Two Thoughts for a Sunday Morning

[thetatiana]

My son was playing music this morning that was so good it made me sing along. So I began to wonder what made this music so good. I was trying to analyze where the goodness resided. Was it in the melody? The singer's voice? The chord changes? Sometimes chord changes just feel so right, so satisfying, that I'm tempted to decide that changes are where the beauty of music comes from. The words contributed, too, I'm sure. The real truth is that we don't understand at all what it is that's so good about music, why we love it so, and why it moves us so much. We don't know what it is that makes music good, so that we could use that principle to construct all the most beautiful, delicious, best music ever, without end. Lots of people try hard to make good music every day and come up with dreck, with awful music, dull, repetitive, uninspired natterings. The beauty of music is a deep mystery, as deep as that of human existence. Why is music good? Because it is. We have no better explanation of it than that. So how is it we think we understand anything about life, if we can't even answer such a simple and important question about our daily lives? We know nothing!

Then that got me thinking about our picture of reality, our best view of what is, what constitutes the something (rather than nothing) that we experience as existence, as the universe, as this stuff here. And that picture of waking reality is entirely contingent on the fact that every so often, every 20 hours or so, each of us must go into a coma and hallucinate for some 6 or 8 hours, that if we're deprived of the ability to do that, our reality breaks down entirely and we become psychotic. Not after years or months but after just a few days. So our view of normal waking reality is utterly dependent on this entirely mysterious process of sleep, of dreaming, in which we lie still, but for some twitching, plus breathing and other autonomic functions necessary to maintain life in our bodies. We lie still and lose consciousness, and we hallucinate things that make no sense.

Our dreams are sometimes rich and detailed, with long narrative arcs, complete with foreshadowings, with symbolism and all the depth of a great novel. But much of the time they're just bizarre and seemingly meaningless. A lot of the time they mirror the frustrations and struggles we experience in waking life, but other times they just have us struggling and frightened over weird and nonsensical things we never come across during the day. I used to have a recurring dream in which I jumped from a very high diving board and missed the little postage stamp pool of water at the bottom and smacked into the concrete. I would think "so this is what it's like to be dead, odd", then wake up. Occasionally dreams are full of enjoyment and peace. There was that one in which I was making bacon, eggs, ham, toast for everyone on a grill at our cottage on the beach. The air had that quality of lightness it has when the summer sun is reflected off the white sands of the Gulf of Mexico. So lovely. But on the whole dreams seem rather random and disconnected, and really not much to do with anything.

Once when my son had an odd reaction to Ambien, he sleepwalked and sleeptalked all night while I sat up with him to be sure he didn't do himself any harm. He shared the contents of his dreams with me then, and they rapidly shifted from a huge party at our house, to the pirate ship ramming into ours and the pirates boarding us, to the circus arena we were in during the middle of the performance, to the beautiful rainbow which he asked me if I could see. I answered sadly no, I'm in the dream but I'm not experiencing the dream. So he leaned his head close to mine as though by so doing he would let me see through his eyes. It was marvelous and sweet, and I'm sure I would have appreciated it more had I not been so very tired and sleepy myself. But I was surprised that no connected narrative came though at all. Only a series of scenes, flashes almost, one after the other after the next, hour after hour all night long. Not at all what my dreams feel like when I remember them.

And this whole odd process is absolutely fundamental and essential for our brains to work during our waking lives. Without dreams, there is no waking, and no reality as we know it. So how real can such a reality be? How, if it's so delicate, so contingent on such a weird inexplicable process, can our waking reality be an accurate representation of *the* reality, of ultimate reality, if such a thing really exists at all?

For all we know, for all of science and orthodoxy, all of academics and prognostication, we still have absolutely no clue about such ordinary daily things as music, dreams, and waking reality. We don't know much of anything. We're left to goggle in amazement and wonder. Praise creation unfinished! Amen.