...and to fall in love.

I had a strange and unsettling dream as I fell asleep at about 2 in the morning in June 1999. I recorded it in my journal, and today, almost 9 years later, I reviewed that entry.

It was a dream, I sensed, of demons. Evil demons. And they haunted me. And I was trying to slay them, I think. With a sword or a sharp instrument on top of my head. Maybe a horn. Like a devil’s horn. I’d puncture the demons. Wound them. But the demons would keep coming back. They wouldn’t die. And this was frustrating. And scary.

And when I awakened, I tried to stay awake for a while. Because I was afraid that I might fall back into pretty much the same dream. But far as I can tell, I eventually slept peacefully the rest of the night.

Also strange, before I initially went to bed that night – before the dream – I was tired. But I had a compulsion to read a D. H. Lawrence short story called “The Blind Man.”

And when I finished the story, I crawled into bed. Thinking. That I wasn’t sure about the meaning of the story. I wondered what Lawrence intended the reader to get out of it.

Well, after my dream, I wondered if maybe he was telling me that the blind man, Maurice Pervin, really did see. That maybe he saw human nature better than people with sight. Because what he did was befriend a male friend of his wife Isabel, a man that he didn’t particularly like. But he did this for a strange reason. He really wanted to drive this man, named Bertie, away. Because he knew Bertie liked to keep his distance from people. And not really get close to them. And the moment someone tried to get friendly or intimate with him, Bertie would keep his distance, rather than become a true friend.

To me, it seemed like a story of manipulation. For devious reasons. To keep people away.

And I thought at the time it might be the kind of manipulation of which I was guilty during my lifetime. Keeping people at a distance. Not letting them get close to me for one reason or another. And maybe for reasons that I didn’t quite yet understand. Maybe a fear of intimacy. And maybe deep down in my sub-conscious I considered such manipulation wrong. And perhaps evil. Thus the dream. And maybe the dream, which verged on a nightmare, was my effort to slay the evil demons. And it was best to rid myself of them. For the sake of salvation and my own happiness.

Maybe the message was telegraphed to me, from someone in the spirit world, through my unconscious mind, to sit down at that moment before going to bed that night, to read “The Blind Man” and to try to make sense of the story.

Maybe I am the one who was blind. And it was time for me to see the significance of life. How important it is to become intimate….and to fall in love. –Jim Broede