The Trump Protesters - Kids Who Have Never Read Joseph Conrad

“Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. ”
― Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

In the 1970's, I was teaching English at Bishop McNamara High School in Kankakee, Illinois.  A movie came out called Apocalypse Now.   At that time, I learned how many people 'pretended' familiarity with Joseph Conrad - " The great British African Explorer and adventurer and wrote Heart of Darkness.  Did you know that Apocalypse Now is all about Heart of Darkness?"

No, I had not the foggiest!  I had been reading Conrad's the THE ENWORD of The Narcissus, you know about how  Jim and Huck took a raft trip and were raped by Hillbillies.  That movie came out about the same time.

A handful of people were aware that Joseph Conrad was in fact Polish.  A couple of fingers of folks, including teachers of English were aware of the fact that Conrad was a radical.

Since November 8th, Anti-Trump rallies  funded and organized by the World Workers International, Revolutionary Communists within the Answer Coalition have allowed privileged whites to again loot and vandalize cities with approval of the globalist elites.   The pale soul patched, man-bun suburbanites have put aside Pokemon and donned red bandanas and balaklavas in order avoid discomfort and identification as they temper tantrum across the continent.

The drips on cable news coo for their feelings and fears. And the decontructionist academics offer misreadings in support of their crime and misdemeanors.

Yep, a stone radical, who had brushed aside the Revolution.  That idiotic Second Coming of the Masses!  The Masses are tools. Always were and always will be.

Apocalypse Now is not an antiwar movie.  It is an Anti-Masses movies, just as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Sharer, The Secret Agent and Under a Western Sky are warnings to the individual heart that it belongs to God and not man's longing for a material paradise, or their personal feelings.

Jim Wait, a doomed West Indian sailor of color , dying of Tuberculosis  has the sympathy of the Masses - Black Lives Matter!  The Captain of the Narcissus, Alistoun and an experienced salt named Singleton, are reviled by the masses for not having human hearts. They are only concerned with the work and safety of the ship. When a storm puts the Narcissus in peril, the crew, the Masses want to chop off the sails and right the ship. The Captain and Singleton refuse.  Guess what?

The ship rights itself when the storm passes and the Narcissus still has sails to continue on its voyage.  Jim Wait dies.  The Masses wanted to slow down and give Justice to Jim Wait and they wanted the ship righted Now!  It can't wait! Move on!  The Answer!

The Masses will sink the ship.

Is that fatalism?  Is that heartlessness. Nope that is reality.  I have less than 21 miles worth of gas in the tank of my Malibu and protest I might the car won't make it to Peotone from Morgan Park.

Joseph Conrad lived in Polish occupied Russia and saw Imperialism at worst and learned that Revolution trumped that monstrosity hands down.

I hazard a wager that most of the Trump Protestors have never heard of the dead white man who wrote Under Western Skies and Heart of Darkness - you know Apocalypse Now.

Had the little dopes been stuck in one of my classes they might know that Revolution is always the ugliest example of human behavior.

Then they might know this, The ignorant serve cruel masters.  Or as Conrad wrote in Under Western Skies:

In a real revolution–not a simple dynastic change or a mere reform of institutions–in a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane and devoted natures, the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement–but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims–the victims of disgust, disenchantment–often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured – that is the definition of revolutionary success. There have been in every revolution hearts broken by such successes. But enough of that. My meaning is that I don’t want you to be a victim.   Conrad

John Kass has been Denounced by the Politburo of Small Minds

 

Inventing the Enemy uses stories of personal relationships to explore the behavior of ordinary people during Stalin's terror. Communist Party leaders targeted specific groups for arrest, but also strongly encouraged ordinary citizens and party members to “unmask the hidden enemy.” People responded by flooding the secret police and local authorities with accusations. . . . every work place was convulsed by hyper-vigilance, intense suspicion, and the hunt for hidden enemies. Spouses, coworkers, friends, and relatives disavowed and denounced each other. People confronted hideous dilemmas. Forced to lie to protect loved ones, they struggled to reconcile political imperatives and personal loyalties. Work places were turned into snake pits. The strategies that people used to protect themselves – naming names, preemptive denunciations, and shifting blame – all helped to spread the terror. Inventing the Enemy , a history of the terror in five Moscow factories, explores personal relationships and individual behavior within a pervasive political culture of “enemy hunting.”   intro to Inventing the Enemy by Wendy Z. Goldman 2011

“I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love... too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate.”Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

"Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs."  George Orwell


The Muhammad Ali of the canon of African American writers is Ralph Ellison; never the less, Black writers from James Baldwin and Leroi Jones to the second raters of our day detested Ellison as one who would not play group think.  Artificial outrages couldn't make Ralph Holler.

