DREAM - TRIPTYCH

DREAM – triptych

PART ONE

HEALTH

Most people die in bed, at least in times of peace. In sleep, in hospitals, nursing homes, hospices. Medicine takes the position that movement is health, that the sooner we get up after illness, the better. This way of thinking is also present in common opinion. “The illness put him to bed and he never got up”; “as long as he walked it was still somehow okay, once he lay down he died”; “bedridden” – meaning close to death. “He got bedsores,” “contractures” – all very depressing. Lying in bed during illness is thus an increasing threat – a threat of death. Sometimes inevitable death, inscribed in the process.

Such death can be not only natural. Sometimes it is inflicted deliberately, spread over stages to intensify suffering and pain. Not of the one who suffers, although also; mainly of those who watch. It’s a kind of marketing of suffering, a warning, a reprimand, sowing fear. Sometimes it is caused by incompetence. Explained as a margin of error inherent in the development of medicine, sometimes it is a source of pride. Like a heart transplant. We remember when it succeeded, we don’t remember the previous ones – deaths. So death on the altar of science, politics, development. Death in bed.

How to reconcile this with the image of our grandmothers, mothers standing over us from the cradle and saying: “sleep well, you’ll be healthy”; “go to bed, when you get up, it will be better,” or the magical “SLEEP IS HEALTH”? Where does this lie come from, where this copy? Did our mothers, casting a spell on illness and sleep, try to reject the possibility of death? In bed, in illness. Another failure of religion, lack of logic, lack of definition. Believers could not declare, create and ground joy from going to God. That is why death is terrible, unwanted, cruel when “too early,” hard to explain. This fear caused funerals to be sad, songs mournful and tearful, colors black, mourning.

Is that why our mothers were afraid that we would leave? Who was God to them if they did not want to give us to Him? And yet they led us to baptism, to communion.

SLEEP IS HEALTH

Another lie told to children before they understand that the world is different when they leave home.

PART TWO

INNOCENCE

The nature of sleep is interesting. As children, we learn that sleep is dreaming. We can dream that we are someone else, great, rich, famous. We can have an adventure, fly into space, win a race, a war, or win a woman. Culturally, we have always spoken of “dreams of sleep.” Strange that semantically and phraseologically they differ from “hallucinations.” Phraseologically, DREAMS have a positive connotation, HALLUCINATIONS definitely not. Dreams are not only dreams, they can appear in other contexts. “Prophetic dreams,” “dreams of power,” “erotic dreams”... The ancients, though not only them, attached great importance to this, explained, interpreted, searched for meanings. Later psychology looked for subconscious projections, the id, in dreams. That would mean for every child that dreams are important, define personality, and we should listen to them.

And here is the catastrophe. As a child, I learned that no. This disappointment comes before First Communion. You have to go to confession. And among sins we find bad behavior, bad words, bad deeds, omissions, lies, etc.; but there are no “bad dreams.” You do not have to confess dreams. This exclusion is not accidental. It was necessary to declare the INNOCENCE OF DREAMS. To make them excluded from the unity of body and spirit-soul of man. Otherwise the whole system of faith, its moral code, system of guilt and redemption would collapse. How to confess a dream; if in it we kill, lie or commit adultery. You can confess, but how to declare improvement, remorse, renounce the evil of such a dream. So you could build the world of dreams and unfold it inside belief systems, but that was too difficult, easier to recognize that sleep does not exist. It does not matter, does not influence us and our lives. Even if, as psychiatrists claim, it is some projection. Even if we declare atheism, this cultural copy is so deep that we cannot leave it, cannot think differently. After all, we will not apologize to the neighbor for killing him in a dream.

Or will we? Don’t we subconsciously feel that we will greet the neighbor differently if in the night in a dream he helped us in trouble? Won’t we approach work more willingly if we dreamed we were rewarded? Won’t we look differently at a woman if we dreamed she was a partner?

It’s like Facebook. You have a feeling of participation but you are not really there. You were not at the party, you didn’t help a friend in illness, yet you feel like it happened.

Is that innocent?

PART THREE

FAITH

The first birch. If a birch grew from a seed, then who created the first seed? Obviously – God. If a frog comes from spawn, then who created the first spawn? Also obvious – God. And so on. Sounds familiar. Saint Thomas.

All who believe in God invariably have many arguments proving He exists. One might ask why do they need these? Since they believe… But that’s a trick because these arguments are needed for those who must be convinced, after all...

I was thinking how an atheist can ask a believer about faith. Immediately they will face the argument that faith is grace and that he will not understand it until he experiences it. So that’s a problem.

And here again I thought of sleep, the “little death.” A strange state when for several hours we are not here. Not here. We do not know what happens around us, what happens to us, what we do and what is done to us. Even anesthesia – “artificial sleep” does not cause much anxiety. We know many people who woke up. We also, as children, getting into bed every day got used to waking up in the morning. One could say “it’s natural.” However, no, because each of us will someday go to sleep to never wake up. And no one knows when. Yet we go to sleep – calmly, hopefully. Calmly and hopefully it is difficult to die.

So faith belongs to one who lies down knowing he will die and lies down with faith that he will wake up “there” – calmly. How many are there?

So if you are an atheist, ask believers about this, because through this example one can understand the true power of faith.

Or its lack.

Opening: November 10, 2017, WL4

Photos: Jarosław Bartołowicz