Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Better Than All This Book Reading Crap

I had a dream this morning and because I rarely remember mine, I like to recollect them as much as I can before I lose them completely. This one isn't really funny, though, I should warn you. Before I start into the dream, I would like to point out one of the coolest things about dreams. It is easily the best part of any dream and it is simply that no matter how crazy the circumstances of the dream are or how everything is unrecognizable anything is, as you proceed through the dream, you have a sense of unspoken knowledge in the dream. It is never explicitly told to you, noone ever informs you of it. You simply know. It is built-in knowledge. For instance, this dream of mine starts off in a smaller town that I am unfamiliar with. Now, there is nothing that tells me that this is a small town. It doesn't seem like it would necessarily seem so. If you're plunked down onto a random street anywhere, you may not know how big the town or city is. But I knew that it was a small town and so it was. And the reason I knew I was unfamiliar with it was not because it didn't look like Minnedosa or Brandon or Winnipeg, but rather, my built-in knowledge supplied to me for the purpose of the dream told me it was an unfamiliar town. I wish that in reality, there were times that you could just have knowledge come to you at will. That would be so sweet. Better than all this book reading crap.

Anyway, on with the dream. I was walking down the street, there was a back-up of cars, I don't know why there were a back-up of cars, it was just so. I was walking along and decided to cross in between a couple of the cars because no one was moving. Then one of the drivers of one of the cars, started to yell at me. It wasn't because of my jay-walking either. From built-in dream knowledge, I knew to just ignore her. I wasn't supposed to make a ruckus. Then a couple of dogs come up to me, one of which is more on the playful side or perhaps curious. The other had a bit of more aggressive side, as it stood on it's hind legs and had its paws on my shoulder. Now, because this is a dream, I should point that these were normal dogs. They weren't dogs that could walk around on it's hind legs as it spout out old Beatles' song backwards as they drank martinis. It was more that this was a big, grey dog. I don't know what kind it was. I don't know my dog types. Which brings me to another cool thing about dream knowledge is that it doesn't try to give me knowledge that I don't have in real life. I don't know dog types in real life, but I do know that I still do not like dogs and so it is with dream me.

Anyway, the lady said a lot of things that were trying to attack me, but the one that stands out to me now is, in reference to the dogs, "They can smell your kind!" And due to dream knowledge, I knew she was talking about how the dogs could smell that I was a Jew. And it had that edge that she wished me dead because I was one.

For those of you out there that don't know. I'm not Jewish at all. My name is David and that's as far as she goes. But due to dream knowledge, I knew that I would not be able to have a reasonable discussion with an ignorant racist, because it is effectively useless. Wait, screw dream knowledge, that's just common sense. And I guess that also shows how wrong the dogs were if they could truly smell the Jewishness in me.

Anyway, I knew I had to get out of there before others in the town found out that there was a Jew in the town. Or at least an accidental Jew.

Now, more dogs start crowding around, not aggressively mind you like the one, but I go down to the river's edge in an attempt to get the dogs away, because they were getting in the way. It's like how I feel about dogs in real life. I then push the big, dumb dog over and keep moving. I hear a gasp as I do this. I go into the water up to my knees and I turn around to see a park rangery type police officer coming down the river bank. I knew this due to the fact he wore shorts. He was stern and knew to be cautious of the Jew.

"What is going on here?"

I knew he was talking about me pushing over the one dog.

"Well, that dog was on top of me..." I start to explain, but I know I must be careful with my explanation. I walk back to the shore and that's when the officer pulled out a stun gun and zapped me and I fell to the ground. My dream knowledge told me that I was in a lot of trouble. And the dream ends.

Of course, I was thinking through the dream and made me realize again how incredibly difficult it is to stand up for yourself in the face of ignorance. Whether it's in regards to race or religion or whatever, ignorance is the one thing that a logical explanation is useless against. I mean even if I would have tried to explain that I wasn't Jewish, it would have done me no good. I was screwed.

That's why I think I've been trying to be open-minded about things, because as soon as you start being heavy handed and start shutting out other opinions simply because they differ form your sanctimonious version of reality, that leads to the path of violence and discrimination. You start to see people as less than. And that's the thing that scares me the most.

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