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	The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

	Rev.  Edmund Robinson 
	Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield 
	April 2, 2000

Here is a dream that one of you shared with me last week:

"During my teens and into my thirties, I commonly dreamed that I was
in a public place and suddenly realized I was missing some essential
piece of clothing.  I would panic and look around for a means of
covering myself.  There would be nothing within close reach and I'd
have to either run some distance or hope that no one noticed.  The
most memorable sensation during this dream was one of severe
embarrassment."

I hadn't really noticed when I set out to do a service on dreams that
it would fall on the day after All Fools Day, but there may be
something fortuitous in the conjunction of these two ideas.  April
Fool's Day, as you may know, started in France.  In sixteenth-century
France, the start of the new year was observed on April 1st.  It was
celebrated in much the same way we now celebrate New Years with
parties and dancing into the late hours of the night.  Then in 1562,
Pope Gregory introduced a new calendar for the Christian world, and
the new year fell on January 1st.  There were some people, however,
who hadn't heard or didn't believe the change in the date, so they
continued to celebrate New Year's Day on April first.  Others played
tricks on them and called them "April fools."  They sent them on a
"fool's errand" or tried to make them believe that something false was
true.  In France today, April first is called "Poisson d'Avril."
French children fool their friends by taping a paper fish to their
friends' backs.  When the "young fool" discovers this trick, the
prankster yells "Poisson d''Avril!"  (April Fish!).

There is something of this calendar confusion that persists today; I
fully expect a few people who forgot to set their clocks ahead to come
tooling in here just as the service in ending, thinking that it's
10:30.

Fools are a big topic in the UU pulpits today, if I can judge by the
interest in my laughter sermon which I preached last January.  I
mentioned it on a minister's chat list on the web, and have sent out
about 25 copies so far.

But the fools that I want to talk about today are not the ones that
used to hang around court making the king laugh, like poor Yorick.
They are not the fools we make of ourselves day in and day out.  The
fools I want to talk about are that visit us in our sleep.

The concept of dream is one that is used metaphorically at a bunch of
different levels.  We have dream as a vision of the future as in
Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech.  We have dream as
standing in for the imagination, as you've got to have a dream.  A
fair amount of popular songs and other products of the Great American
Entertainment Machine urge us to have dreams, to follow dreams, to
believe that dreams may come true.  Indeed, that Entertainment
Machine, which is rapidly becoming America's most economically
important export product, might be said both to be made up of dreams
and to sell dreams as its principal commodity.

The dreams I want to talk about today are not the metaphorical ones,
though these are obviously important.  The dreams I want to talk about
are the ones real people, you and I and the person sitting next to
you, have in the course of a real night's sleep.  Or maybe a real
morning's sleep.  Like maybe some of you are having right now, or will
have before I'm through this morning.  As Harvard Chaplain Peter Gomes
told the state House of Representatives this week, "it is my job to
speak and yours to listen.  And should you finish your job before I
finish mine, I hope you will be kind enough to wait.  I will catch up
with you as fast as I can."

We all have dreams, though many of us can't recall details of them
after waking up.  The question is, what do they mean?  Since my
article of faith is, as you know, that the really important questions
don't have just one right answer, I want to put to you three possible
answers to the question of what our dreams mean.  The first is, that
they mean nothing; they are random firings of neurons, a sort of
brain-yawn by which extra electric potential gets discharged.  The
second idea, loosely based on Freud, is that they tell us a lot about
what is going on in our unconscious minds.  And the third idea is that
our dreams are some form of contact with or apprehension of a reality
beyond ourselves.

Let's start with the first.  We know that what we call consciousness,
a normal waking state, is actually a welter of thoughts, feelings and
perceptions associated with different areas of our brains and
different sets of neurons.  The idea of brain activity that I like
best says that it builds up by a kind of Darwinian mechanism.

Maybe dreams happen when the system is just exercising itself, or
cleaning itself for some reason.  We know that dreams that can be
consciously reported don't seem to happen in all phases of sleep, but
only in those light phases associated with rapid eye movements and
called REM sleep.

Maybe dreams are a result of these neuron clusters sort of firing at
random during those phases of sleep.  The sleeping mind experiences
these firings as bits of remembered data, images, narratives, and
feelings.  Dreams on this view are just a reshuffling of the flotsam
and jetsam lying on the mind's floor, much as you might kick your way
through a pile of fallen leaves in Autumn.  Indeed, it may be that
what we can remember well enough to write in our diaries or tell to
our friends, however bizarre and disconnected a story it makes, is
only the most coherent part of what our mind experiences.  It may be
that there were other things that you went through in the course of
the night which were so deep and fragmented that you could never
remember them, let alone find words to describe them.

