What Do My Dreams Mean?

These days I dream a lot. It's dream after dream after dream. I honestly cannot get it. And the dreams are not always pleasant. Plus, I don't know what they mean. What do my dreams mean? I wish I knew. I wish I was some sort of expert on the issue of dreams. I know Sigmund Freud has written extensively on the subject, but have you met Sigmund! The guy is very hard to read. Some people are so smart that sometimes they speak and you can't make head or tail out of what they say. It's so annoying! Someone once said that smart people exist to make life difficult for students. These brainy individuals write books and books and more books, and poor students have to read and read and read. Was it Bill Gates who declared that one of the greatest epistemological problems of our day is the number of books left unread? But smart people will keep writing; whether to show off or to inspire, or simply to make students suffer, smart people go on writing.

 

It begins by thinking. Smart people like to think. They sit on a chair or take a walk in the park, or lie in bed and think. They think and think and think, like Archimedes, until they reach an aha moment, and then they grab a pen and begin to write, or a laptop and begin to type. A funny clip from Seth McFarlane's Family Guy features one of the many versions of Peter Griffin sitting in a chair with chin propped up by hand, thinking. His wife comes in and says, "Would you please go and look for a job?" And the thinking fellow quips in his philosopher pose, "Why?" Why look for a job? Now, when an unemployed individual asks why he or she should go look for a job, is the person being a philosopher or just a fool? Can one be both?

 

And so it is that wise people question everything, even the foundation of life itself. Why am I here? What am I made of? Who am I? Descartes was famous for his meditations. We're reading him right now in class, and I really like what he writes, the product of his thoughts. But the funny thing about philosophers is that these otherwise wise men never agree on anything. Just as one has finished reading Descartes and loving everything he says, then comes Spinoza to say that everything Descartes said, everything you've read and loved, is mere rubbish. Or take Aquinas. You read and read and read and just love what he says, and take it you understand why the Church has adopted him as prime doctor. But then you reach the point where Aquinas himself says everything he writes is straw, compared to the beatific vision he has glimpsed. Well, you wonder, can you share this vision? And Aquinas would readily say no. Because language is insufficient.

 

So what then? How can we know? What can we know? What are dreams made of? It seems to me that even after making life considerably hard for students, wise men still cannot resolve it. I bet even if I read Freud I'd still not understand dreams. It's like reading Plato's Theaetetus on Knowledge. When you begin reading the book and realize it's on knowledge, you hope you're finally going to learn what knowledge means; what it's all about. But when you do finish reading the book, you discover that all you really know is what knowledge is not, and that you may never in fact know what it is. So why did you read it in the first place? Same reason the author wrote in the first place; to satisfy a mental itch. To feel smart. And so the enterprise of reading and writing will go on.

 

Or God. Thousands of books, articles and papers have been written about him, but no one sufficiently explains who he is, or what he is. All we get when we read about God is what he is not, or analogies to things on the earth, or what he has been "revealed" to be. By whom? Jesus? The Church? It begs the question in each case, since God is manifested in these, and you cannot prove the existence of something by itself. We cannot prove the existence of first principles; we just have to take them for granted. It's the only way we can say anything about anything. It's like Descartes' Cogito model. How can he prove the existence of his mind or intellect? By the fact that he's thinking? But what ratifies the fact that he's thinking? His thoughts? Doesn't this sound like begging the question? I know I am thinking because I think that I know I am thinking. Phew!

 

I begin to understand the relativists, the agnostics and the atheists. I begin to understand why they refuse to believe anything. They seem to realize that deductions come from inductions, and the information sourced from inductions is partial. Because no matter how large a sample size is, generalizations made would always end up inadequate. One would have to know every element in a set to adequately generalize about the set. And only God - our concept of this reality - can examine every element in a set. So, only God can adequately know. By the way, this word "adequately," and all the words in its family, like adequate, adequation and so on, are used often by Aquinas to explain what we can know, and how what we can know is limited compared to what God can. Take the set called humanity for example: it is made up of every human being that has existed; the human beings that are existing now, and the human beings that are yet to exist. Only God can know all of these human beings. God sees the past, the present and the future, as if they were all happening right now. Augustine, Aquinas and Boethius say as much. Anselm is of the view that God is infinite in perfection and there is nothing more perfect the human mind can conceive than God.

 

God. So I guess it all boils down to God, the necessary being; the one "who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfection." Everything begins and ends with God. And we don't know exactly what he is, but we believe he exists. We can know him by reason. Aquinas, Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventure, Scotus, Descartes - philosopher after philosopher has attempted to prove him. One particular "proof" sounds so cool. It's Descartes'. It says: Whatever is contained in the concept of a thing can be predicated of that thing. Necessity of being is contained in the concept of God, and so it is predicable of God. In other words, God is a necessary being. Cool. But it begs the question still. It's pretty much the same as Anselm's Proslogion argument, only in better language. It's like saying: God is necessary because he's necessary, and he's necessary because I think so.

 

Phew! Again I ask: What can we know? What is life? Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going to? What do my dreams mean? I don't know. I'm still searching. Are you?