THE LAMPS:

The dreamt dealt mainly with restriction, imposition, and artifice. Someone was sued for biting someone’s lip whilst kissing, for instance. Other parts of the dream dealt with adolescent themes, be they house parties or high school. Ironically enough, the illusory source of authority that challenged and condescended upon these youths, so long repressed and finally expressed in maturity, was in fact no different from Convention, a typically adolescent form of “morality” that most individuals maintain throughout their entire lives and that some adolescents transcend early on by force of Nature and, quite often, insufficient Nurture.

The stylings were not Kafkaesque, but there was in fact a sense of Purgatory to it. The notion was not the false hope that one would leave the home of one’s parents and find “one’s own”. Nothing could so belong to one’s self ever again; it all belonged to a God so Superpersonal that He seemed barely Personal. Yet when this God has been so generous to me, byfar surpassing the generosity of any parental figure or friend I have known, I am not shy to employ him as a model for the lot of them, myself included. I would not be holding them to my own standards, but to His. And that presence was dimly so in the background, a comforting and unconditional love and glowing warmth and Grace. It was not Of This World, so it was not bound to its conventions, and thus it transcended even the Universal. It was Multiversal and daunting, haunting.

When I was still in high school I fantasized about climbing the roofs of the high school. They simply were THERE, as though to be climbed, like mountains. Only a culture of beings so mad as to ban Mount Everest could place such restrictions as to forbid adolescents access to the roofs of a schoolhouse after class hours. But so it was that Man had opted out of Nature in his collective egoism and arrogance. So it was that I imagined that when finally we attained Adulthood, crossing those Gates into self-determination, that we would return, Alumni, and boldly traverse these roofs that became so familiar to me in my freshman year. It certainly was a sentiment not alien to my literature classes.

The House Parties were Something Else. No one seemed to know who was in charge of the household: the parents or the children? Everything was in a state of Absurdity and subliminal psychic warfare that had reached no degree of sophistication. The lighting was saturated and nauseating as the lamp section of a Home Depot or a callously lit part of IKEA.

Somewhere there dwelt a dogmatic force that preached debt to those who did things for us. But since we were powerless when those things were done it was impossible for us to owe them anything; they had rather all ready owed it to us, for we were literally helpless and could do nothing to change our situation. We could not be held responsible, and neither could a Mass of Conformists and Consumers, so the responsibility fell naturally to those closest to us. Such was the Natural Order. This was the balance that each individual had it in his Heart to maintain; to defile it would be to commit an offense to Nature Herself. And that would be to forget that all lights have, beneath their lurid and banal exterior, one Great Light of which they all emanate: that source of Energy that is the Maternal Fabric of the Universe Herself.

It was a very feminine dream, and as such it was a relief.

Dm.A.A.