I love it when Progressive voices begin to rise to the level that only mutts can hear.  That is almost a daily event.

Yesterday, some writer named Stephen Gossett wrote an Old Timey Joe Stalin Amalgamated Textile and Cash Register Workers DEE-NUN-SEE-Ay-SHUN of Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass. Citing no less authoritative voices as Wonkette,

Stephen Gossett does total Battle of the Cowshed on Mr. Kass:

"John Kass' lodestar is provocation—and that has taken the Tribune columnist into some pretty ugly, even quasi-racist territory. But his latest incitement represents a new low.
First off, here's how Kass chose to introduce the column, titled "Murder numbers don't tell the story in Chicago. Shootings do," and published Thursday morning . . .

"The feral boys of #Chicago with their death sticks, a direct product of the #Democratic welfare state." Just let that rattle around for a second, then try to compose yourself.

As former Chicagoist editor Marcus Gilmer* pointed out, "feral" has become a preferred epithet for the alt-right, along the lines of "thug." And "boy," well, that sad, racist history precedes itself. This is, of course, the Trump-ian mode of public communication, borrowing "nationalistic" language and turning the dog whistle into a megaphone. But its familiarity makes it no less virulent.

The piece itself begins right away with more reprehensible language, particularly after mentioning Chicago's undoubtedly awful murder statistics"

Reprehensible language like this, " nihilistic feral boys, brandishing their guns in cars, waving their death sticks in rap videos, young African-American men who believe they have no future, waiting to die."

Nihilistic is dog whistle language for someone or some people with nothing to guide them - like a lodestar, or good Old Polaris, Stephen Gossett, but to be too provocative,myself.

Brandishing guns and waving death sticks is dog whistle language for props used in Face Book selfies by nihilistic feral boys.

You see, friends and neighbors, words matter.

When people are blocked from using the words in our language and culture by prissy little pundits with precious little to offer in the way of talent or impact,  as if a word's very existence caused genocide, famine and Skittles on the sidewalk, we end up with Hillary v. Trump.

The denunciation is a journalistic form of shunning.  It can be effective, especially when the readers have limited scope in their reading and experience, or are just dopes. It is especially effective when pleonastic sesquipedalians toss out them big words and studied up facts/

Post-factual race-baiting has been made the new normal in 2016; and now Kass seems all too content to join the worst of the fray. That's the true feral nihilism. And it's especially loathsome when its delivered by a messenger parachuting from the outer suburbs. Notice the location stamp on his tweet: the hard front lines of Berwyn.

Post-factual race-baiting has been the new normal in 2016 - hundreds of thousands of people have said so, during the global warming/climate change costume change and red carpet show.  Hey, Stephen Gossett, I read Variety, as well as Salon.

Well John Kass has been denounced as a writer of the English Language and as a suburbanite.  I know Joe Epstein lives in Evanston, but I do not think that Joe knows, or has read Stephen Gossett.

You are denounced John Kass. You and John Dos Passos, Camille Paglia, Ralph Ellison, Mark Twain. Saul Bellow,John Steinbeck, H.L. Mencken, Russell Kirk, Joseph Epstein, Walker Percy, John Kennedy Toole, P.J. O' Rourke, . . .**

* ??????????Marcus Gilmer - related to Jimmy Gilmer?

** Denunciation Alumni

America's Dash from 'The Field' to Victimhood

"The Bull" McCabe: The field is mine.

The American: Well we'll see about that won't we? John B. Keane The Field
"You didn't build that!"  President Barack Obama on the stump 2012

John B. Keane was a brilliant Irish writer, storyteller and pub owner from County Kerry.  In 1965, he wrote a play called  The Field that told the story of a rough farmer by the name of The Bull McCabe.

