Dream On

The politics of the week represents to me a level of stupidity and meanness almost unprecedented in my life. The Supreme Court seems prepared to declare unconstitutional the Health Care measure passed by Congress in its attempt to ensure that most Americans, and especially children have adequate health care. I know that the issue is complex, but I cannot understand how anyone can be against the idea of mandatory health care insurance. In Europe this kind of protection has been in place for years.

And then the budget passed by the Republicans in the House of Representatives eviscerates programs that assist those with the least resources to help themselves—the widow, the orphan and the stranger in our midst, to speak metaphorically and Biblically—and gives benefit to the richest in the form of tax breaks. This is a trickle up but what are a few more drops in the ocean? Take from the poor and give to the rich. And where is our Robin Hood to torment our Sheriffs of Nottingham?

Thoreau was correct: do not read the papers.

I have for years considered that all of the characters in my dreams were representations of an aspect of myself. I was the dream and all that enacted it. This made sense to me at the time: if my unconscious constructed the dream then it was my unconscious that was represented in the dream. What else would fill my unconscious but my own complexes and conflicts. I imagined dreams to be not unlike the scene in the film Being John Malkovich when Malkovich enters his own mind and all that exists in his mind are John Malkoviches. And all they can say is “Malkovich.” He occupies his entire mind—conscious and unconscious.

But lately I am suspecting that the dream work uses others as way to inform my conscious mind of issues with which it actually deals in daily life but about which it remains conflicted. The dream work presents a resolution to a conflict. So was it last night. I awoke at peace: I had seen things in my dream that had troubled my waking life, but in the dream these issues gave no trouble. I awoke resolved.