Wood Stone Water and Flesh

dreamt in early 1990 at age 32 ... reproduced here is the first half of the dream, because some friends who have asked for this publication will be mostly interested in the part about the church and Jesus. I still remember my surprise when I awoke, to think I had had such a Jesus-themed dream, having been raised a Jew, and then thinking about Jung's theory of the mass subconscious. I have maybe a hundred more dreams written down. A Jungian would have a field day.

I had agreed to apartment-sit for a woman named Sylvia. Sylvia was an aging, or late-middle-aged, successful attorney. She was very observant, the kind who could size a person up at a glance. Very serious, but not without a certain droll humor.

Sylvia was going on a trip. Her apartment was located uptown where my mother's is [my mother died in 2002], but the interior seemed more like a country cottage. Dark wood was the most persistent motif, covering even the walls. Mullioned windows let sun into the kitchen. The other rooms were dark, and the whole place spoke of an intellectual inhabitant, comfortable with herself and not afraid to combine the rustic with the urbanity of her life.

Like my mother, she kept houseplants which I was to water. However, they were rather unruly, of free foliage, spilling around the sunny kitchen windows, unlike my mother's plants carefully arranged in the living room under a Gro-lite.

So I packed some things for Claire [aged 2 when I had this dream] and myself and we took up a short residence in Sylvia's apartment.

I had to run downtown again every couple of days, maybe to feed my cats, or pick up more clothes for the baby. But I don't remember actually being in my apartment.


On one of these forays downtown, I was walking across 7th Street on my return trip to Sylvia's, and just in front of St. George's Ukrainian Catholic church I noticed a fragment of a wooden statue which had been put out on the curb, perhaps by a church janitor, as trash. I recognized it as something very old and important. I looked closer and saw that it was the severed lower legs of some medieval mythological figure, which perhaps had adorned the exterior of a building. The two thin, bird-like legs were fused, carved from one piece of wood with no space between them, and had formed the pedestal of the missing upper parts of the statue. I believe the legs were severed below the knee, yet somehow I knew the missing knees had been bony and protruding. The feet were splayed and duck-like, with four webbed toes on each, and formed what would have been the base of the statue.

[some day I'll scan in my little drawing here]

The wood may have been painted once, but no color remained. It was aged and cracked, centuries old.

A black limousine pulled up to the curb and two priests stepped out. One of them was trim, middle-aged, with black, slightly grizzled hair.

I turned to him and said, "You know, this is from a Gremlin."

"I know," he agreed.

"I'm on my way somewhere now, and I can't carry this with me. But I don't want to leave it as trash. Can I store it inside the church?"

He granted me permission to bring the wooden fragment inside.

I carried the piece of statue up the church steps, through a large door and into the shadows under a colonnade that bordered on a large, landscaped, sunlit church courtyard. The floor under this very tall colonnade was made of cobblestones. I heard water running somewhere nearby; perhaps there was a small stream or fountain in the yard.

I found a spot at the base of one of the columns where I thought the fragment of the Gremlin would be out of the way. I was trying to be considerate of the church and of those who worked or worshiped there. I leaned the fragment against the column, but when I looked up I saw Jesus hanging on a cross attached to the column above me.

This crucifix was supposedly only stone statuary belonging to the church, the priests walking by saw a statue of Jesus, but I could see that THIS WAS THE FLESH-AND-BLOOD JESUS HANGING ON THE CROSS. More priests walked by, oblivious! Jesus looked sad beyond words, because his real message was not being heard, and the man that he had been, the things he had said and done, were being so misquoted, misused and misunderstood. The very people who made him their religious figurehead could not see him at all.

These priests -- who pretend to be closer to God than mere worldly men, who pretend to intervene and speak to God on behalf of the followers of their "flock", who would have their followers believe that Jesus was the only living Son of God and that Jesus wanted to be worshiped as God rather than teach their congregants that Jesus realized his own Godhead and sought to help us realize the Godhead in each of us, these priests who act as though they own the copyright on Truth -- these priests did not even recognize the real Jesus right in front of them!

But I stayed mum. I didn't have much time, and I thought if these men could not see, then they are not supposed to see, and they are not able to see. Also, they were letting me retain custody (only because they failed to recognize its worth) of this important piece of wooden mythology, and, moreover, they had granted me permission to store it in their church until I could recover it later. So, out of a desire not to insult or anger them, and, more than this, out of respect for the living Jesus on the cross, I moved the Gremlin to a different spot, and continued on my way back uptown to Sylvia's apartment.