Time Magazine this week features an article:"Shhh! Genius At
Work." It walks us through some of the amazing mysteries to sleep. Both
religion and science have been intrigued with these mysteries ever since
the Bible described Adam falling asleep in the Garden, later the Greeks
saw in dreams messages from the gods, later still Shakespeare had
Hamlet learn secrets from the ghost of his father.
Science
considers mysteries such as these as problems to be solved. Religion and
playwrights tend to engage the mysteries they meet on their own terms.
You and I have a choice each morning waking up to the question: What was
that crazy dream all about...?
Psychiatry has helped explain how
dreams are REM moments in which faces and plots from our waking world
collide into our sleeping world. Putting aside the mounds of
jaw-dropping theories, one part of our dreaming seems simple and clear.
The cast of characters we encounter in our waking world somehow cross
the stage of our sleeping world. Usually in disguise.
They are
disguised in different
appearances...situations...relationships...purposes...and connections
with us as we move, triumphantly or terrifyingly, through our dream's
plot line. And while all this has become more understood when it comes
to the important people in our lives, what is less understood are the
occasional entrances of various bit or canceled players.
They
appear in the action without much reason or rhyme. Your third grade
teacher...your mail carrier ...that cashier at the supermarket...a
long-dead cousin...a boss you once had and hated...a young girl you once
dated and loved...your children, but now all younger...your dead
parents...oh and Mickey Mantle and President Obama. What's going on
here?
Unqualified to answer that question, may I simply leave
this thought. You and I are also "bit and canceled players" in the
dreams of friends and strangers alike. So know this. Tonight, you and I
are likely to appear for a mysterious moment in someone's dreams. A
someone we haven't seen for years or who we can't even remember meeting.
Ready
for your entrance...? Cue that dream! And remember in some mysterious
way, we and the other 7 billion of us are all part of the same dream.
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