Dreams, Stories And Facts

 USAF F 15E Strike Eagles 335th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron bombing run over Afghanistan

Last night I dreamt of an organic farm collective related to cows . On the collective’s milk containers were the words: “By rule and law, this milk is not to be used to kill, trap or poach.” In response, I thought in the dream that it was admirable, but foolish to make such a claim or legal demand.

For example, what if someone in a bombing run drank the milk that, in turn, fortified him to carry out his intention? What about a poacher, who drank the milk that invigorated him so that he could go out and slaughter elephants for their tusks?

The fact is that we are directly or indirectly related to everything around us. So to try to stop the overall trajectory by dictates, such as those on the milk containers, is impossible. In other words, to not use milk for slaughter is impossible.

The dream went on and I learned the following information from it:

Human brains are composed to make up stories. This is an evolutionary advantage.

At a certain point, we know when our stories are real and when they are bogus. For instance, a story that I could compose about a two inch high blue fairy dancing like a ballerina in the forest may be believable to a two year old, but not to most adults.

We compose our lives in stories. It is the way that our brains are configured due to a long history of evolutionary honing and usually the story is linear in sequence, but can have as much detail as we like or can manage.

So I can tell myself a story that goes like: “Yesterday I did X, Today I will do Y and tomorrow I will do Z.”

Like news, we classify our stories into three categories. One seems true (such as believing that Jesus said thus and so or that Gods or angels fly through the air based on religious indoctrination), another is the untrue (such as pigs can sprout multi-colored wings and fly through the air) and a third is in the unknown, probable category (such as Donald Trump may have said this week to a friend of his that he would like to kill the North Korean leader).

Oddly news, stories and facts have a way of transmuting over time. Try the fun American party game of telephone as a way of showing this as being the case. Have someone whisper into the ear of a next person a statement and ask him to repeat it down the line to the next. Then watch the statement that comes out of the last person’s mouth — the last in line for the game.

Does it match the original statement? No.

 

It makes practically everything suspect, including the stories that come to us from religious leaders, the ones passed by generation after generation by word of mouth.

Yet we have another way to fix in place information. This is by fact. For example, it is a fact that I can let go of a plate and it will drop to the floor unless it is in a gravity-free zone like outer space.

Facts based on evidence seem harder for people to subsume. They reject them if they go against their belief systems based on the stories that they tell themselves.

So we have climate change deniers, flat Earth theorists and all varieties of other thoughts based on an inability to accept truth. Truth in a rough world is just too hard to take into oneself, it seems.

One of my friends and work related colleagues is a right-wing constitutionalist and whenever I give him information that disturbs his views (i.e., his condonation of Trump and disbelief in climate change taking place), he calls it b.s. Then I write him in emails back: FACTS, FACTS, FACTS, EMPIRICAL TRUTH, SCIENTIFIC METHOD OF INQUIRY.” So we spar

The dream of mine went onward. In it, I saw myself as being Sisyphus.

Sisyphus – Wikipedia

Yes, I am him. I do the same actions every day only to repeat them the next day when the boulder rolls down the hill again. I wash the same dishes, clean the same counters, wash the same laundry, brush the same teeth and so on.

It is always a repeat performance, and again and again. It is part of the human condition and the life for everything on this planet. Again and again the same effort with the same result of repeating the action.

One of the actions that I repeat every day is a verbal apology in my mind. Nobody hears it except for me. I do it all the same to remind myself of my place in the life stream.

I say something like:

Dear little microbes — ones like viruses, bacteria and dust mites — I am sorry that I kill you each day, especially the ones that I breathe into my body and that my body’s army kills, my immune system kills. I am sorry that you get slaughtered even if you are benign to my system, not a sort that killed my mother like pneumonia germs.

Next I go to the forest: Dear forest and all that lives in forest, flora and fauna, I am sorry for my paper and wood use. It destroyed your lives, but I don’t know about what to do since I like tissues, toilet paper, paper towels, printer paper and books.

Next I go to the land, air and water. I say that I am sorry for dioxin that is used to create paper. I apologize for my pollution based on agricultural run-off that sickens animals and plants alike.