The Bull McCabe worked land adjacent to his own - a field allowed to grow fallow and useless through neglect.  He made the field grow green and fecund by his labors.  In fact, he neglected his own family to make this once useless field of rocks and weeds flourish and become an asset.

The problem being the field is owned by a widow. It's the law.

When the widow decided not to sell the property to The Bull,  he engaged in rural terrorism to force the poor woman to give up and go away.

If The Bull had a lawyer as every serious victim seems to have, he could have made a case in court for himself under the real estate laws of Adverse Possession - A method of gaining legal title to real property by the actual, open, hostile, and continuous possession of it to the exclusion of its true owner for the period prescribed by state law. Personal Property may also be acquired by adverse possession.

The Bull, like most people, was too busy doing his work to give such thoughts only people with too much time on their hands and a few sparks of cunning between their ears their due.

Like most of us, an injustice real or perceived can race the heart to bitterness.  The Bull was bitter, due to the widow's grasp on the land and the widow, bitter about the pranks and taunts visited  upon her by  The Bull McCabe, his slow-witted son and a sneaky leach called The Bird.

The widow determined to sell the property to a Rich American - The Yank - sight unseen.  The play ends in tragedy.

John Keane's wonderful play concerned human labor and property rights at its most basic. Keane's characters played to the fates without a politician to come to aide of either side.

That was in 1965.  LBJ was President. There was a War on Poverty and War in Vietnam.  Victim hood became the greatest revolutionary tool since anarchists international discovered that fused pyrotechnic could shake Bourgeoisie into submission.  Bomb tossing had little effect. Victim hood won the day for the Masses.

America's greatest essayist, wrote a history of Political American Victim hood in the Weekly Standard.  Epstein writes,

Victims of an earlier time viewed themselves as supplicants, throwing themselves on the conscience if not mercy of those in power to raise them from their downtrodden condition. The contemporary victim tends to be angry, suspicious, above all progress-denying. He or she is ever on the lookout for that touch of racism, sexism, homophobia, or insensitivity that might show up in a stray opinion, an odd locution, an uninformed misnomer. People who count themselves victims require enemies. Forces high and low block their progress: The economy disfavors them; society is organized against them; the malevolent, who are always in ample supply, conspire to keep them down; the system precludes them. Asked some years ago by an interviewer in Time magazine about violence in schools that are all-black—that is, violence by blacks against blacks—the novelist Toni Morrison, a connoisseur of victimhood whose novels deal with little else, replied, “None of those things can take place, you know, without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.”
Public pronouncements from victims can take on a slightly menacing quality, in which, somehow, the roles of victim and supposed antagonist are reversed. Today it is the victim who is doing the bullying—threatening boycott, riot, career-destroying social media condemnation—and frequently making good on their threats. Victims often seem actively to enjoy their victimhood—enjoy above all the moral advantage it gives them. Fueled by their own high sense of virtue, of feeling themselves absolutely in the right, what they take to be this moral advantage allows them to overstate their case, to absolve themselves from all responsibility for their condition, to ask the impossible and demand it now, and then to demonstrate virulently, sometimes violently, when it isn’t forthcoming. (emphasis my own)

We are victims waiting for shoes, bricks, bats, bullets and bombs to drop - unless we have a lawyer in our wallets'

Americans have run from The Field.   John B. Keane's character The Bull McCabe would have none of that -things will go very tragically, I am afraid; unless, we snap out of it.

Ralph Ellison's " King of the Bingo Game" - Undertstand it and Maybe We Will Understand Baltimore

Ralph Ellison is not loved by the African American elites and is very often kept out of the public school literature canon for that very reason.

Ralph Ellison was the first black man in America to present in black and white on the printed page the full color of the African American Experience.  No Communist meat puppet, like Richard Wright, nor a bee bop poser like James Baldwin, talented men both, Ellison remains an original American voice.

Invisible Man is a prose epic of the first order. In appeared in 1952, just like the white man writing these notes.

That novel placed Ralph Ellison very near the peak of the American Literary Olympus: National Book Award for 1953 and lionized by the New York publishing and culture mouthpieces universal.

Read it.

The African American elites hate the book and the man who wrote it, as do the white power brokers of culture who call the tune they seem to dance to at every turn.  Ellison is no Toni Morrison and certainly no flabby thinker like Michael Eric Dyson.  He is an artist and man comfortable in his own black skin.

