"All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality."

Today I watched Network. It was recommended to me by Alex, one of the handful of people whom I trust implicitly when it comes to movie recommendations.

The film started a little slow, but I rode it out. The dialogue is fantastic. For a film made in 1976, it was absolutely prescient in its indictment of television (TV news, in particular).

I had one of those terribly wonderful dreams last night - the kind where you wake up and get depressed because it wasn't real. In high school, we used to say that we would rather have bad dreams than good dreams. Good dreams just make real life miserable.

So this was one of those dreams. It started with me waking up in my bed with a fictional girl standing over me muttering something about how much she loved me. This was not a real person at all. Oddly enough, at this point I remember muttering in a moment of shocking lucidity, "Oh, no. This is one of those dreams. I guess there is nothing to do but ride it out." And I did. Why in that moment of clarity I didn't decide to wake up, I don't know. But I rode it out, and it was a great dream. It was just hanging out with this fictional girl who was supposed to be my girlfriend - there was nothing perverse or unusual about it. But it was nice. It was also completely and utterly unreal, which made it rather depressing upon facing reality again. It set the tone for the rest of the day, which was full of a sullen distance from God and people. This feeling that my own mind, in addition to God himself, is toying with me.

This happens unbelievably frequently to me. It is not a phenomenon that I can explain. I can't explain why these dreams take such hold of me. They do, though. For some reason, over a period of several years I have had some of the most unbearably pleasant dreams; dreams where my mind manufactures things I have never felt or experienced. This makes the experience particularly powerful - because each time I dream that I am experiencing it for the first time, and each time I wake up and realize that it was all an illusion. And because the emotion is so powerful, these dreams don't fade like other dreams. They remain. They haunt me as ghosts of memories - like those vague memories of childhood, or the feeling you have after a night of drinking enough to make your memory dim but not enough to cause you to forget completely, or when you stay up for 24 hours at a time. You can't remember everything too well, but you can remember flashes of emotion and detail. You can remember a laugh at a strange time that night, or the taste of coffee at 5 in the morning, or the feeling of your head spinning in the darkness of a bunkbed.

In the same way, I can remember a kiss or a hand held or a laugh or a dance that never actually happened. I can remember an impression, a feeling, a look in a girl's eyes - none of which I saw or felt while conscious.

This isn't the kind of thing that I would normally blog about. But I feel like I need to. This is a fairly large part of my life that I don't feel like I have in common with other people. Oh, I'm not saying that people don't have these dreams. But it's the way that these dreams play into my insecurities - the way they play into my constant struggle with depression and loneliness and hopelessness. I don't know if other people experience this or not. That's part of the reason I'm blogging about this. Maybe someone will read this and feel the same way.

I often puzzle over my desires. In the fall of this past year, we talked about longing in Dr. Horner's class. We talked about C.S. Lewis' notion of the scent of a flower you have not smelled, the melody of a song you've never heard, the memory of a place you haven't visited. Lewis was talking about our longing for God, our feeling that there is something transcendent in this life that we can't quite put our finger on. I feel like this is what I experience through these dreams, only with things far more earthy, far more imminent. I feel like I experience this with romance.

And maybe, just maybe, these dreams will be able to translate into an ability to understand what Lewis is talking about. And maybe, just maybe, I will one day understand to what my longings truly point.

Peace,
Sam