, since it is the most clearly allegorical but is also a passage that I have *felt* many times. It’s about the home of Mr. Wisdom. He and his children live a quiet, sober life there. They dine on plain fare and are content. But at night, his children in a trance fly off to participate in witches sabbaths and bloody melees and the like.
The point is that a myth, to really work, has to have some weight to it apart from the message its supposed to be teaching. Which is why Mr. Wisdom and his children have come to my mind at times that had nothing to do with the message that rationalists subconsciously derive their emotional satisfaction from elsewhere.
My best parables can sometimes have a very clear message, but they have a power beyond the message.
Poet Head, for instance, is so self-consciously message fiction that I literally call the head poet heads and sober heads. But it still works.
I dreamed that there were these woodland spirits of great beauty. They did not have children in the normal way. Instead out of the banks of the rivers they dug the shapes of rough beings of clay.
Animated, these crude creatures stumbled through the forests breaking things. They shambled.
The spirits them subjected them to great force and pressure. If they did not shatter altogether, they condensed and purified, more and more, until they were as the woodland spirits.
I was telling someone about a dream. I and some men and boys were clustered around on a dirt track in the woods. At the point we were, there was a trail heading up the side of the mountain. I think we were talking about heading up it, or getting ready to do so.
Along up the track comes a horseman with a horse that is really wild, just flat out running and bucking and swerving around. Its eyes were wide and white. We all back off to the sides to let the man and his out of control horse through. Some back up against the slope on the one side of the dirt track and the rest of us back into the grassy verge on the other side. But this is all happening very fast, you must not imagine that we have made a very big lane between us, most of us have just had time for a step or two. I should also mention that on my side of the track–the side opposite the slope–there is a low lying ‘disc’ made of several grey limestones placed together. They aren’t very tightly placed, there is plenty of grass growing up between the cracks. It looks a bit like a low lying altar, but it isn’t anything of the kind. The Forest Service put it there for something or other.
As the horse gallops by it grabs my shirt near my collar in its teeth and tries to drag me off. I grab the stones, the horse is being pulled in a curve now, and then the dream ended.
“That sound’s significant,” she said (I disagree). “Let me tell you another dream I think was significant,” she says (I agree, and I think you will too once you hear it).
I dreamed there was this family that moved up to the hills for the peace and quiet. By choice they had no phones nor internet. Instead in the evenings they would sing and the girls in the family would play the violin and cello. There they would sit in the twilight playing the music.
Then I had a sense that somehow they were my family, this was my home, and the music would be there waiting for me when I came on home.
And then I dreamed that this place was the place Joseph and Mary were headed for the nativity and they were somehow also going home when they went there. I saw a tired man and a tired woman on a donkey headed up a country road to a white house where they would be welcome in. They were close enough now to catch a hint of the music of the strings and to see the dim figures on the porch.
What happens if you read a couple of pages of D&C 132 back to back with Elder Christofferson from May Conference being wryly funny about why we don’t baptize rolls of microfilm?
You see an image in your mind. This is the image you see.
There is a man standing but leaning forward. He is wearing a suit and looks suspiciously like President Nelson. A brilliant light is beaming straight down onto his head, his neck, and his upper back.
His arms are straight out to each side. Each one is resting on the upper back of another man in a suit who is also hunched over a bit, just like the first man, to receive the weight. The light appears to run through the first man’s arms to those two men.
Each of those two men have their arms straight out to the side. Each of them touching the backs of two more men in suits. The light flows through their arms too.
I dreamed I was watching a Dark Lord–you know, the big bad villain, the leader of all the spooks and goblins and things that go bump in the dark, bent on conquering all of Fantasyland and putting it under his iron heel. It was apparently–you know how you just know things in dreams–one of those Fantasylands where a new Dark Lord arises every few hundred years once the old one has become only a hazy memory.
He was talking to someone. Maybe a subordinate, or maybe he was monologuing to the plucky farm boy hero.
