It’s past time to give dreams their due. Isn’t it? Time to be more discerning about what can and cannot be let into the conversation. Throwing out science is obviously stupid. But equally stupid is restricting science to a certain paradigm that disallows dreams, fantasies, myths, legends, all those aspects of human beings that everyone shares but which can’t be measured in a laboratory.
Nothing wrong with measuring facts in a laboratory. But the laboratory should have windows to look out of onto, and doors to walk out of into, a different set of facts, just as real as those being studied inside. Don’t you think?
It always makes me laugh when someone pompous goes on about how astrology is superstition, how could the planets affect us on earth? The same person generally has studied, in grade school, how the moon affects our tides. And if she’s female, she knows the moon affects her cycles as well. Not to mention how the stars and the planets affect gravity. Scientists are finding out more affects all the time.
There is the kind of person, though, who goes forward, wearing self-satisfied blinders, rejecting all but what they think of as the “history of Western science.” Inevitably that person relies on Isaac Newton. So rarely do they admit, or perhaps even realize, that Isaac Newton was a keen alchemist.
And of course, recent deep science has discovered how to turn molecules into gold.
This brings us to the general technological disdain of the Humanities. “What are they for?” the modern day Inquisition demands. But what is literature than a body of the dreams of humanity? And what is the study of literature but a study of that history of dreams, of what they mean, of how they influence how we live, of how they actually form how we live and what we value?
What is the study of religion but that? The study of art? Of music? Of language?
All of these are the studies of humans dreaming and watching those dreams become reality, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. But it’s always the dreams that form us.
So when dreams clamor, and I say they are clamoring loudly now, we need to listen. To attend. To parse. And to stop shutting them out in the name of a sterile rationality that no longer waters the landscape, is no longer fertile. Our rationality needs watering. And it needs watering by dreams.
No one says this more eloquently than the poet Yahia Lababidi. His upcoming book, to be released in October of this year by New Village Press, is If You Cannot Say Genocide. We’ve published an excerpt in this issue here. I’ll have more to say about the book in the fall issue of EAP: The Magazine, so stay tuned.
Meanwhile, congratulations to two EAP contributors are in order. Barry Vitcov has just published Unknown & Other Stories, where he explores reality and imagination—as I hope all EAP contributors do. You can buy the book from Finishing Line Press, or directly from Barry. And David Bolton also published a book of short stories, Whispering Pines, distributed by Simon and Schuster, so you can find it here. Onward, writers!