As such, he has no problem revealing the hopes and dreams deferred that boil in rage and frustration beneath than darker American pelt; more so, Ellison understands their sources and they can not be linked solely to societal misdeeds and slaps in the face. Ellison's short story, "King of the Bingo Game" is an easy path* to understanding not only Ralph Ellison, but also the frustrations of African Americans broiling in Baltimore.

To summarize, the story is set in New York, most likely in the 1940's.  At the end of each movie shown in theater the house conducts a bingo game.  Young man from North Carolina with a sick wife at home and no prospects for employment, because he does not have a birth certificate, buys five bingo cards.

The black man has not eaten and the smell of peanuts being eaten by a person near him gnaws at his stomach, as does the smell of whiskey being enjoyed by two men near him. He anguishes over his new life in the big city and recalls that people in the impoverished south shared whatever they had with one another.

His hunger and boredom awaiting the chance at a spin of the bingo wheel for the prize of $ 36.95 puts him to sleep.  He dreams and in his dream shouts out to the annoyance of the movie fans. The two guys drinking the booze offer him the bottle, not out of a sense of a neighbors needs, but to shut him up.

One of the five bingo cards is a winner and the young man is called to the stage. He is a winner and has the chance to win the money.  He will be able to buy his wife some medicine and buy some food.

Being called to the center stage with the bright lights and everyone shouting at and about him, he freezes.  The world of attention overwhelms him.  He cannot spin the big wheel - the device is a button that controls the screen sized spinning wheel.

Two men and eventually cops are called in because he has stopped the entertainment. The audience sings, hoots and hollers at man frozen by opportunity:

He was standing in an attitude of intense listening when he saw
that they were watching something on the stage behind him. He felt
weak. But when he turned he saw no one. If only his thumb did not
ache so. Now they were applauding. And for a moment he thought
that the wheel had stopped. But that was impossible, his thumb still ,
pressed the button. Then he saw them. Two men in uniform beckoned
from the end of the stage. They were coming toward him, walking in
step, slowly, like a tap-dance team returning for a third encore. But
their shoulders shot forward, and he backed away, looking wildly about.
There was nothing to fight them with. He had only the long black cord
which led to a plug somewhere back stage, and he couldn't use that
because it operated the bingo wheel. He backed slowly, fixing the men
with his eyes as his lips stretched over his teeth in a tight, fixed grin;
moved toward the end of the stage and realizing that he couldn't go
much further, for suddenly the cord became taut and he couldn't afford
to break the cord. But he had to do something. The audience was
howling. Suddenly he stopped dead, seeing the men halt, their legs
lifted as in an interrupted step of a slow-motion dance. There was nothing
to do but run in the other direction and he dashed forward, slipping
and sliding. The men fell back, surprised. He struck out Violently going
past.
"Grab him!"
He ran, but all too quickly the cord tightened, resistingly, and
 he turned and ran back again. This time he slipped them, and discovered
by running in a circle before the wheel he could keep the cord
from tightening. But this way he had to flail his arms to keep the men
away. Why couldn't they leave a man alone? He ran, circling.
"Ring down the curtain," someone yelled. But they couldn't do
that. If they did the wheel flashing from the projection room would be
cut off. But they had him before he could tell them so, trying to pry
open his fist, and he was wrestling and trying to bring his knees into
the fight and holding on to the button, for it was his life. And now he
was down, seeing a foot coming down, crushing his wrist cruelly, down, (emphasis my own)

The Wheel landed at the required Double Zero - he won.  He did not get what fortune, luck, investment and opportunity had provided.  His overwhelmed condition and the roar of the crowd denies him the prize offered to any man.

He is a good man, a Black Hamlet.  He is a faithful man, and African American Tom Joad.  He is a lucky man, a Negro Leopold Bloom. Opportunity and circumstances deny him the prize.  Racism?  Not in Ellison's story. The King of the Bingo Game could be a Swede, a Mexican, a Latvian Jew, a Russian or a cracker from Georgia.  He happens to be a black man, a Negro, as Ellison demanded to define himself.

His name could be Freddie Gray.  He is about the same age.  Ellison draws no conclusions; he presents a human being in uncomfortable conditions, where a opportunity slips from the hands of a good man.

