I have had some recurring dreams in my life. I have viewed them with some wonder because they have stayed in my mind as clear as day for more than 2 decades now.
The first dream I had along these lines, I have ever-since used as my firey ambition in life.
It took place on the wild and windy sand dunes of the beaches of my homeland in the Western Isles.
I walked the dunes as a young boy of around 13 years, dressed in a loincloth, like our Mesolithic ancestors.
I eventually walked to the top of a huge dune, more than 20 ft high, and jumped.
The leap of faith.
It took a long time to come down.
When I landed on the ground I was now an old man.
Grey, long-haired, like Samson or Tom Hanks in Cast Away. Tired, old muscles, as if I’d been toiling in some celestial coal mines as I flew threw the air.
When I landed, I fell to my knees.
And then I stood up, with purpose.
I walked forward several paces until I came across a rock. The only rock on this vast, storm-battered beach, where worlds collide.
I knelt at the rock, and pushed both of my hands deep down into the stone, burning their imprint permanently into the earth itself.
My leap of faith. My mark on the world.
My ambition to become an old man, with impact.
Today, I had a new dream. Clear, colourful and vivid to the point of a waking reality.
However, it was rather less inspiring of my ambition. Perhaps 20+ years of expired potential have that effect on a man’s dreams?
In this dream, my landscape was a combination of my old high-school, my university town and that flower-strewn machair grassland of my childhood happiness (comfortingly interspersed with the gravestones of my West-Coast-Celtic ancestors).
I was supposed to be teaching a class, but it turned out I couldn’t teach them the prescribed lesson of music; because I cannot read music. So I decided to teach them marine science, something I have actually learned rather well through my current profession.
The wrinkle now was that all of my would-be students were in the wrong class, so I had to wander around the campus to find them.
On my journey to find my students, the landscape altered itself, as they often do in my dreams. In a short enough time, I found myself outside of the comfortable rooms of the university, and on the banks of an impassable river. There was a bridge, and my students were in a tower, on the other side of the bridge. But I could not access the bridge from my lowly position on the riverbank.
I doubled back. Climbed a polished granite wall into the wildflower meadow graveyard of my ancestors, and walked through their fertile resting place to try to find a way out to my (no doubt, patiently-waiting) class.
I got to a building and went through it’s entrance, only to find that in doing so, I had allowed a horse to escape. Evidently doing some damage in the process.
Some old weather-faced farmer took me by the arm and escorted me back the way I came.
In the area where the horse had been, there hung a beautiful looking shotgun. It was on a bracket, attached to a board, hanging from a bare stone wall.
The old man saw me looking at it and said, ‘You have to leave now’. ‘You’re depressed, you can’t be here’.
‘You have to leave now’.
And then I woke.
For the record, I am not currently depressed. I have never been happier. I have a loving wife, 2 beautiful children, whom we raise peacefully, and a third on the way. I have an interesting job, albeit a very demanding one.
So when the wise old man in my dream, doesn’t want me near his guns because ‘I am depressed’, that came as a bit of a shock to me!
In this world of Covid fear, Trump Vs Biden 2020 debates, self-inflicted recessions, stranded colleagues, tyrannical laws being enforced in Britain, free-speech a thing of the past, and a maniacal public desperately begging for dangerous RNA based vaccines to be rushed through trials and made mandatory for all school children without parental consent, I’ve actually got only one fear.
I fear that if we are no longer god-fearing people, then we only have 2 things left to constrain our insane civilisation and cultural nihilism. The zombie-mob and the nation-state.
Can I believe in God again, like the child who walked the among the wild Atlantic dunes, near-naked, yet unafraid?
Do I have to?
Can I?