Dreams of Gerontius
Lately I had a dream unlike any of those I remember having had before. In it I was a young family man with two little children, studying at a university where I was taking yet another degree—something I once in fact was. It dawned on me as I walked in the dream with my children and watched them play that I was not very happy at the school and did not really belong there, nor was it right for me to subject my family to the life toward which my training was taking me. They, at least eventually, would become at least as mildly unhappy as I had suddenly realized I was. In the dream, I resolved to leave the school quickly, return home and learn to be a mechanic or take up some other honest trade, and thus have the chance for the happiness one achieves for himself and his loved ones when he manages to escape the vanity of ambition for a plain life.
When a man past seventy with a wall full of diplomas has a dream like that, it inclines him to think he has wasted his life, and indeed, for me this unavoidable impression came as a relief, because even when one discovers he has been wasting his time, he has much to be thankful for in that he still has the capacity to realize it (I think of Malcolm Muggeridge’s Chronicles) and thus know he still exists within casting distance of heaven.
This dream would not have been extraordinary outside the context of my adult-dream life, which was dominated by three themes, which my wife can bear witness often troubled me: School, Church, and Rejection. All the coherent dreams I can remember involved rejection by school and the church, and I took them—and still take them—to be symbolic representations of the truth of the failures of my principal endeavors, and thus as a judgment on the value of my life, which rises unbidden from the depths of an unguarded psyche during sleep.
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S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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