The Evolution of a Dream
Written by Rev. Philip Stonhouse
The Commentary is found below the poem:
I have dreamed in many forms. In the beginning, it was a flow of colours, swirling and whirling in my mind’s eye as a sort of river of colour. Calming the colours eventually started to form images. When the colours became images they continued to move and change into new forms. The sky would turn into a roof, the street would turn to a beach, and items would come and go. I watched as if watching a movie, seeing the beauty that the world could become. As these images developed into stories I became part of them; I could touch and feel all that happened. It was as any waking hour, with just as much emotion and feeling. It was more than life ever could be. I understood all without conversation, without words; no talk was needed for experience. Understanding was instant and complete. As I began to understand the beauty of sound, music unlike any other became the soundtrack of my mind. I discovered a whole new world of sound and music; I created and listened to whole symphonies, sound was my playground. Language in all its glory was last to enter my mind. I began to understand in life, not all was perfect understanding, that there were thousands of ways to express any one thing: so the beauty of individual, creative expression was born.
One or many of these ideas existed at any one point, yet as it stands I know nothing of nothing. I was never able to remember absence and lack of anything. There was one thing that was always there: emotion. It was there as my true response, the true response of feeling to sense.
After this life of experience from dreams, I have woken up in darkness. I try to reach out my hand in front of my eye but I see not and feel not its movement. There is no touch, no sound, no sight; my body itself seems not to exist. My mind is obsessed with this idea of nothing. From a place that seems to exist only in perspective, somewhere deep inside, from inside my soul, in the center of my very being, I feel a pulse of pain. Like a ripple in the water, it spreads and consumes all in pain and then disappears. Now that the pain has dissolved into nothing, I feel consumed by fear and sadness: fear of my lack of understanding of nothing and sad at my loss at coming into nothing. A spark of joy flows through me, it is surprising but it calms me. There is happiness in being, even if only being in nothing. All at once, I can feel every emotion grief, sadness, horror, playfulness, happiness, hatred, surprise, pleasure, pain, and calm. It started at nothing and built to absurdity. I feel as if I can no longer survive such extreme happiness. This much excitement feels like horrible agony as ever pain could. The pain itself had progressed but it no longer felt like pain, it was warmth and comfort. The sheer mass and power of each emotion obscure themselves into each other. Now I can touch the horror, I can see the excitement, I can taste the anger, I can hear the sadness, I can smell the calm. As they grew, they became one and the same and now it is nothing at all.
Where had it all gone? All of it had come and gone into nothing. How did so much come from so little? There was all in nothing. It is funny the closest things we have to represent the infinite seem to be nothing: The Circle, the 0 as a continuous loop the never ends means nothing, zero, the absence of existence. Space: the eternal darkness, the giant vacuum. Both the infinite and nothingness are impossible to perceive. As something reaches infinity it appears to be nothing at all.
Commentary: Originally published in a U of T student anthology - I have often had very vivid dreams. I even taught myself to lucid dream. This prose poem came as a result of a very vivid dream I had in which absent of everything else my emotions heightened to such a degree that they were both horrifying and glorious. C.S. Lewis once said that when each of us are extended into the infinite we will become just like either of these, horrors or glorious. This poem also challenges our ability to perceive/experience the infinite, which is God or the absence which is distance from him.
