One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy

This is an essay about what I've learned from previous dreams.

I am ready to end this chapter in my dreamlife and real life. It was about seeking wisdom. Years ago, I chose to seek wisdom because I had become disillusioned with mere intelligence. Intelligence is nice but it is an inborn talent. I was dismayed by the reality that intelligence is so often abused and fetishized. Wisdom is a greater thing. Wisdom is earned and transmitted.

I'm not giving up on wisdom, just broadening my goals. I will detail that in a separate essay. For now, I want to tie up some loose ends from The Dreaming. Some of these where hard lessons and realizations. But that is the nature of wisdom.

I learned what The Goddess is hiding behind her Mona Lisa smile and it is nothing profound. She had dental braces as a kid and was embarrassed by them, just like I was as a kid. That's why she doesn't speak either. She is self-conscious about opening her mouth.

Similarly, The Goddess won't reveal her real name because she is ashamed of it, again as I was of my name when I was kid. Whatever her real name is, she feels it doesn't fit her so she would rather use an assumed name. I chose the name Michael and I chose the name Gabrielle for her. I might stick with that for now. I might call her "Gabby." That will develop in future dreams.

The Goddess isn't a femme fatale tease. She isn't aloof. She is shy, just like I am. That's why she's always running away, avoiding eye contact, and dodging questions. She is me. She is not an ideal. She is a person trying to shape her identity as best she can. It is a put-on, but that's a very honest and real thing for a person to do.

Everything else, as was revealed by The Goddess, relates to baseball. This is no-doubt influenced by the movie Field of Dreams as well as a book I recently read called Baseball as a Road to God. The Field is a baseball field. But it's just grass. What is missing is the dirt infield. That would be the clay from the clay and the potter. The Goddess and I are angels because I live in Los Angeles and one of the two local baseball teams is call the Angels. They wear red. The other team is the Dodgers and they wear blue. All the symbolism of names and colors is just arbitrary, just like sports teams have names and colors to identify themselves. The Giants are orange. The Athletics are green. It's all just identity, not necessarily meaning.

Baseball has a separate meaning to me and it relates to The Moon, too. When I was a kid, I wanted to be either a baseball player or an astronaut. That was my "dream" (aspiration). As an adult, I think I'm trying to fulfill those dreams. After my encounter with The Goddess about baseball, my next plan was to build a baseball field on The Moon. That would be the ultimate fantasy: to be both a baseball player and an astronaut. That's how I arrived at this conclusion about wisdom. In the end, all my thoughts evolve from my past and my influences. In some ways, I'm still that little boy. I am not an observer of reality. I am a participant. I am immersed in the totality of my experience.

There's more. I could go on and on about Field of Dreams and The Players and the layers of symbolism. I think it's enough though. I'm ready to accept that I am not just an observer. I am an actor. That is why I leave this initial pursuit of wisdom and instead seek virtue because virtue entails action.