All Work & No Play

I want all the people I have ever known to appear in a room where I am, and I want them all to be terribly confused as to how they arrived there and deep in thought about what cosmic forces are at work and how this casts their entire existence in a radical new light, so that they will be receptive to all the things I have always wished I could say to them but never have. I would explain to all the excellent people with whom I no longer communicate that I never wanted to lose touch, and that if I knew what I was doing I would not have allowed that to happen. I would tell all those beautiful girls whose interest I ignored that I was too afraid and too judgemental to do the things I desired, and that this is my mistake. I would clear up every misunderstanding, and pay back every debt (current total: $800 plus interest). I would apologize to my high school film teacher for telling him I would turn in my assignments and never doing it. Then I would tell them all that the gods had captured them and rounded them all up here to tell me the truth about myself, as they see it, and that they would never be able to leave (”never” meaning they would be trapped for eternity) if they didn’t tell me exactly what they thought of me, whole and nothing but.

This morning an old black woman say in front of me on the train. She smelled wretched; she had what my friend Mark had once called “a geriatric smell.” I did not move from my seat, mostly because there was nowhere to move to. I felt short of breath, as I frequently do, but the woman’s cloying smell was overwhelming and I could not catch my breath. I tried to just read my book, in which Thomas Merton was describing his surroundings on Perry St. in Greenwich 1939:

The air outside my window is quiet, and light hangs among the leaves and is soft and blue and warm. In one of the next houses I could hear pots in a kitchen, and water running from a tap, and I can hear the voices of kids. … This sunlight, this warm air, the sounds of the kitchen, speak of God’s goodness and His mercy. I can sit here all day, now, and think of that, and ask God to show me everywhere more and more signs of His mercy, and His goodness, and to help me regain my liberty. Peace.

Merton would later take vows as a Trappist monk.

I was breathing only through my mouth now, something I am unaccustomed to doing as I am so often short of breath. I chose not to complain within my mind to an imaginary listener, but instead to begin writing down my experience. This too was a change. As the train pulled in to Glenside where I work, I considered remaining on the train, to extend my experience. I chose not to, however, and went to work.

One day is not enough
to see all there is to see
in one day’s worth of me.

How could I ever be so bold
to think that one day should be told
when it is only one day old?

A diary is a private place
where one can a single day face,
one’s every moment to trace.

A woman’s ear might suit me well
the secrets of twenty-four hours to tell
wants and misgivings aplenty to quell.

But twelve hours of mirth
or of struggle in dearth
cannot public words be worth.

Like any substance that directly alters your brain chemistry, caffeine is a drug, and as such, it has the same essential drawback; namely, it favors some brains states over others, and is addictive. Thus, the chronic caffeine user has a limited set of mental states available to him, a set defined by the drug. In this way, the drug limits our will.

In some instances, this limitation of will is useful. The chronically depressed person, for example, is caught in a self-sustaining, undesirable state - feeling depressed is demotivating, thus the person does not do the things which might take them out of the depressed state. The necessary solution would be to make recognizing the depressed state and becoming motivated to change it easier, thus requiring less raw motivation. By artificially placing the person in a more energetic, positive state through the use of a drug, we create the opportunity for the person to create anchors to those experiences. So, when they reenter the depressed stat, as when they are removed from or become accustomed to the drug, they can access those states more easily. (See Anchors.)

It is an evil of our current methodology that depression is viewed as “physical,” which is taken to be different than (and mutually exclusive with) “psychological,” or “willful.” In fact, this failure of understanding is pervasive in the public mind, and, seemingly, in the scientific community as well. That which is psychological is physical, period. To access a motivated state through anchoring accomplishes (if successful) the same physical result as is intended with administering a drug. The difference is that anchoring empowers the subject - he may choose to enter that state, or not. The drug takes away the choice. With a chronic depressive, temporarily removing that choice is good - the subject either does not know how to choose otherwise, or lacks the motivation to make the choice. Give him no choice, and you provide him with the opportunity to learn about other states. Permanently removing the option, however, seems an inferior solution.

It is possible for a dream to drive you insane. To see that this is true, you must understand three things.

1. Your emotions are not under your direct control. You may be able to redirect your emotions, make it so that you will not feel in a few moments what you feel now, but your present emotions are absolute and immutable; further, emotions form a continuum - they cannot go directly to zero from a quantity that is not zero. They must travel.

2. What is “real” and what is “not real” - these terms refer to emotions, not thoughts. Despite all our philosophical pretensions, believing that something is real means nothing unless you also feel that it is real. If you have a paralyzing fear that the bogey man will grab you if you get out of your bed, then you cannot get out of your bed, no matter how well your mind is convinced that there is no such thing as the bogey man. This every parent knows. Their child is not stupid, their child is merely afraid. Though the child can acknowledge verbally that the bogey man doesn’t exist - and mean it - they cannot get out of bed, and they become even more upset because they cannot explain to their parents why they cannot get out of bed. Because no one ever explained to them that people do not control their emotions.

   Emotions define reality for everyone, not just children. How many adults protect themselves against dangers they themselves agree have a microscopic probability of ever occurring? How many adults cannot fly? How many make sure to lock their doors while driving, to protect against the astronomically improbable car-jacking, while talking on their cellphone? More profoundly, how many cannot voice objections to Church doctrine out of fear that the Devil will take them because of it, even when those objections would negate that very belief? Though we can influence our future feelings through our present thoughts, it is nonetheless true that what feel, and not what we think, defines our reality.

3. We do not choose or control the emotions we feel in a dream. Some people claim they can control their dreams, and I have no doubt that this is to some extent true, but do they not still experience the unbidden dream, the phantom with its own will?

So, it is indeed possible that not only our sleep but our very reality could be corrupted by a dream. What if, suddenly and through no choice of your own, you felt, embedded in your psyche, an irreproachable fear of logic - a terror at the first hint of reasoning. How would you contrive to undo this? Or, what if something were so frightening, that even the thought of confronting that fear was itself prohibitively fearful? You would stop thinking about it. Talk about “overcoming” fear all you like; we do this only by finding a new way to perceive the thing that scares us.

The scariest dream I ever had - the scariest thing that has ever happened to me - happened when I was 16. I was obviously no longer a child, and well understood the difference between dreams and reality. And it had been a very long time since I’d had a nightmare. Nevertheless, the next night I would have done almost anything not to sleep - to never sleep again, in fact. I spent much of the day trying to think of a way not to sleep until I could forget the dream I’d had. And this was after several waking hours. The moment I awoke, I wanted only to escape, wanted it like I have wanted nothing in my entire life, but knew that I could not go anywhere that I would be safe. The dream would be wherever I was, without exception. I wanted to dash from my bed, and I wanted to stay in my bed, both with untold urgency.

In the dream was a being, and that being was the thing that I feared. It was enormous - in my one cloudy memory of its image, it spanned countless city blocks. It was all black, metallic but also alive. (It’s strange, I’m afraid even now. I am on the verge of tears.) It had a bulbous body protruding several stories from the ground, and one grotesque, smooth tapering appendage; it was the appendage that reached across the city, though I did not see it move. I do not remember what the thing was supposed to be, nor in what way it was a threat, but I remember it could communicate to me in my thoughts. I heard its voice, a composed, direct voice, and that voice was a force of pure, unlimited terror. What was it? What could it represent? These questions cannot be answered, because dreams do not fit into the clockwork logic we use to organize reality. And that is precisely where the power dreams come from. It is why, in the final count, your dreams are more powerful than you. If there is a devil, then it would only make sense that he take a different form for each person. And I know exactly what mine looks like.