Being the Dark Lord is harder then you think. You have to make the nicest of judgments all the time or you fail. If you draw off too many forces to deal with the plucky hero and his ragtag band then your main assaults against the kingdoms of men will fall. But if you do not draw off enough forces just when you’ve crushed the last Kingdom of men and are planning on ruling unchecked and supreme, the plucky hero shows up in your throne room to kill you.
If you give your subordinates too little independence and power then the plucky hero is able to run rings around them. But if you give them too much, they turn on each other and even on you.
I remember thinking this made sense and even thought to myself that the dark lord had to be pretty terrifying to cow his enemies and keep his own hordes in check, but also could not be too evil or he would fritter away resources in just doing nasty stuff and would actually inspire more opposition that way.
The next part of the dream was an infodump.
I was given to understand that the dark Lords monologue was correct. In fact a dark lord had to basically do everything right or else the plucky hero and his ragtag band would figure out a way to defeat him.
That was because the purpose of Fantasyland was not generating heroes. The purpose of Fantasyland was to create the perfect dark lord. The plucky farm boy heroes and swords of prophecy and the alliances of light and all of that were just for testing the dark lords and terminating failed dark lord trials. They were a mechanism for creating the perfect dark lord.
When I woke up I thought that such a dark lord might turn out to be not so dark after all.
The Great Ruler’s towering, massive fortress complex overlooked a wide plain. There nobles and others vying for his favor would come with their personal armies to contend with each other. The Great Ruler himself would sometimes watch them from the walls. Leaders who succeeded in these battles could gain great favor and even high office in the Great Ruler’s invincible endless hosts or in his magistracy.
The Lord of Yan showed great promise. He was sure to make it to the plains and do well there, so they said.
But instead he left his home and estates and went wandering alone.
Over time he acquired three followers. They were cripples. One was blind.
In the public square of a large market town he proclaimed them his army. With them, he said, he would prevail.
He and his three-cripple army then marched towards the fortress complex and the wide plain.
The Lord of Yan had a reputation, both because of his early promise and because he had gone wandering. His announcement made a minor sensation.
People came out to see him and his three cripples all along the route.
Many volunteered to join him. He said no.
Commanders and leaders offered to join him with their skilled, trained bands. He said no. The minor sensation became bigger.
Some of the most famous names of the continent sent him letters offering to meet him in battle on the plain. He did not reply.
Many nobles and their troops gathered there, waiting to see what the Lord of Yan would do.
He and his cripples arrived. They marched up to the main gate of the fortress complex. There the Lord of Yan denounced the Great Ruler as a bloody tyrant and declared war.
The Lord of Yan and his three cripples won.
***
This is a dream I had many years ago.
I remembered it again today when I read these two verses.
The Dark was rising. It spread its influence over the land. It captured institutions, customs, lands — it put more and more peoples into its thrall.
When this had happened before, each time a Champion had arisen. Blessed with power and light from the Great God of Light and War and Justice, the Champion led the people with his blazing sword in driving back the lords of the Dark.
But this time no Champion came. One by one the peoples fell into the hands of the Dark powers.
Finally, of all the free peoples all that was left was a little band of a few hundred gathered around a hill to where they had been driven, awaiting the final assault of the Dark hordes in the morning.
They would fight and die.
I dreamed that I decided to become a novelist. Surprising myself the dreamer (not myself the person in the dream) I cranked out quite a bit of good dreck that got popular. Then my ambitions increased and I decided to become a great novelist. (more…)
This was the dream.
There was a conclave of the gods. Around the open marbled floor were ringed the towering pillars and the towering thrones and the towering gods, who were grave and almost unmoving.
Into the middle of that floor through an entrance came clattering a funny looking stone and behind it ran a little boy and his dog
.
The boy did not notice the gods. He ran straight to the stone and resumed playing with it.
The bright-faced goddess of joy laughed. The boy looked up. He contemplated the gods gravely. They contemplated him gravely. After a time he went back to his playing and then left.
For all that the gods made him greatly blessed.
How they greatly blessed him is jumbled. It partly seemed that he grew up and became handsome and talented and rich but with the unselfconsciousness and the delight of a child. Partly it seemed that his blessing was he died soon after