So there is our first view of dreams, a product of random brain
activity.

A second view is that dreams are a window in the unconscious.  Sigmund
Freud held this view, and wrote a book called The Interpretation of
Dreams, though what I am laying out here is my own version of Freud,
not anything from that book.  We are all creatures of instinctual
drives for sex, food, elimination, dominance, and we have these taboos
which prevent us from acknowledging these drives.  Civilization is a
process of institutionalizing these taboos and distancing ourselves
from our primary drives and desires.

Thus the unconscious becomes a kind of Second Self Within, whose
drives and doings are hidden from our conscious minds.  They are
hidden because our superegos, the "parent" part of our personality,
with all its oughts and shoulds, has erected a firewall between our
conscious mind and these unseemly desires.  Fore example, I have such
a sanctified image of myself that I can't acknowledge to myself an
unworthy emotion, like jealousy, even when I'm clearly feeling it.
Urges that come into conflict with our views of ourselves are simply
denied or ignored.  Yet they are ignored at our peril, for those same
urges and drives can lead us into patterns of behavior that are very
harmful to ourselves or to others.  The object of psychotherapy,
similar to Buddhist mindfulness, is to understand the forces that are
at play in our personalities, and dreams can be a key part of this
discovery.

The dream that I related at the beginning of the sermon, of a person
being without essential clothing in public, is so common that Freud
categorized among the normal dream types.  Of course, we may not
realize it's common because the dream creates so much shame that we
don't even want to tell anyone else about it.  The taboo against being
naked in public, or in inappropriate clothing, is very powerful.

What is a dream like this telling us?  Not that we are about to lose
some of our clothes in public.  Maybe it is telling us that we are
acutely ashamed of something that has happened to us, and the
nakedness is a metaphor for that shame.  When we have a dream like
this, it is good to ask where the shame is coming from.

The dream that Vicky related is of a different type, playing not on
shame but on wish.  A wish for a better house, anxiety about the house
one lives in, is fairly common, I think, among people raising
children, for one of the responsibilities you took on when you had
children was to keep a roof over their heads.  My first wife used to
have a recurring dream that she found a hidden stairway in our house
and it led to all kinds of extra rooms.

Looking at this in terms of a wish or even of a fear lets you know
just how important housing, the place you live, is to you, and that
might help explain to you some of your feelings and motivations around
housing issues.

Here are two dreams from one of you in which the fear is palpable:

"A more recent dream was when my youngest child was just learning to
walk.  In the dream, we were on a colorful tubular play structure.
The baby somehow got just beyond my reach and was in great danger of
falling to certain death.  I had to maneuver my way over to him before
he fell."

"Another recent dream _ by no means the first I've had of this type.
I'm on an airplane ready to take off.  As the plane taxies down the
runway I grip the armrests and try to convince myself that everything
is alright.  The plane lifts off and climbs a few hundred feet and
then slowly turns upside down and plunges toward the ground.  I wake
up in a sweat."

While these two dreams demonstrate a high level of fear in the
unconscious, that is not to say that the fear is generated by the
situation in the dream.  The mother may not actually be that afraid of
the baby having a playground accident, the playground accident may be
a metaphor for her fear of losing control of the child as he gets
older, or it may reflect an incident from her own childhood.  The
therapists say that you are every character in your dream.

So we have looked at the proposition that dreams are random firings of
neurons, and that they are a reflection of our unconscious.  The third
view of dreams is that they are a connection to something that is
really there in the world.

One aspect of this idea is that dreams are where there is
communication between ourselves and deities or messengers from
deities, an idea which is found not only throughout the sacred
scriptures and stories of many religions, but also in myth and legend
and secular high literature as well.  In the Hebrew Bible, the
Promised Land is deeded to Jacob in a dream and Joseph as a prisoner
parlays his skill at dream-interpretation not only into liberty but a
job as aide-de-camp to the Pharaoh.  In the New Testament, the angel
appears to Mary in the dream to tell her that she will give birth to
Jesus, and comes back to tell the Magi not to return to Jerusalem
after they have paid homage to the child.

In ancient Celtic religion, as we learned at Halloween, it was
conceived that the everyday world existed side-by-side with a spirit
world, and that one of the ways the spirits communicate with us is in
dreams.  Elves and fairies and other inhabitants of the sidhe, the
Other Kingdom, communicate with mortals through dreams.

