“I had a Dream too”- The Crown of Creation and a moment of marvel

I realized only in hindsight that giving anything the title “I had a dream too” as we
head into the MLK holiday had its own bold, potentially disrespectful
connotations. Nonetheless, the dream I had a couple weeks ago has nothing to do
with ending injustice, race, or the best aspirations humanity might rally to this time
of year. I share, my weird dream because it does have to do with how
miraculously marvelous, we can be.
See, my dream was a real dream that took place somewhere between 5:20 and 7am
on a recent Thursday morning. What happened between my ears that morning
reminds me of how miraculous all our minds are. I thought I would share it.
In that stretch of REM time, I found myself dreaming that I was both creating a
movie, in the way a director does, and one that I simultaneously found myself
watching it. Don’t ask it was a dream. It starts with a very Matthew Broderick
like lead character trying to de-fog his car window with his sleeve while driving.
FYI- I do this hasty task myself from time to time.

Anyway, in this movie, Broderick (unable to fully see through the glass) watches
his car slide slowly off a snowy road, up, and then over the crest of a beautiful long
hill near a house. I remember there being a comic absurdity to how far Matthew
Broderick drives off the road. In this movie/dream scene we never really see the
end; I presumably crash rather peacefully to a halt that again we never see.
Somehow, wordlessly, this is the point in my mental movie that I, its very author
discover to be a comedy. How one can surprise oneself in a dream that we
ourselves create is pretty amazing.
The next scene my mind entertained myself with involved the introduction of a
character that seemed to be Matthew Broderick girlfriend. She was played by
Christa Miller, the brunette actress who played Kate on the Drew Carey show. (I
remembered after waking that I had watched a speck of that show in re-runs just
two nights before). I have a little crush on her.
In scene two, we find her lying face down in an uncomfortable prone position in
the cab of an old truck. She is trying to fix something under the dashboard so she
can leave Matthew Broderick and go live on the Northern Coast, presumably
somewhere like Northern Washington. I don’t know how this news is conveyed to
the audience, only that in my dream I understood it as her goal. Moreover, I have
no idea what any of it means, it is a dream after all.
Anyway, in the next scene in my dream/movie we find her beginning to be
harassed in a comical over the top way by a low-grade moronic cop played by the
scruffy but affable Ryan Reynolds. I’m not kidding these actors were in my dream.
Why? I’ll never know. It’s a dream. Who do I look like Carl Jung?
In this scene there was a funny encounter, and a disagreement between them.
Frustrated by their encounter, Drew Cary’s Kate proceeds to ignore his plea that
she should leave the truck and returns back to uncomfortably lying down head
under the dashboard to fix something. We never see what?
The conclusion of this scene involves the rube cop Ryan Reynolds duck-taping the
doors and windows of her truck so solidly that she cannot easily get out.
Interestingly, I had just watched a PBS program on the ingenuity of honey badgers,
and this scene with the tape was reminiscent of something they did. However,
again, I have no idea why my mind took me on this journey. Nobody does, or
likely ever will. It was a dream.
This is not about foggy car windows, Duct tape, or TV crushes. It is about the
capacity of our brains, which as far as we can tell seem to be the crown of creation.

I woke up shortly after that. Pleased, amazed, wanting to remember and really
share the marvel of just how cool it is that we have such imaginative capacity built
into our very bodies.
So, somehow in that early morning in a way nobody can explain, I was watching a
movie that my own head was making. And, seemingly for its own playful purpose.
So cool! We have the most powerful tool in the known universe, “the (known)
crown of creation right between our ears that seems capable of understanding
nearly all things except itself. Damn, life is interesting.
There are lots of theories about dreams. One African tribe believes that dreams
are the real reality and that our conscious lives are essentially the illusions. Freud
called dreams the royal road to our unconscious selves; Jung says that via dreams
we connect to a broader more singular consciousness; and one of the more recent
working theories is that dreaming is the act, and in a way the result of the brain
filing our conscious experiences into memories.
The accuracy of any of these theories is not my point. My point is that we are
amazing. That amazing isn’t always pleasant, but good or bad it is always
amazing.
That’s all, just a moment of wonder who we are.
~ Steve Wilson

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