READING DREAMS

INTRODUCTION

The title of my homily is, "Reading Dreams."

One of the great ways of interpreting scripture is to imagine what you are reading or hearing is a dream you had.

Some people like to write out their dreams. When they wake up from a dream, they turn the light on and jot down what they experienced. It makes the dream more memorable, more reflectible, more message laden – that is - if you can read your own writing from 2:45 in the morning.

TODAY’S TWO READINGS AS DREAMS

This dream approach doesn’t always work too well with a lot of scripture readings, but today’s two readings are good ones for this dream process.

Image you had a dream where you were in a big boat and the whole world was flooded and you had no place to land and you wanted to land somewhere, anywhere. You’re sick and tired of water, water, everywhere. Rain. Rain. Then more rain. If that was a dream you had and you woke up and wrote it down and then read it in the morning, what would a dream like that tell you about yourself and the world you live in?

Or imagine you had a dream about yourself as blind and Jesus comes into your life and heals you. And now you see! How would you feel about yourself after waking up from such a dream?

How would you feel about yourself if they were two of your dreams in your dream journal?

HOPE AND HOPELESSNESS

For the want of a better way to categorize dreams, there are two kinds of dreams, good ones and bad ones, nightmares and good dreams.

The good ones give us hope; the bad ones give us feelings of hopelessness.

It’s as simple as that.

Today’s two readings can be seen as stories and dreams of hope.

And we human beings need to have dreams about hope. We need signs of hope, stories of hope. We need images and symbols of hope – especially when we are down or when we are feeling hopeless.

When things are going well, we don’t worry about hope. We don’t notice signs of hope as well. We don’t need stories of hope as much.

It’s like the old cliché. We don’t notice and appreciate our health till we are sick. Then we hope for health and recovery.

So we hope for hope a lot more when we are feeling hopeless.

We hope for light a lot more, when we feel like we’re in the dark.

This message of the need for hope, to have dreams of hope, when we are feeling hopeless, hit me when I read today’s readings.

Take the story in the first reading – the story of Noah’s ark – lost at sea. They are caught in a sea of destruction and they are filled with fear. They are sailing in a sea of terror and they are hoping to see the shore. When the dove returns with the olive branch, Noah and his family have a great symbol of hope.

Take the gospel story. It tells the story of a man who is blind. He can’t see and he receives his sight. Like everyone, he has to make the journey from darkness to light. It can be a story of hope.

HOMILY MESSAGE

So my hope for this homily is to present a message of hope – to get that message across – in the midst of hopelessness.

And I hope you can see today’s readings as stories of hope

Now sometimes we have heard something too many times and as a result we don’t hear it. 

Today’s story about Noah’s Ark is something we have heard 50 to 100 times. It’s like an old commercial. We heard the story before, but we still enjoy it.  However, we don’t get the old impact. It’s like an old movie or an old joke or song. We know the ending.

But imagine if we never heard the story before? Imagine  it wasn’t in the bible?

Imagine it is a dream you had one night. Imagine you have a dream where you are on one of those big cruise ships and it’s filled with couples – two by two – like in Noah’s Ark – and you’re having a great time, but it starts to rain, and rain, and rain, and rain, and rain, and all the earth is flooded and you begin to notice when you look over the side of the ship’s railing floating bodies and dogs and cats and debris, dead people, children, ugh. Animals. All died. The captain announces over and over again, “Thank God we are on this ship, because there is no longer any land. The whole world is flooded out.”

And you wake up and you feel yucky. Yug. Oooooh. You feel rotten and you feel that way for a week and you wonder if it’s you or if it’s the world that’s headed for destruction and you wonder about your dream.

And a few weeks later you have another dream and this time you are on that same boat and this time you send some birds out to see if they don’t come back – because if they do come back they haven’t found any place to land and one comes back – with an olive branch in her mouth.

What a sign of hope!

