God's Own Dream

Never heard of him, but Pieper quotes the 18th century German philosopher Christian Wolff:

The truth that is called "transcendental" and is conceived as inherent in reality as such... is the ordered structure governing all existing things.

The transcendent Order from which immanent order flows is in contrast to the dream, which involves "inconsistency in the transformation of things. The truth implies order, the dream disorder."

Freud famously imagined he had discovered the implicit order, or deep structure, of dreams, and for awhile there I myself believed it. For the cult of psychoanalysis is exactly that: a cult, featuring a prophet, revelation, dogma, disciples, apostolic succession, sacraments, rites, purity tests, and of course, plenty of cash. 

Still, Freud's racket was better than what we have today in psychology, which isn't even a fairy tale. Speaking of which, if we ignore those transcendental principles referenced above -- should they 

ever disappear from the universe of all existing things, then the real world would dissolve into a fairy tale (mundus fabulosis), the equivalent of a dream (Wolff).

Obviously, we are there: western civilization has exchanged the order of truth for the disorder of the dream. But is it really a disorder, full stop? Just because Freud got it wrong, it doesn't necessarily mean that the dream has no order. Clearly, dreaming has some kind of order, or it would be a literal chaos with no narrative structure, characters, dialogue, scenes, themes, etc.

Thinking back on when I used to interpret dreams, I never did so in an "orthodox" manner that reduced them to some preconceived structure. Rather, I would approach them as one would a work of art -- a film or novel -- and try to discern the intent of the Dreamer, i.e., the underlying theme.

And as a matter of fact, I didn't come to post-graduate work in psychology in the usual way. Rather, my undergraduate degree was in film, of all things, more the artistic than technical side.

There has never been any conscious plan, but once I made the impulsive decision to veer into psychology, I couldn't help but see human life as a bad movie -- or a movie that is going badly -- and unhappy patients as being trapped in a plot unwittingly written by themselves: just like a horror movie, except the calls are coming from inside the head.

It was also during this time that -- unlucky for you -- I discovered Joyce, and more particularly, Finnegans Wake, which is what exactly? You could say it is the most complicated dream ever dreamt, which is to say, all of human history packed into one crazy dream in a single night of one individual, who is human nature writ large, AKA Here Comes Everybody. 

No one has ever come close to fully understanding the book, and no one ever will. However, the very idea of it drew me in like a moth to the flame. It didn't take much of a leap to regard it as literal, in the sense that history is indeed a nightmare from which we cannot awaken, and the more one studies history, the more evidence one finds for this endless nightmare. To study history is to float over a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat, a sewer called human nature.

I know, I know, there's plenty of good stuff down there, but it is clearly the exception, and it is always fragile and surrounded on all sides by the things one naturally finds in a sewer. Like today, for example. How insentient does one have to be in order to not smell it? 

Time out for some aphoristic back-up:

Civilizations are the summer buzzing of insects between two winters.

I'm an optimist. I say it's late autumn. 

History is a succession of nights and days. Of short days and long nights.

And the nights are, of course, when the most intense dreaming takes place, like REM sleep.

Our civilization is a baroque palace invaded by a disheveled mob.

Led by a dementia patient. 

What we call the "news" is really the Dream Police: it defines the parameters of the dream and marginalizes or punishes those who stray from it. For example, today's dream is that sending illegals to wealthy Democrat playgrounds that claim to welcome Diversity is a "political stunt." Okay dreamer.

Pulling out for a moment from this civilizational nosedive, it occurs to me that to become a Christian is to plug into God's own dream, so to speak. Thus, for example,

The Church’s function is not to adapt Christianity to the world, nor even to adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld in the world.

Or, you could call it a counter-dream to the nightmare of history. It resembles the transcendent order referenced above, except the latter is philosophical, or accessible to natural reason, whereas we can know nothing of God's dream unless he reveals it to us.

But like most dreams, it's definitely a strange one -- so strange that upon hearing it, many of his disciples said, This is a pretty weird dream. Who can accept it? But this is part of the appeal, for

Christian doctrines have the implausibility of objects that we do not construct, but that we stumble across.

Morevoer,

Certain dogmas of Christianity seem so evident to me that it is not difficult for me to believe in those that are difficult to believe.

Now, we've had plenty of morons in the White House, but not since Wilson have we had a frankly demented one. What does this imply for the nightmare of history? 

It's difficult to say at this juncture whether this is a cause or consequence of where we are in the nightmare, but it certainly seems like we've lost any connecting thread, and that we are now like a planet with no star, and therefore spinning out of control. Say what you want about the nightmarish tenets of the left, at least it's a structure. But this is madness.

Even so, the Central Sun is always here, at least for the individual. To be a conservative is to say that there is a transcendental order in things; that this order is discovered and not invented; and for this reason ought to be conserved, precisely. The things that are not of this order shouldn't be tossed aside lightly, but rather, thrown with great force.