by Tod Davies.
When I was a very small child, I heard voices. They would sound directly in my ear. I knew they were inside, rather than outside, but that didn’t trouble me, as I understood they were helpful. The voices warned me not to tell the adults. They said my parents, especially, wouldn’t understand, that I’d be put in a hospital. I’d been in a hospital to have my tonsils out, and I knew I didn’t want to go back to one if I could help it. So I listened to the warning.
Not that I always did what the voices said, though I always regretted it when I didn’t. But the culture I’d been born into was so unforgiving. Often the voices argued for me to act in a way I was told was wrong by my parents or others, even by stories on the television set, in the newspaper, in magazines my mother picked up in the grocery store. For example, the voices insisted I not be left alone with my uncle Bud. He was my father’s favorite, and I was constantly scolded for being disrespectful to him. But when I nerved myself to go near Bud, the voices would yell loudly in my ear, and I’d shudder and jump back. I always shuddered when I had to dance with him at family parties.
From the moment I was born, these voices also spoke to me in dreams. Even from the moment before I was born. There in the dark, the voices told me someone who was supposed to be outside to greet me was not. That was my absent father. But the voices said I was not to worry. They’d take care of me. It would be all right in the end.
One of those voices sounded like my own, now that I am old. I remember once when I was twelve, standing on a windy corner after school, waiting for a bus, shivering in an inadequate old coat that no one had noticed needed to be replaced, thinking life would always be like this, that I would always be cold, that no one would comfort me. But a voice sounded in my ear. “Don’t worry. It will be different when you are older. I promise you.” The bus came, and that earlier version of myself was obscurely comforted. Here’s the remarkable thing: years later, as I was drifting off to sleep, I saw, in a waking dream, that same little girl, terrified and cold at that bus stop. And I said those words to her.
It was true, too. I got older. I found a dog, or rather, as so often happens, a dog found me. From the beginning, he saw me, he loved me, not only that, but, maybe more importantly, he insisted I see him and love him back. I had known dogs before this first dog, but never had I listened to what they were trying to tell me. Once I began to listen, there was discovery. Of the world I lived in, of the people around me in it, but most of all, of myself.
There was this similarity between dogs and dreams. I had been told, by the world I was born to, that both were useless in the every day battle that was life. Extraneous. Maybe entertaining, but ultimately meaningless. Unreasonable. Irrational.
Dreams and animals, Emerson says, are what tell us about ourselves. To know who I am, and to act on that knowledge, is to me the very definition of Reason. All my life I’ve been told that those things I hold dearest, that teach me the most, that have the most meaning for me, are ultimately disposable, meaningless. In an increasingly transactional world, those things I feel and those creatures I love, are framed that way.
It’s the opposite, of course.
Dreams and dogs. It’s through them I reclaim my own world from the poverty and sterility of a world constricted by transaction and useless utilitarianism. I’m looking for a larger view of Reason. As dogs and dreams enrich my landscape of thought, opening it up to wider and wider vistas, I write about them, as best I can.