A dream within a dream.

Music and art is my catharsis.  As much as I love work and school (yes, I do enjoy those things) I often feel the need to sneak away and create something just for myself.  I have selfish reasons for why I paint, and write and make music.  There are somethings we do because it is what we do.  Then there are things that we do because it is what we are.  When I sit down with my drawing pencils or a Mozart Sonata, I find out who I really am by loosing myself.  When I focus my mind so intently on my paint brushes or a crisp page of music, all of my fears and worries and stress just fades away.  And I feel more real, more alive and like I have finally gotten off the treadmill and started walking in a beautiful field of grass.  This catharsis has allowed me to become introduced with myself again. 

The past few weeks I have enjoyed playing Schumann's collection of children's songs late at night.  Nothing has made me happier than Schumann and strongly brewed loose leaf tea.  But somewhere in the music, and in my concentration and frustration, it's easy for my mind to go in another place and I start to weep.  I began to ask myself why.  Why do these songs make me weep?  

Do you know that feeling when you wake up from a moving dream but you cannot remember what it was?  And you get that pang in the bottom of your stomach and you long to remember?  That is what I felt when I played Schumann.

Last night I sat down with Schumann and I realized I had heard these songs before.  My grandmother used to play them to me when I was a small child, and I remember being very close to her while she played them to me.  Maybe that is why the music made me feel like I was grasping for love that was out of reach.  Maybe that is why those songs felt like a dream, because that time of my life was a very good dream.  And even though I have woken up into adulthood, those songs are still a part of my dream.  Sometimes I want to fall asleep again.

I had the same mystery several months ago when I came back to an empty hotel room and flipped on the television to see Pride and Prejudice on one of the channels.  I suppose because I had nothing better to do, I sat on the bed and watched it intently.  Would Elizabeth finally find love?  Will Mr. Darcy get a second chance?  And in the end, when Mr. Darcy confesses his bewitched mind and undying love and kisses her in the sunlight, I wept.  I always weep during that part, and there are days even now when I watch that ending scene again and again.  Usually on the fourth re-run, I ask myself, Where have I seen this before?  When I watch Mr. Darcy walk across the meadow I have the same spark inside me when I sit down with Schumann: I feel like I live in a dream and these are the only things that are real.  When I watch Lizzy graciously forgive, and Mr. Darcy eloquently describe his love, and I see a redemption, I think, this story is like one I have heard before.  

In the movie A Beautiful Mind, I often feel like the brilliant mathematician, John Nash, who has lost his mind in the fog of Schizophrenia.  Finally when his hallucinations bring him to the point of desperation, he cries, "what is real?"  And his wife holds his face in his hands and whispers, "this is real."  I want to hear that again and again and again.  I want to behold something so beautiful and know that it is real and that I will be free from gimmicks and fog.

When I play music, I look for a song I recognize but have never heard.

When I seek love, I look for arms that I know but have never felt.

When I seek beauty, I look for a masterpiece that gives reality a different perspective.  I look for a masterpiece that I can gaze at and say, "there you are; I've been looking for you all this time."

I never knew the things I have no knowledge of could be so familiar. It feels like a dream within a dream.  And I can't wake up.

C.S. Lewis put the yearning best when he wrote:

"Most people, if they have really looked into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world.  There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise.  The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, our longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy...There was something we have grasped at, in the first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality.  I think everyone knows what I mean...Something has evaded us."

Why have I spent my entire life grasping for something I cannot reach?

I remember in my first philosophy class, the professor lectured about Plato's theory of forms.  It always really intrigued me because I did not believe it was true, but I wanted it to be.  Plato's Theory of Forms expressed his belief that non-material and abstract forms (ideas) possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality.  Thus, Plato reasoned, the material "forms" we see with our senses only mimic the real Forms.  Plato believed that before our birth, our souls existed in a world with these Forms, and and after we are born, our souls distantly recall things from that other world.  For example, lets say that Plato was sitting in your kitchen and you picked up an apple.  And after you picked up the apple, you marveled on how good the apple was.  Yet how do you know what a good apple is?  What do you have to compare it to?  Plato would say that we compare every material object to it's higher Form that our souls once knew.  

I know, it's a confusing concept.  But I like thinking about it.  And although I don't think it's true, I have always wanted it to be.  

At times my spirit feels like it came from another world.  Like it was made for a place where love was mysterious, beauty was vibrant and music was perfect.  People were made for the good.  People are not made for what is, but for what can be, for what will be.  I often agree with C.S. Lewis that sometimes the whole Christianity thing seems highly unlikely.  But this longing in my soul - this familiarity with the good outside of my reach - is often the only thing that still keeps my wandering soul within the faith.  

  

Even since childhood, I've been a philosopher.  I can remember being as young as six and questioning my existence.  I can remember wondering, "what if one day I wake up and I learn everything in my life has been a dream?"  And the older I get, the more I realize that one day I will wake up in another world, but unlike now, the dream of reality will seem more real than it ever has before.  And I can imagine waking up and saying, "oh, so this is what I have searched for all this time."