Here is a dream from one of you:

"But one of my favorite dreams starts with me walking down the hall in
my Stoneham apartment, toward the livingroom where there is some
threat or danger.  Before I get to the livingroom, a large
collie/German shepherd type dog rears up in front of me, putting its
paws on my shoulders and gently presses me back, protecting me from
whatever bad thing there was ahead of me.  The sense of gentle, firm
protection was so strong that the next morning I went to my deck of
Indian Medicine Cards (sort of a Native American Tarot) to look up
what it said about the Dog card.  But before I looked for it, I pulled
a card at random and found that it was the Dog card!  The description
of the role of the Dog as a spirit guide emphasizes its
protectiveness."

"I did not relate this dream to anything happening in my life at the
time, but found/find a great sense of comfort in the image of the
protective Dog.  And of course to the dyslexic theologian Dog is God."

You know, if you're going to have a visitor from the Beyond, you
couldn't do much better than this!  What a wonderful gift!

However, I expect that few of us have had dreams about God, Jesus, or
angels, and if there are other divine or supernatural beings, they
might take guises like the Dog.  The more common type of spirit
communication that we have in dreams is with people whom we have known
who have died or moved out of our lives.

My father died in 1977, and I started going with Jacqueline in 1997,
but shortly after our relationship started, I head a dream in which I
introduced her to him, and asked him where he had been keeping
himself.  He reminded me that he was dead and that is when I woke up
with a great sense of loss.  But who knows, maybe his spirit was
trying to communicate with me, to answer my desire to root this new
relationship deep into my life history.

And consider this one from one of you:

"My mother died in a car accident when I was 25.  For the most part, I
didn't dream of her.  A few years after her death, following a long
period of self-analysis and I guess, depression, I had a dream.  She
and I were in the kitchen of my house.  She was sitting at the kitchen
table and I was rummaging around the refrigerator, complaining that
there was nothing to eat (much like we did as teenagers at home).  She
said to me, 'No, Dear, you have the ingredients for everything you
need right here.'  Then she began to point out some ingredients that I
could use to make different foods that she used to make for us.  Then
she said, 'You always have everything you need right inside of you.
You just need to look.'

"I tucked that dream away and use it whenever I feel at a loss for
what to do, for the times I feel I don't have the strength to carry
on.  There were no instant answers/foods in that dream, everything was
a combination of ingredients, which, when mixed together, were
nourishing.  What I love about this dream is the humor our psyches
have.  This dream deals with comfort food and comfort words and
comfort from my mother!"

So we have these three views of dreams:  random neural activity,
messages from the deep unconscious, and communication from beyond.
You can choose whichever one suits your mood of the day, and I will
not try to argue that one is more valid than the other, nor will I try
to argue that each one is equally valid.  What I want to leave you
with is a different thought+ each approach is equally holy.

For the holy inheres in randomness as well as order, in chaos as in
reason, in laughter as in logic.  The random firings of your brains
are as much a part of the holy order of things as any theory put forth
by your psychologist.  We search for meaning in the world because we
are genetically programmed to do that, but the world is the way it is
whether or not we succeed in explaining it all, and the parts we can't
explain are as holy as the parts we can.

So in a sense it doesn't matter whether my dream of my father was my
father trying to reach me from beyond or the fulfillment of my wish to
knit together parts of my life separated by two decades.  What matters
is that it gave me some measure of comfort, as the dream of your
mother gave one of you comfort.

What is real?  Well, we cherish this distinction between dreams and
waking, between reality and unreality, between fact and fiction, and
the distinction is a practical necessity.  However, it has its
limitations.  Is this Chuang Chou dreaming he is a butterfly, or is
this the butterfly dreaming he is Chuang Chou?  What we dream may be
emotionally and spiritually real to us, and may be more so than many
of the things we encounter in our waking lives.

I'd like to close with a last dream from one of you:

"I am out for a stroll with a friend of mine when I realize that we
have passed through a time-warp and its 1865.  We sit on a hillside
and watch some soldiers returning from the Civil War.  I remark 'isn't
it strange how these guys don't even know we're from another century?'
One of the soldiers turns and says, 'Oh yes I do.  What you guys don't
realize is that the past and the future are all one.'"

This is one of the finest qualities of dreams:  the ability to
collapse time.  As the closing hymn says,

"The present slips into the past and dreamlike melts away the breaking
of tomorrow's dawn begins a new today.

"The past and future ever meet in the eternal now to make each day a
thing complete shall be our New Year vow."

Number 350.  Let's sing it.

Amen.