Don’t Forget Your Consonants or Why I Sometimes Hate My Dreams

By Christopher Myers

This morning I woke up angry with my mother. Not my real mother—my dream- mother, and not my dream-mother, as in my ideal mother, but my mother in my dream. I was angry with her. But we’ll get to her in a minute. First, the dream itself. From what I can remember, I seemed to be in the balcony of a church. The balcony was more like the upper deck of a baseball stadium than a church because everyone on stage looked small. I don’t remember what was happening, but I do remember an organ playing, and not a “How Great Thou Art,” Baptist Church, pipe organ, but a whirling, rock and roll, Bob Dylan with the Band organ. So maybe it was a rock concert in a church, or a baseball stadium that felt like a church, or some other non-logical possibility that only exists in dream world. I’m not sure.

What I am sure of is that my mother was there and that she was sitting next to an odd looking man in the balcony. I have no problem pointing out how strange this man was because I have never met this man in my waking life, and as far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t even exist. (How’s that for some writerly solipsism?) He was bald but the hair he did have was scruffy and his smile went up too easy and fast like his gums were greased with something. My dream-self didn’t trust him. Plus, he had sweaty hands. I don’t know that he had sweaty hands, but my dream-self was pretty convinced that he did, considering that he kept them palm down on his thighs and made no effort to shake my hand. But my dream-mother looked like my real mother, so my dream-self never thought for a minute that sweaty-handed guy was my dream-father. My dream-self was relieved.

I started talking to my dream-mother, but I don’t remember what we discussed. I just know that I got angry, because she used the phrase, “Don’t forget your consonants,” not once but twice. The second time she said this my dream-self exploded and started into a tirade that I can pretty much sum up with the phrase, “I don’t seem to be speaking in vowels right now, do I?” After that my dream-self started to mock my dream mother with a stream of consonantless phrases. Then I woke up. Angry.

Now, has my real mother made a request of me that seemed at the time to be as ridiculous as not forgetting one’s consonants? Absolutely, and I got angry at those too, though I don’t remember being as vindictive as my dream-self. But that isn’t the point. The point is how in the world can I wake up angry with my real mother for something my dream-mother said? Or put another way, how can something fake make me feel something real?

The whole realm of entertainment is built on the premise that people can have real responses to fake things, and on that level I’m glad for it because I, like the rest of humanity, like to be entertained. But that makes me think about how silly entertainment seems when you think of it that way—engaging in something fake in order to feel something real. What if the only real feelings I have are all products of entertainment? Or more specifically, what if I only seek out feelings stimulated by fake things because, in some weird inversion, those fake things become more real to me than reality? The dangers of constant stimulation are many, but the greatest danger is that it feels so real. It is not wrong to be stirred up—we were meant to be passionate. The question is what stirs you up? As John Piper points out, you can tell a lot about a person by what they are passionate about: “To know a soul’s proportions you need to know its passions. The true dimensions of a soul are seen in its delights. Not what we dutifully will but what we passionately want reveals our excellence or evil.”

What does it say about my soul if its only delight is in the latest season of The Office or the next Batman movie? Mostly that my soul doesn’t have much dimension. And that’s scary. Our parents, it seems, were right about too much TV, but not for the reasons they thought—it doesn’t rot our brain. It trains our brain to feel constantly flooded with feeling and emotion so that if we watch too much of it the real world doesn’t feel like much of anything at all. But even I could muster up the courage and rid myself forever of the glowing tube, I’d still have my dreams to contend with.