I Dreamed of Hibiscus

In Biblical times, dreams were apparently taken far more seriously than we take them today. They were considered revelatory and even prophetic; to act on the basis of a perceived message or warning in a dream was not considered foolish, but wise. I've heard stories of many modern people, most of them quite rational, who also believe that some vital information or answer to a problem came to them in a dream, and I have no trouble believing it. I've sometimes been surprised at a dream that seemed to reveal knowledge I had about a person or situation that I wasn't at all conscious of at the time I had the dream. "How did I know that?" is no longer a question I ask. Wisdom comes to us through a variety of experiences that we file away but don't entirely forget.

I had a very vivid and colorful dream this morning, and I'm sharing it because I think it encapsulates what I think of as the spirit of the times, at least as I see them. I'm not the Oracle of Delphi--I think the same information is available to all of us, but maybe I have more training in dealing with my intuitive side than many people do. I'm not afraid of it, as I think some who value logic and pure reasoning above all else sometimes are. Our society tends be weighted more towards thinkers than feelers, as I understand it. I don't think of the type of intelligence represented by dreams and intuition as irrational but rather as just another type of knowledge, another source of information to take account of. In fact, at its core, intuition is probably rational knowledge based on sources of information you weren't entirely aware of when you picked them up, simple as that.

The order of events in the dream is a little confused in my mind, but I'll start with the part in which a friend suddenly appeared outside the door of my building. I was quite surprised to see her, and she told me she thought I had moved. Apparently, there had been a letter that I hadn't answered, and she had told me about her intention to visit. The joy at seeing a friend was tempered by a sense that there was some confusion or misapprehension on her part about what I had been doing with myself.

We went inside, and there was a restaurant on the first floor, where we spent some time placing an order at the counter. Up a steep flight of steps, there was a room with a large bed in it. My friend, who had a couple of people with her, one of whom may have been her husband, got into the bed and sat there chatting with me as I sat at the side, partially covered by a blanket. I believe there was also someone standing next to me. I wondered whether I should go to bed, too, but instead, I got up and started pointing out the features of the room, the color of the walls, which were a soft peach, the beautiful, gleaming hardwood floors, which had evidently received a recent coat of varnish (prompting some laughter when I pointed it out), and some rays of sunlight that touched the floor in a couple of places.

The room was pleasant but rather empty. I looked out the window and saw the yard outside, and after that, I seemed to be by myself for a short interval, floating above a canopy of tropical flowers and foliage, as if there were a conservatory on an upper floor and I was hovering over it. There were a number of red flowers similar to hibiscus, and I saw a large spider walk over one of them before climbing down a wall to the floor. As I floated down the aisle, I saw that there were quite a few of these large spiders walking on the foliage.

After that, I confronted my friend and told her that I didn't believe we were where she said we were at all. I didn't entirely blame her for the confusion, but I felt it was important to clear it up as a sort of Matrix type of fluidity of space and time was occurring that was very disorienting. At that point, we were outside, standing on a street with some commercial buildings nearby, as if we were in the outskirts of a town. A few other people were standing about, as if some public event were taking place, and though the scene looked more like suburban Louisville than anything else, I told my friend very firmly that she was wrong: we weren't at my apartment building, we were in Texas.

There were other parts of this dream in which I was in a hair salon (hair salons and appointments to get my hair cut are a recurring theme in recent dreams), but that's basically the gist of it. The overriding tenor of the dream was an awareness of multiple versions of reality being presented at a rapid-fire pace and a reluctance to accept someone else's version over my own.

If you're wondering why I said this dream is an emblem of the times, you must not be paying much attention to the news, for, of course, in an election year, one does hear multiple claims of truth-telling, the problem being that they mostly conflict with one another. I often get the sense when perusing the news that various viewpoints are actually screaming for my attention; I just consider what makes sense and refrain from rushing to judgment. I consider that some of what I read is true but not all of it, which is but stating the obvious. This is no doubt the way it is all the time, but this year the process seems to be in overdrive, with two major party candidates anathemic to large portions of the public having risen to the top.

There is also a sense in which this dream is personal, of course, and I don't consider that any less important than the collective aspect of it. Personal and collective seemed to very intertwined in this dream, but I won't bore you with any analysis of what my dream means to me personally. That's a story for another day. If you insist on a summation of what message there might be in this dream that's of any help to anyone, it might be, "Well, enjoy the flowers, but don't overlook the spiders. And actually, don't make too many assumptions about the relative merits of flowers and spiders. They could both be iffy."

OK, the anti-oracle has spoken. Now back to our regular programming.