XI
Alex didn’t feel like God, while he was wondering if the pigeons might be feeling like the Israelis in the desert, throwing pieces of bread to them, as he was, from a window, some floors up in the hotel in Spain he was staying in, making time to go to the seaport, so to get on a ship for England. Alex preferred ships to planes. And so that was the way he travelled whenever he could. He felt, however, that Catholic spirituality, on the level of the soul, and metaphorically speaking, was something like moving into a seaport or an airport, waiting to go home. As he felt that, as a catholic, while still living in this world, he was sort of like a tourist in a third world country. You know, somewhere you might go to, but you don’t really want to live there.
– Dreams rarely have a literal meaning. The elements and story of a dream are or can be fused or amalgamated, as they might be in reference to some significant thing that might happen in the course of your day, not necessarily the day after you had the dream. For instance, if you dreamt of a friend of yours playing guitar, wearing a postman outfit, being that friend of yours not a postman nor someone that plays the guitar, you have already there three elements that should be considered separately, them being your friend, the guitar and the postman. The elements of dreams sometimes don’t have to do with the elements itself, as in pursuing the or a literal sense of whatever might be related with them, but sometimes something that is happening on the side when you might be thinking or talking or meeting someone that is or could be significant to you. As in, for instance, someone is telling you something and, at that particular time, a postman caught your attention for whatever reason; or someone playing or carrying a guitar; or your friend appearing or someone that has the same name has him or her, etc. After having such a dream, you don’t call your friend and say, hey, you’re going to be a postman and learn how to play the guitar, you know? Dreams and/or their meaning can be a language dependent of the individual’s personal development on the matter, not wanting to exclude, with this, what could be designated as the existence of a system of archetypical signs.
Just Alex reminiscing on one of the topics of the night in Crete – or was it Rhodes? –, still in his room, throwing pieces of bread out of his window to the pigeons, while making time to go to the seaport. He had been to Santiago de Compostela, to the Cathedral where the Apostle rested, being this a Xacobeo Year and all.
– Certain elements of dreams can also present themselves in a certain way, but meaning its opposite, as in, if in a dream someone is stepping outside a church, in the, let’s call it, awake mode, that could mean that that person is in fact entering a church.
»In the manner that the dream unfolds, again, it can be the opposite as to what might happen to you when awake, as in, the last part of the dream, in its «story», could be the starting point of something, related to that dream, in the awake mode. For instance, if someone dreams that he was cooking dinner and then was watching television and then was listening to music in his headphones – a great invention, I might add –, but, in the awake status, it will unfold the other way around, as in, that person will first listen to music, then watch TV and then cook dinner. But dreams can also have a literal meaning, despite of, so it seems, being rare. But, again, it’s a personal thing, and dependent on the individual. So, when are you going to know if its meaning might be literal or not? My answer would be, practice.
The night in Greece had been a night to remember. The conversation, at some point, was about music. Alex liked mostly rock, but he didn’t think of musical genres as some sort of teams in whatever sport. You know?, go, rock!, or go, jazz!, or go, pop! He liked whatever it was that he liked. But Alex was mostly a rock person. And Rocket Skates from the Deftones was something he thought as some sort of an ultimate rock song. Just as a manner of speaking, given that he didn’t believe to be any ultimate song, given Life being Eternal and such, so the pursuit of songs being also eternal. Or not.
Alex thought of Eternal Life mostly as in consisting of artistic pursuit. But, hey, if you want to plant potatoes or something, I guess it’s alright. Anyway, Jesus is there, so, who cares? But that song… really. For Alex was something else. Not that it, in appearance, in regard of what made it up, as in, guitars in overdrive and so on, was what made him feel what he did about that song. Just how it was put together, you know?, as in, greatly written, and the little details here and there. I know there’s this expression that the devil is in the detail. Well, in some parts of the world is said that God is in the detail. Whatever. French cuisine is in the detail, the detail is in the detail... All sorts of things are in the detail.
But back to Rocket Skates: the guitar riffs were just great, the drums arrangements were just something else, that whoo made by Chino, really, just gave an extra special something that permeated the entire song, really, like a subliminal omnipresent oh, yeah! That bridge, where the keyboards are with that sustained siren-like sound, and the drummer adds those two strikes in the tom-toms in between the – what’s its name? – the high pitched tom-tom, which isn’t really a tom-tom, the one where you put the snare or something, the one that, in a way, is setting the rhythm, the thing in between the drummer’s legs. There. In Portuguese, a tarola. But the two strikes on the tom-toms in between the one on that thing, combined with that guitar riff and the sustained siren-like sound, well, again, put together, what a swing. Really.
The unity of the Church or of Christians was also something that crossed Alex’s mind while interacting with the pigeons. A subject he thought that didn’t need many arguments so to happen. For instance, the Church is designated, among other things, as Christ’s bride. And any Christian that understood that it was alright for existing all sort of different churches or Christian communities, nevertheless not having anything to do with one another, that sort of understanding appeared to give the idea of understanding Christ, when of the time of wedding His bride, as in being in favor of polygamy… being so many different and unrelated Christian communities, that is.
Maybe I shouldn’t think about this subject in these terms, thought Alex. Anyway, maybe there’s a mental institution in Heaven, he wondered, for his peace of mind. But why am I thinking about this?
Maybe because of where he was going to.
The alarm sounded.
Alex threw a few more pieces of bread out the window, grabbed his suitcase and headed for the door while thinking: off to see the heretics, then. Or was it the apostates?
Jolly good, old chap – singled out amidst a conversation going on between a group of people waiting by the elevator down the hall of the hotel corridor, right after he opened the door.