Riddles. I never liked riddle games when I was young. I think it was because I rarely got the answer very quickly. Things have not changed as I have gotten older. But then, it seemed to me that everyone else around me was already laughing at the joke and I was still working on trying to get the answer to the riddle. In retrospect, the thing that bothered me the most was not my inability to solve the puzzle quickly, but to not be included in the social group knowledge. Here’s a story theme: being on the edge of social networks and groups, never feeling like I enjoyed full, center weighted membership. It took a very long time for me to realize that there a lot more people on the edges than in the centers of things.

Riddles often fall into cycles of phrases, images of repetition, rings within rings. Symbols of many things including eternity itself, rings at their best are punctuated by jewels of meaning, stars in the arc of the heavens worn on heads, fingers, around waists, ankles and wrists. They challenge us to duels of interpretation, which we are pleased to lose, wearing the triumphant rings for all to see, and marvel at their beauty and mystery, at least in our dreams. I’ll bet you have some favorite jewelry that bespeaks of more than pretty colors or interesting design, but that holds some private meaning that you rarely, if ever share, and which you actually do not completely understand yourself.

Dreams. Cheryl tells me mammals have had the ability to dream for about 180 million years. What I find interesting is that after that after many of millions of years we still don’t know what dreams actually are, and we still try, sometimes quite desperately, to decode them, “accurately,” as if a linear cause-effect understanding can be accomplished. And to no one’s surprise, when it can, when the meaning of a dream can actually be completely decoded, defined, dissected, and delineated, we find that its fragile power far too easily decomposes in front of the eyes of our controlling understandment.

Dreams are metaphoric, and while metaphors do have referents, their confirmation, and the nuances of meaning that can be attributed to the connections between the two are up to the dreamer, archetypal images in dreams notwithstanding. But this is not about how to understand dreams except to say that dreams are a means of discovery. Riddle-like in their interpretive challenge, they are also riddle-like in their means of understanding, being open to those that are open to them, but always mixing a sort of shyness in the light of intention.

It seems certain that we are compelled to construct plausible meanings for dreams. We fall easily prey to the boring and the absurdly scripted dictionaries, providing cyclical humor for the deities of dreams, something to keep them amused while they spin their rings of dark ambiguity.

Storms. Meteorological storms are often weather fronts thrown out in vast arms from a central area of low pressure. They often signal the boundaries between masses of air between which are great differences in temperature and pressure. The clashing of which can result in spectacular fireworks of lighting, ominous thunder, and frightening wind. And there are other sorts of storms, pain storms for instance which can be physical, emotional, or spiritual, and various combinations of all. For most of us, awareness of these storms, once they have passed, is short lived even though the storm can actually rage on for great lengths of time.

Dream storms can signal the clashing of worlds, conscious and unconscious, intent and what may seem to be fated experience. They can pass through our reality like a thunderstorm in the middle of the night, providing eerie illumination, making things familiar seem strange. Trying to understand the metaphoric dream is like trying to control the sea. Just about the time we think it’s safe, and we have a meaning figured out, when we think we are in control of the dream and ourselves, the dream reoccurs, cyclical, riddle-ring-like, telling us only that there is some deeper meaning, which may escape our mental investigations in spite of all of our attempts to shine a light of illuminating consciousness on it. Just when we think we have it boxed in to a Romantic understanding that fits well into our fantasy… “Well this is obviously an archetypal dream involving the universal, symbolic images of… blah blah blah,” the dream shifts its shape, and when you expect it to fly and are looking toward the sky of your understanding with great anticipation, it crawls out of the shadows, and with only a quick glance surprises you awake to wonder, with a gnawing sense of anxiety, what just happened.

Quickly now, and quietly, or they’ll notice, and you have taken the box as well, and they won’t be best pleased about that. So you’ll need to be far from here, well into the other light by the time the word gets out.

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