Human beings behave no differently in Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Joyce, or Ellison. I'll be damned, if I'll say else wise, much less teach literature counter to that.



* for the reading challenged, or just plain lazy.


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If God Were a Soft-hearted Slob . . .Oh, That's Right He Is. . .Seventh Promise of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

                                         

                                        “Tepid souls shall become fervent.” 

I go to Sacred Heart Church at 116th & Church Street in Washington Heights just east of Morgan Park in Chicago.  The Mass is traditional and unself-absorbed and sung in English.  The Saying of the Memorare after the Nicene Creed was and is a huge selling point in my attendence at Sacred Heart - that and the people who attend.

It is a kid friendly place of worship free the more pious scolds who skunk-eye and 'hush and shush' families with little kids (infants -toddlers) who interrupt the sanctity of the liturgy, while celebrating the sanctity of Life. Little guys screw around and Mass can be brutal. Among the faithful in the pews there is nothing but simple dignity and smiling tolerance for the little guys.

Sacred Heart parishioners are salt of the earth blue-collar working women and men. A State of Grace after Mass includes a dose of pride knowing that you have been numbered among these people. No hand tossing Hosanna-types of the Church of Happy Horse-#$%^.   People who know hard work, hard times and hard prayer have a dignified

Sacred Heart worship is Divine -thanks to the likes of Father Gallagher, Father Vanecko and etc. Gallagher and Vanecko are brilliant and succinct homilists.  They do not need to hear the sound of their voices.  Mass is never like attending a Wagner Festival.  Thanks be to God.  The church building is understated beauty.

The French immigrants who paid for and built Sacred Heart at the turn of 19th Century did a great job on the stained glass windows that feature St. Margaret Mary Alacoque's 12 Promises of the Sacred Heart of Christ. My favorite is Olde # 7  “Tepid souls shall become fervent.”

I am about as lukewarm/tepid/less than hot a soul ,as God ever cranked out. Mind you; nothing wrong with the parts and labor going into the making, but really poor maintenance by the owner.

If God were more of shiftless, lazy, excuse-laden slob, He'd allow me to be and act more like Joe Epstein, Skinny Sheahan, or Dan McGrath.  They are a Trinity of nice guys who toil at it.  God does too.  I do not.

I like to think that with a little more prayer and great deal more effort the Sacred Heart will deliver. Fervent beats tepid hollow.

Joseph Epstein Raises PT 109 - Camelot: JFK Viagra, or Pantagonia?

Tough guys take on the tough jobs and no one is tougher than America's Montaigne - Joe Epstein.  A good writer can dazzle, but a great writer turns off the dazzle in favor of the light of truth.  Some of us just can't handle the truth, that is why mortgage debt relief commercials, male chemical Lazarusian priapism pills and cable news networks are all the rage.

It is tough to face the truth of laying on one's back & arse with a flat-screen remote in one chubby mitt and a Walt Mart sized bag of Gluten Free Cheetoes in t'other is no way to avoid Dunlap's Disease.*  It is the same with the old noggin.  There is such a thing as cerebral cellulite. Ah, the appetites:  Gustatory and Sexual! Eat some and get some, fellas! Blubbery boys can also bloat and  devolve into flaccid impotent meat bags, only restored by blue pill popping.

We are what we eat and we most certainly become what we read, or accept from news readers. As far as acute minds go theses days,  the old kitchen drawer is chock-full of kinch-like flatware, but nothing that could slice a boiled peach.  People will read only the point of view with which they are most comfortable - why prepare a good wholesome meal, when you can Micky D?

Minds and souls require vigorous exercise and stimulation and not of the solitary unwholesome form taken by devotees of porn sites.  Dining is not gluttony and eros must be guided by agape.

Joseph Epstein writes for rigorous minds and last week's surfeit of empty Camelot Calories clogged American intellectual arteries and packed on the discernment lard.  I cried when JFK was killed by LHO. Hey, he was one of my tribe.  So was Roger Touhy. So was Senator Joe McCarthy.  Kennedy was the President.  Since 1963, Camelot and the madcap Kennedy clan have ballooned into cosmic fog sin shriving shenanigans. Last week was the 50th Anniversary of the Dallas Assassination of JFK.  I avoided the memorial festive board of Camelot treats, like a fat man facing a wedding in a fortnight.