And you wake up, feeling right, feeling hopeful, feeling better.

One dream was a nightmare and the other was a dream of hope.

FLOOD DREAMS!

Have you ever had a flood dream?

Carl Jung in his book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, tells about some dreams he had in 1913 and 1914. They remind me of the Noah story.

Let me let him tell what happened in his own words.

Toward the autumn of 1913 the pressure which I had felt was in me seemed to be moving outward: as though there were something in the air. The atmosphere actually seemed to me darker than it had been. It was as though the sense of oppression no longer sprang exclusively from a psychic situation, but from concrete reality. This feeling grew more and more intense.

In October, while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision lasted about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness.

Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions, even more vividly than before, and the blood was more emphasized. An inner voice spoke. "Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it." That winter someone asked me what I thought were the political prospects of the world in the near future. I replied that I had no thoughts on the matter, but that I saw rivers of blood.

I asked myself whether these visions pointed to a revolution, but could not really imagine anything of the sort. And so I drew the conclusion that they had to do with me myself, and decided that I was menaced by a psychosis. The idea of war did not occur to me at all.

Soon afterward, in the spring and early summer of 1914, I had a thrice-repeated dream that in the middle of summer an Arctic cold wave descended and froze the land to ice. I saw, for example, the whole of Lorraine and its canals frozen and the entire region totally deserted by human beings. All living green things were killed by frost. This dream came in April and May, and for the last time in June, 1914.

In the third dream frightful cold had again descended from out of  the cosmos. This dream, however, had an unexpected end. There stood a leaf-bearing tree, but without fruit (my tree of life, I thought) , whose leaves had been transformed by the effects of the frost into sweet grapes full of healing juices. I plucked the grapes and gave them to a large, waiting crowd.

At the end of July 1914 I was invited by the British Medical Association to deliver a lecture, "On the Importance of the Unconscious in Psychopathology," at a congress in Aberdeen. I was prepared for something to happen, for such visions and dreams are fateful. In my state of mind just then, with the fears that were pursuing me, it seemed fateful to me that I should have to talk on the importance of the unconscious at such a time!

On August 1 the world war broke out. Now my task was clear: I had to try to understand what had happened and to what extent my own experience coincided with that of mankind in general. Therefore my first obligation was to probe the depths of my own psyche; I made a beginning by writing down the fantasies which had come to me during my building game. This work took precedence over everything else.

OURSELVES

Haven’t we all had dreams where we felt trapped, caught, lost, being attacked. Aren’t they connected to the world we are experiencing every day?

Haven’t we all watched TV and then gone to bed and somehow what we watched got into our dreams?

Well, doesn’t the same thing happen when we watch the world and our everyday experiences? Don’t they get into our dreams?

A FORTIORI

So if we feel hopeless in our dreams, trapped, caught, the world we experienced must feel that way. Maybe we have to make some moves. Maybe we need to move away from hopeless situations. Maybe we better plug into good stuff. Maybe we better reflect and meditate on stories of hope so that we will dream hope stories.

When we feel sorrows deeply in our dreams, maybe it should move us to pray for the world. Not just ourselves. Maybe we need to be a  sign of hope for our world, not just for ourselves, but for all those around us, who hopefully dream of a better world and then we will have the dreams of hope as well.

TODAY’S GOSPEL

Take today’s gospel. Imagine if you never heard this story before and you have a dream of yourself as a blind man bumping into people, and the stuff around you. And you meet Christ and he sees you and your blindness. He stops everything. He has time for you. He then takes you outside of where you are and puts spit in your eyes and heals you and then Jesus says to you, “Go home now a new person.”

CONCLUSION

Interpreting dreams can be a very powerful way of raising our consciousness, so too the scriptures. Not everyone writes down their dreams for later reflection and meditation. However, various people have taken the time to write down the scriptures for our growth and development. Amen.

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Painting on top: Noah's Ark by Edward Hicks, 1846