"There used to be a lot of things in our past that might be described in that manner," said Ross. "Call 'The Thing' love, honor, integrity, intelligence, industry, humanity, sublimity. Call it all of that."

      "When did the change begin to occur in your dream, I mean in your experience of it?" asked Heather. "Go and 'rewind' your dream and replay it. What was the first thing that struck you as odd? Was it your dad's financial portfolio? Had you ever noticed that concern before?"

      I said that I hadn't, but Ross said that this was only a symptom. Ross said that the real change began in my experience when the images appeared less frequently, which nobody really noticed except in retrospect. Ross pointed out that it all started with the bulldozing of the houses and the killing of people in them. "That's when the world was beginning to be flipped upside down," said Ross. "It started with the willful destruction of what 'The Thing' had accomplished, in order to get at 'The Thing' itself and to annihilated it, to deny its existence and its foundational role in civilization."

      "That's already happening in the real world on a large scale," said Heather, "and it has been happening for some time on an ever greater scale. The financial portfolios appear to be secondary. They are merely among the first visible signs of a civilization crumbling into dust."

      "When did the joy disappear?" asked Tony. "It probably began to disappear when the images of 'The Thing' became less frequent. Am I right?"

      I answered that it was so.

      "All sorts of alarm bells should have gone off right there and then, in order to stir up a search for the cause of the disappearance, both of the 'The Thing' and the joy in living," said Tony. "But where are the alarm bells going off in our world where the same signs are everywhere? Is anybody rewinding our waking dreams? How far do we have to go back in real terms to locate this missed opportunity in understanding our history? When did we begin to loose our joy?" Tony asked emphatically. "When was the axe laid at the root of all that is profoundly human? Was it when fascism was laid upon the world to protect the British Empire against the freedom of mankind that the USA was founded on? Or did this loss begin earlier when the religious wars were unleashed by Venice to destroy the Golden Renaissance? Or do we have to go back still further to Aristotle whose philosophy of natural slavery became the platform of the Empire of Rome that nearly destroyed civilization? Or do we have to go further back to the ancient priests that perverted the Mosaic Decalogue into an instrument of power with which to isolate humanity from one-another at the grassroots level and enforce this isolation with the death penalty? How far back to we have to go?"

      Ross suggested that if one is faced with layers of mud, laid upon other layers of more mud, one has to deal with the whole mess to get a clean slate. He also suggested that the bottom layer might hold the key to the whole mess, since everything else is piled on top of it. He suggested that the top layer may not bear the faintest resemblance to the key cause, so that one has to dig deep to get a flavor of what the whole mess is all about.

      Tony just nodded. I think he did so for all of us, since none of us had a clue of what my dream really meant.

      "That's the trouble with us," said Sylvia. She almost scolded us suddenly at this point, as if to start the alarm bells ringing in us. "We give up too easily," she said. "At the first impasse we throw in the towel and walk away from the ring where we should be fighting for victory. That's what we do in dreaming, too. Dreams are scary images that we conjure up when the mind is asleep. We dredge things up that we know, but which we don't want to look at in real life, images which we block out. That is why dreams can sometimes tell us more than we want to know. We should look at them for this core reality that we don't want to look at, whatever it is, rather than throw the dream away. I would say, let's get into the wrestling ring on this issue and fight, just as any wrestler would."

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Stories about  Love from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche