Yiddish From Rubbish

The 5th of our 31 Dreamers is Rebecca, an amateur mushroom hunter from Bellingham, Washington. Rebecca sent me the following dream back in October and I thank her for waiting so patiently for an analysis. The dream:

I am outside in a garden.

I lift a brick and discover mycelium threads clinging to the brick.

I am surprised—the mycelium is Allen Ginsberg.

Small beautiful flower heads begin "fruiting" off the brick.

The flowers are his poem Kaddish.

I pick Allen's flower poem and begin to cut it up into a fine powder.

I snort it up my nose.

I think to myself what a beautiful gift.

I feel a deep love for Allen as mushroom and his flower poem Kaddish.

Then I start thinking in Yiddish.

(Sidenote: Kaddish is a poem Ginsberg wrote about his mother. It's a heavy poem.)

Beautiful dream Rebecca. So beautiful that I'm tempted to just leave it be. My expounding upon it will only break the spell of its poetry. I invite anyone reading this to stop here—to move on and turn to the dreams of others or, better yet, send in a dream of their own. The curious may proceed, for this dream packs in a rich loam of subject matter as well as cultural and mycological references that I must unpack a little bit. First the mycology:

Myceliae (plural of mycelium) are basically the "roots" of a fungus. They can range in size from microscopic threads to massive subterranean rhizomorphs that spread for miles. The world's largest known organism is an Armillaria ostoyae (the honey mushroom) in eastern Oregon whose myceliae span over 2,000 acres.

Fruiting bodies (pictured above) are like "flowers"— the fleshy, spore-producing parts of the fungus that poke up out of trees, logs and soil—the portion of the fungus that we generally refer to as "mushrooms."

Next, the (human) culture:

When poet Allen Ginsberg's mother died in 1956, the rabbi would not deliver the Mourner's Kaddish prayer at her funeral in the presence of Ginsberg's beatnik goyim friends. The poem Kaddish (our book of the day) is what he wrote in lieu of that—a memorial to his mother written in fits and starts while tripping on hallucinogenics, amphetamines, and (gasp!) jazz. It is as much a portrait of the Beat poet as it was of the woman who birthed him.

Rebecca, I take it you know all this. I'm just putting on the record for the rest of us. In your dream you look for something and you find it. You flip over a brick and there it is. It feeds you with beauty and knowledge and the process is so simple and direct, yet there is complexity in it. You crush this "heavy poem" into dust and shoot it up into your brain, but the reality is Kaddish isn't so easy to digest, nor is Yiddish so easy to learn—no language is! And yet you master both in one quick sniff.  Ah, if only it were that easy when we're awake!

This dream is rife with cycles of birth, growth and death. Music composer John Cage—a practicing Buddhist, amateur mycologist and contemporary of Ginsberg's—wrote a lot about mushroom hunting and cuisine. In the final passage of his groundbreaking work Indeterminacy (1959), Cage tells of meeting a Buddhist art historian from Philadelphia who asks him about the symbolism in the Buddha's death from eating a mushroom. Cage writes:

I explained that I’d never been interested in symbolism; that I preferred just taking things as themselves, not as standing for other things. But then a few days later while rambling in the woods I got to thinking. I recalled the Indian concept of the relation of life and the seasons. Spring is Creation. Summer is Preservation. Fall is Destruction. Winter is Quiescence. Mushrooms grow most vigorously in the fall, the period of destruction, and the function of many of them is to bring about the final decay of rotting material. In fact, as I read somewhere, the world would be an impassible heap of old rubbish were it not for mushrooms and their capacity to get rid of it. So I wrote to the lady in Philadelphia. I said, “The function of mushrooms is to rid the world of old rubbish. The Buddha died a natural death.”

The life cycle of the mushroom parallels that of Allen Ginsberg and his mother: The young Yiddish-speaking  Mrs. Ginsberg came to America, had to a son, Allen, and eventually died. Allen, in turn, birthed his poems, and he too died one day. For you, Recbecca, dreaming your dream last fall, "the period of destruction" when "mushrooms grow most vigorously" (and when, I presume, you do the bulk of your mushroom hunting) you dreamt of the poet as mycelium threads, taking the remains of his mother's life and turning it into a poem, which you in turn absorbed to gain the original knowledge that his mother possessed: the Yiddish language. 

