Jasmine's Dream

A strong wind blows passed as we walk back to our classes from lunch.  A former female student, huddled in a mass of males, and keeping my pace yells out, "Mr. Standing, the virgin Mary came to me in my dreams last night and she told me that there will be snow tomorrow."  She means to say school will be cancelled.  I smile and say, "Oh yeah?"  I keep walking and she turns to the left to enter a building.  I am alone again, walking in a mixture of bundled teens.

I walk on and think about the possibility of what dreams mean, what the Virgin Mary has meant to so many people for so long, how wish fulfillment is a way to understand the complex concoctions of interwoven narratives the brain actively builds during lights out.   All my wondering keeps me awake and alert through the day.  One must consider the smartest people in the world are prone to an unimaginable absorption of ideas.  They fail to see how we could ever abandon an idea.  For them, there is no such thing as case closed--which is the complexity of what drives so many mad in the end.  Even out of irreducible trouble, we define it as "irreducible" and then go on to eat dinner with family, talking about our days and the weather.

A mind's ability to focus and attend to detail for prolonged periods of time is paramount to success.  Tenacity.  Glue.  Velcro.  Effort.  Mental attention is built through practice.  Our mind's only able to concentrate for as long as we let it.  We are the rulers of our mind's focus, though our cognitive function greatly diminishes through different episodes of sleeplessness or chemical imbalance.  

I want to carry Jasmine's Virgin Mary's story further than I have.  In my college days, I quickly wrote it off as foolish talk, automatically concluding the impossibility of a Virgin Mary, the unlikely reality that dreams are somehow instructions from the unconscious, or preconscious, brain to somehow benefit one's waking world experience.  In my rationality-trumps-irrationality mindset, I would have been humored by the idea that snow predictions concerned the Virgin Mary so much that she felt it necessary to enlighten Jasmine last night during REM sleep.  

But as I get older, my ideas of the world are in constant question, my natural beliefs always undermined by something willing to put up a fight to what I accept at common knowledge.  I don't listen to myself as much as I used to.  I want to believe Jasmine and her dream, despite my immediate desire to laugh it off for its absurdity.  I want to believe that her dream of the Virgin Mary has great potential for understanding Jasmine as a human being, for appreciating the simple fact that she feels ok disclosing something so intimate as a dream and her predictions and her hopes, to a former teacher who walks alongside her in the windy February afternoon.  From the inside to the outside, Jasmine encounters, acts with and against, the world in which she occupies by the simple gesture of revealing what her mind so craftfully conveyed using the same medium that's been with man for millennia.    

Science teaches the cold hard facts, but the lessons of what to and how to appreciate those immutable physics of our universe are seldom attained by discovers.  Appreciation is bias.  But it is our appreciation for things in and of this world that is part and parcel of what constitutes humanity.