Instead, I sampled some wholesome JFK fare from Joe Epstein and my pallet remains cleansed and my intellectual breath is just minty fresh.  I am also as randy as badger!  I could, by God,  date the females of Finland!  Read this, and you too will get taller thinner, witness dramatic hair growth (sans ears and nostrils), understand that 'This is Age of Getting Things Done Even With a Naturally Flaccid Johnson Bar, Son!' -

The specialty of the Kennedy administration was public relations, image-making—and an image, it is well to remember, is the thing that is not really there. The Kennedy years, or so we were endlessly told, were American Camelot, years in which culture had come to Washington, elegance to the White House, good looks and intellectual brilliance to the Oval Office. Intellectuals swooned, the higher media drooled. Think Charles Collingwood following Jacqueline Kennedy around the White House, enraptured as the first lady, in her best Miss Porter School whispering lisp, modestly explained how in her redecorations she had elevated the joint above the low standard of those pathetic philistines, the Eisenhowers.
Of course it was all baloney. None of it could withstand close scrutiny. When the scrutiny came it revealed that Jack Kennedy didn’t quite write the book, Profiles in Courage, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. The reality behind those touching photographs of his picture-perfect children cavorting round the Oval Office was their father bonking movie stars, mafia molls, and adolescent interns in the upstairs bedrooms.
The rest of the Kennedy family was scarcely better. The father, the founding father as he was called in the title of a book about him by Richard Whalen, had a dodgy financial past, was a major-league philanderer, and on balance didn’t find Adolf Hitler all that bad a sort. His brother Bobby was a bully who had worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy and, once he had power on his side, was able to make even Jimmy Hoffa seem sympathetic. The youngest brother, Teddy, later to become a great liberal hero, failed badly at Chappaquiddick, letting a young woman drown before endangering his own political career. As for the widow Kennedy, after a decent interval, she did what the cynical Gore Vidal said she was always about anyway, and went for the money in marrying the monstrous Aristotle Onassis. Such was the reality behind Camelot.

The murder of JFK created mythopoeic mandates in which our neo-centennial America marinates. At the end of the last century the post-mortal JFK was forgiven every sin of commission and ommission, which set the table for President Obama washed blameless in womb and at the Presidential podium.  BOH is JFK without the bother of shedding the mortal husk.

Pondering that might put one off his feed and perhaps, render that soul impotent.  The only remedy is stock up on some Joseph Epstein and devour great prose wrapping even greater wisdom.

I did! Viagra for the brain-pan.  Yeah!  That's what I'm talking about! Go Cat, go!  Hey Chickee! How about some PT 109! Four hours???  Shoot I can go Six!!!!!!!  This is the Age!!!!!

* Dunlaps disease - When your belly done laps over your belt.

Montaigne on the Brain and I Dream in French

"Je suis un rêveur. Je dois rêver et atteindre les étoiles, et si je manque une étoile puis je prends une poignée de nuages​​."
Mike Tyson

Many cultures attribute prophetic significance to dreams (an example of this can be found in the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis). Others are more skeptical. Aristotle wrote a treatise on dreams 2400 years ago in which he stated that "most so-called prophetic dreams should be classified as coincidences" On Prophesying by Dreams. Aristotle, translated by J. I. Beare,

My dreams mirror me.  Most of the time they look like this:

Sometimes they reflect my sadness over the loss of a quality Network Television program, like Pan Am -late of ABC:

Or, a dream (s) may  have much to do with cautionary tales themed accordingly in devotional readings before night-night.

I made the mistake of reading Michel De Montaigne the French Joseph Epstein whose 'sentences' are bon-bons for the mind.   I read Montaigne on facing my own mortality

Je veux que la mort me trouve plantant mes choux.*

And off I winked all forty

Things were looking mighty mal and so I hit the fast forward REM cycle, remembering this quote from Montaigne

e veux qu'on me voit en ma façon simple, naturelle, et ordinaire, sans étude et artifice; car c'est moi que je peins...Je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre.**

As Dan Savage always says, It gets better! So did the dreams -

*Translation: I want death to find me planting my cabbages.

**

• Translation: I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray...I am myself the matter of my book.