Dreaming Is Free

You asked me what's my pleasure

A movie or a measure?

I'll have a cup of tea and tell you of my dreaming.

Let me take a moment to set down some thoughts on this subject.  A general thought is that anyone who has had their identity shattered this completely will never fully recover.  If they are lucky and if they are resilient enough they will bottom out and fight their way back to a  place where they can bloom, but it will never be the same place.  And it is not like the movies where there is some dramatic turn-around after a transformative moment.  Rather,  any progress will be insignificant and anything appreciable will be composed of a collection of hard won insignificant victories.   I suspect that this is universal although I suppose there could be cases of a movie style happy ending,  I just don't see that happening if you have really been traumatized and have spent a long period of time with your mind in a really bad place.  

In my case 50 + years later I am finally grasping a couple of the insignificant events that began to turn me around.  Had the turnaround been more dramatic I would have recognized the events as significant at the time they occurred.   There were probably some other insignificant events that did not even register enough at the time to be committed to memory.   

One event I do recall was being placed in an advanced English class in 9th grade.  Apparently I had impressed my 8th grade English teacher who also taught the 9th Grade advanced class and he put me in his advanced class.  I was not informed of this and on the first day of class found myself one of only two boys in the advanced class,  with 24 or so girls - generally  the most attractive, most popular, and most self-assured girls in 9th grade.   I might have known several of them from elementary school when I was neuro-typical, but as my 7th grade trauma had caused such an extreme withdrawal the vast majority were total strangers.  I remember that the other boy and I reflexively took seats together in the back row on the first day of class.  The teacher immediately corrected this, separating us by moving me to the front row center beside a girl who had been legendary since the beginning of junior high for her beauty and precocious development.   I had heard her name but we had never had a class together and until that day I don't believe that I had ever seen her.   It was only when the teacher took roll that I realized her identity.  As bad as all this was things quickly got worse as the teacher became seriously ill and was forced to take a lengthy leave of absence.    His replacement was my mother.  

I would not have imagined it possible for me to get any more withdrawn and purposely insignificant than I had been in post trauma 7th grade and then in 8th grade,  but I believe that I became so in that 9th grade English class.   I experienced extreme stress every minute that I was in that class and I dreaded it when I was not - it was a year of absolute torture.   Credit her with sensing that something was wrong,  although in retrospect it is astonishing that in two and a half years nobody else had.   She worked to engage me and was openly protective.   I was secretly appreciative and it would have been appropriate for me to have sent her a note like this one in "The Perks of being a Wallflower":

Please don't try to figure out who I am. I don't want you to do that. I just needed to know that people like you exist. Like if you met me you wouldn't think I was the weird kid who spent time in the hospital. And I wouldn't make you nervous. I hope it's okay for me to think that. 

The point being that just knowing that people like her existed was enough to finally start the healing and the road back.  

 In retrospect the following summer at church camp was a transformative experience although it too seemed rather insignificant at the time.   Closely related to identity issues,  junior high was a time when I felt like a complete outsider;  someone who did not even remotely belong yet was somehow maintaining enough functionality that I went unnoticed rather than setting off alarm bells.   And in retrospect the load that I was carrying was neither an exaggeration nor a figment of my imagination.   Then at Church camp the summer before high school I suddenly found myself included,  effortlessly.  

I've long believed this inclusion made it possible for me to make significant progress the following year at the high school.  But it wasn't until 1979 when the song "Dreaming" was released that I grasped that getting back my ability to dream was an equally important substantive change that occurred at camp that summer.  Giving me back the capacity to see a future that did not totally suck.  

She imbues the refrain of “Dreaming is free” with potency and pathos well beyond the seeming simplicity of the phrase. Blondie’s songs tend to be so much fun that’s it’s easy to overlook their depth and the craft behind them. Don’t make that mistake with “Dreaming,” or you might miss the hurting yet ultimately hopeful heart beating inside that pristine pop shell.

I sit by and watch the river flow

I sit by and watch the traffic go

Imagine something of your very own

Something you can have and hold

I'd build a road in gold just to have some dreaming.

I revisited Mohican Lodge,  where I stayed that summer,  during the week I spent at Mowana in 2019 helping to permanently close the camp and turn it over to the new owners - the Richland County Parks & Recreation Dept.  While there Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Go to the Limits of Your Longing"  kept popping into my head along with the recent revelations of the horrible fates of my two 7th grade female antagonists.  I took this as a spiritual admonition to not take pleasure in the comeuppance of these two predatory women and as revelation that I would be better served by instead putting the incident in perspective through Rilke's words. 

Jojo Rabbit concludes with a line from Rilke’s “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.  Just keep going. No feeling is final.” 

In the context of the movie, the message is that love can conquer hate, even if we will experience terrible loss. The poem further says that even the most extreme experiences and emotions will not last, and that sometimes just keeping faith in the passage of time—rather than worrying about it— can relieve us from pain which threatens to overwhelm us. I absolutely think that the filmmaker captured something essential about Rilke’s poetry, namely the belief that acknowledging the beauty and terror of a given moment allows us to experience the world fully, without being overwhelmed or overlooking much of it.