What does this dream say about the way you want to process other things? Take your own mother, just as an example—are there things that you'd like to know from her that, for whatever reason, are difficult to obtain? Would it be easier to simply write a poem about her when she's gone, grind it up, snort it up your nose and BANG!—everything you wanted to glean from your mom's mind is there without the parts you don't want—you know, the  difficult parts that are painful to digest? I know I'd sometimes like to do this with regards to my own mother, among others. Sometimes. 

In reality we have to deal with people holistically. We can't just suck the Yiddish from their brains and leave the rest to decay under the bricks in the garden. This is what your dream challenges you to do: to take Kaddish and the mothers of the world in all their beautiful and difficult entirety, for better and for worse, and realize the love presented in the whole picture. Only then will you unearth the truth that you seek.

The Rainmaker

Last year when I saw bell hooks speak she reminded us all that she reads a book a day. I figure I can at least open a new book each day and read a sufficient amount of it. Today's book is Art & Fear: Observations On The Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It's a good book to crack open on the first day of the new year and a good introduction to today's dream.

The first of the 31 Dreamers is Neily from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Neily writes:

I had a dream my friend Tom won the Nobel Prize for Science for effecting significant cultural change in China (using a scientific method of some sort). He was simultaneously elected president of Italy on a cooperative platform.

At his Nobel Prize acceptance/presidential inauguration speech, held inside a mostly white, cathedral-like space, he wore a bishop hat and plain street clothes. Instead of giving a speech, he orchestrated a miracle which was that it rained indoors and abstract images were mysteriously projected on the wall above him. Everyone in attendance was in awe.

When I asked Tom what he did to earn the Nobel Prize, he demonstrated how he would remove red bricks from a wall or a structure without being detected...it didn't make any sense to me.

And then I woke up!
Thoughts?

Thoughts indeed, Neily. As one year draws to a close and another opens, all of us have thoughts around the events of the past 12 months and how these will shape the future. Several subjects highlighted in the news from 2008 have materialized in your dream: Nobel Laureates; goings on in China; a president being elected on a more progressive platform; upheaval in Italy’s government—your dream reads like the ingredient list to a week’s worth of the BBC World Service only with some names of people and places jumbled. Your friend Tom must be quite a fellow—the three Nobel Prizes in the sciences were split between nine different people in 2008 for work in subatomic physics, human immunodeficiency viruses and fluorescent green proteins, yet Tom takes all for something we can only imagine (perhaps harnessing the seismic power of the Sichuan Earthquake to liberate the people of Tibet?) and still has time to oust Italy’s right-wing coalition through promises of direct democracy. Maybe if a million of us just close our eyes and think real hard we can get your dream to actually come true. Are you doing it? I am.

Onto the meaning of your dream: Tom is cast as a wonderful man, capable of working miracles and helping others through the marvels of science and cooperation. You obviously hold a lot of respect and fondness for this person while seeing him as something of a hip authority figure—the presidential bishop in jeans and a t-shirt who is so cool that he manages to one-up Al Gore by actually making it rain as part of his PowerPoint presentation. This spectacle may be spectacular, but you're not 100% sold. Is it all show and little substance? While the rest of us sit in church (by the way, was it the walls or the people in the cathedral who were mostly white?) and shout our praises, you ask Tom to explain himself a little more deeply, and he nonchalantly tries to impress you with his Jenga skills (see picture). Okay, so Tom’s quite the fun-loving gamemaster as well as the people’s liberator, but what is he really playing at? That, Neily, is the question in your dream. You like and respect your friend and his casual playful ways, but do you sometimes feel like you’re being played? Maybe not. Perhaps your dream about Tom is a about your own desire to step up to the pulpit and fulfill your own dream, and Tom's role is that of an inspiring friend and mentor from whom you can learn to make it rain.

Neaily, I hope that you'll share this with Tom and ask him to send a dream in to 31 Dreamers.