On April 29, I was interviewed on ABC’s radio program, Focus. At the time I was not eager because the producer had approached me for an interview on dreams and COVID “for a little fun and entertainment”. I backed off saying I don’t do fun and entertainment, but she persisted and accepted my conditions of participation.
After the talk, I found out a few days later that my section of the hour-long program was missing. Censorship! Erasure! Oblivion! Such thoughts began to besiege me. Then, after a bit of this fun time with the thought hawks, I let it go…
This morning I inexplicably returned to that ABC show and began to think about why my interview was, shall we say, misfiled. There could be several reasons. The host had asked me if nightmares were more prevalent during COVID. How would I know? There could well be an increase in reporting nightmares (fun and entertainment, remember) but I hear about nightmares much of the time, and well before COVID. So I could not satisfy his lust for light entertainment there. At another point he asked, “What is stress?” Before I could think, I blurted out, “stress is a TIME disease”. Perhaps this is what got my interview “rescinded”. I know the medical profession would support my cancellation with just that statement, but I went on to say that “schedule time” or “digital time” is killing us. I offered a few examples: “We are running out of time”; “I don’t have enough time”; bells must ring on time in schools, cutting off all soul movement; time as cut-up discrete units with no continuity between bits; parents shouting at kids, “lets go, time to go, we don’t have time for that,” etc.
I was in fact rubbing the dominant cultural view of time the wrong way. I was saying in fact that time is qualitative, rather than quantitative, as our culture insists. Only qualitative time can be experienced! And our current experience of time contributes to bodily stress ( we can only experience anything if our body is involved). I spoke of how children respond favourably to “story time” or “play time” IF those qualitative times can be allowed to run their course as an experienced soul moment (rising interest, peak, descending to satisfaction, or completion). Parents almost universally experience the stress of coitus interruptus when a little one comes barging into the room at the “peak moment”! Stress is a result of experiencing time as chopped up, with ever-decreasing discrete units of time, no continuity, no satisfying closure, making it harder to experience anything except the high stress of “running out of time”.
A good book that privileges qualitative time is Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose. The monks proceed through a day according to several different qualitative times:
Matins – Between 2:30 and 3:00 in the morning.
Lauds – Between 5:00 and 6:00 in the morning, in order to end at dawn.
Prime – Around 7:30, shortly before daybreak. Terce Around 9:00.
Sext – Noon, the hour of the midday meal in winter).
Nones – Between 2:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon.
Vespers – Around 4:30, at sunset
Compline – Around 6:00 (before 7:00, the monks go to bed).
Each time brings with it a mood and meaningful cultural activities that support the mood, having a beginning, middle, and end or closure. It’s hard to imagine stress being able to get a foothold within these experienced qualities of time.
As I was writing down these reflections on the ABC’s possible censorship, I recalled that I had a dream last night—and it was a dream about time! Here is the dream:
I am with Anita in a car, driving around long winding roads that began to have a feel of a maze. We were, I thought, south of Sydney but I did not know the way out. I asked locals and was shocked to learn that no-one else knew the way out, either. Finally I looked at the sun and saw that it was setting over the ocean. I wanted to head north to Sydney, and, in NSW, the ocean would therefore on my right, if I am heading North. So the sun must be setting in the East! We agreed to keep the sun on the right as we drove but then I noticed that it was setting fast, and we were running out of time….
Anita noted, when I told her the dream, that the sun normally rises in the East, i.e. over the ocean, where we live. That had not occurred to me now or in the dream. I suddenly felt disoriented. The “compass” was no longer any help! Maybe I was south of Sydney, maybe not. I could be in Western Australia heading south so that the sun setting over the ocean would make astronomical sense in waking time, but there is no indication of that in the dream.
The maze-like quality of the time we were in lends itself to this feeling of disorientation. My efforts in “finding our way out” were futile. And, time is running out, as darkness falls. Maze time has a wandering quality where a map (habits of thought, “compass readings”) no longer serves, along with a growing mood of anxiety IF one tries to find a way out of the maze back to normalcy. There is no normalized criterion for making choices (this path or that). And nobody knows the “way out”, according to the dream.
Interestingly, a maze differs from a labyrinth in that a labyrinth has only one path, twisting and turning to be sure, but leading more deeply and inevitably to a centre, whereas a maze involves making choices all along the way, different paths that may led to a center or to a way out—you just don’t know. And, you can simply get lost in a maze! This is the danger of a maze. The danger of the labyrinth lies in what you may find when you reach the centre. Probably, the mood of labyrinthine time would be something like dread—a feeling that something is ahead, waiting, and I don’t know what it is… yet! The mood in my maze-time was more like disorientation and anxiety in the face of an increasing lostness, paired with a rapidly setting sun—time is running out!
That is where the dream ended and then, upon waking, I promptly forgot the dream and remembered instead my ill-fated interview on ABC, which had been subsequently revoked! This memory in turn re-awoke my connection to this dream. This nest of associations seems rather maze-like to me right now, as I write. I could try to work my way out of the maze but the dream suggests another course of action in waking life, in response to the rich nest of associations:
In the growing darkness of our time, happening to all of us (the sun sheds its light on ALL), perhaps trying to get out of maze-time, back to normalcy is not the way. My real-life action will therefore be to stop trying to get out of the maze, Instead I’ll “pull the car over, as the sun sets.” If I no longer privilege one particular orientation (normalcy) then disorientation will no longer be a factor in my experience of the maze and maze time. One implication of this proposed move is that I will be more able to deal with what comes towards me in the maze in its own terms, without prejudice (such as, will it help me get out of the maze?).
I will see what follows from that real-time move.