Afterwords I go to eating and using up resources (other formerly living things) for food, clothing, housing, bedding, etc. I again apologize for using up energy that these entities made for themselves. I apologize for stealing it and killing them in the process.

Then my apology goes further. I apologize to the unborn offspring for all that was killed on my behalf. I apologize to any offspring actually born and to ancestors back to the beginning when life was formed on Earth.

I explain in this little vision that I was not responsible for evolution to be about brutality that goes onward for generation after generation. Maybe a God or Gods did create this viciousness.

Meanwhile I was just born into the system, but forgive me nonetheless. I suffer from time to time and will die some day, too, after my period of theft from the world is over and done.


Evolution, itself, is not very nice. Who are you going to root for here? The hungry crocodile, whose back may have been broken by the stomping hippo, the scared-out-of-his mind and pained wildebeest or the hippo?

The wildebeest should have drowned quickly in the water. As it is he will now die of infection and blood loss due to the hippo’s action since his hoof is hanging on by a small thread of flesh.Then he will be eaten slowly while still alive by vultures, hyenas and/or others.

Hippos Come to Rescue Wildebeest from Crocodile – YouTube

▶ 2:59

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omuLZK_HOXE

Aug 29, 2017 – Uploaded by Kruger Sightings

That wildebeest needs to get some new friends. None of his mates came to rescue him. Poor fella had to rely …

 

Certainly, the way that life goes forward is not pretty. It is not kind, nor ethical.

Nonetheless, we have to try to bring goodness. Without doing so, our whole Earth is a painful and miserable terror, such as this poor wildebeest shows. In short, we have to be more than meat on the universal chopping block, as my USA father said in a lecture in Canada during WWII as a CO (contentious objector), who was left working on a US farm with much turmoil and trouble in the process.

Although I have had pneumonia twice, the events didn’t kill me. I am not a piece of universal meat to be consumed yet, although my mother was consumed to death by pneumonia germs.

Instead I will do more like my father to try to improve life. I see no other option.


All of the above considered, dreams have an interesting way of placing one into reality, although in a symbolic and often unusual way. Mine, the visions and scenarios in my sleep, are mostly not happy, nor peaceful. They are not gentle dreams.

I accept them, though, through no choice in their content and for giving me insights into the world and myself. As there is no alternative, this way of being must suffice for me. I will always yearn to see even when the fare is ugly or not.


One of the Senators in my state of Massachusetts is hell on wheels. She stands up to Donald Trump, who calls her Pocahontas, or anyone else that tries to undercut her progressive views.

Elizabeth Warren – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Warren

Elizabeth Ann Warren (née Herring, born June 22, 1949) is an American politician, academic, and author. A member of the Democratic Party since 1996, she currently serves as the senior United States Senator from Massachusetts, a seat she was elected to in 2012. Warren was formerly a professor of law and taught at the …

Yet she reminds me of quotations from my friend John in AU. They are as follows:

We did it all.  We greedy, driven, money-mad, competitive, short-sighted, ungenerous humans, who have signally failed in our appointed task of taking care of thee earth. – Viki Wright


Our species has failed, and continues to fail at realizing the coming crises, all due to our profligate, consumptive habits of extracting and acquiring more than we need to be happy and worthwhile inhabitants of a veritable Eden
. – Clifton Ware


The Earth is under the control of a few hundred corporations, and merely a few thousand capitalists. 
– Susan Cain

Elizabeth, presumably. has amassed $eleven million USD for herself in personal gain. And from where did that amount derive and why does she need so much a massive amount of money to make herself comfortable and happy?

Meanwhile, she constantly asks people in our state of MA to fund her reelection campaign by donating five or more dollars to it. Why doesn’t she just fund it, herself, since she used Wall Street, I suppose, to amass her wealth off of the backs of the poor, underpaid workers of the world? … I wonder about what she dreams at night.

I wonder about what the bottom half of humanity, the truly poor people who work like hell for eighteen hours a day or the ones who can’t find jobs, dream at night since they labor at pitiful wages if they do find jobs and fund wealth for people like Elizabeth. … Perhaps their dreams are more benign than mine even if they live in hovels or on streets and eat mud cookies to get rid of stomach pangs. I would hope so.

Sally Dugman is a writer in MA, USA.

 

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