Everything is Metaphor

It was a strange city. The streets were lined with broken lamps, piercing the fog ever so subtly like glowing candle light. I strangely recall that the buildings, which were more like multi-level huts, resembled that of some Central American artwork I had seen. I sat alone at a picnic table in a parking lot, in an area that could best be described as a ghetto.

I looked down the street and observed that gradually people were emerging from the buildings. But something was strange about them, much like the buildings themselves. They had abstract features, like surrealist art. Distorted somehow. Human, yet not. Moving, yet not alive. Disoriented creatures, like shadows of mad men, manifestations of an indescribable nightmare. Screeching glass was pleasant compared to the sounds they made. Fear gripped me as hundreds of them poured onto the streets like roaches with the lights off.

I started to run. I had to get away. But in dreams, sometimes you don’t run in the right direction. I ran through the streets, maneuvering, dodging the human shells, when I suddenly found myself surrounded.

Then, like a narration in a movie, when everything pauses so the omnipotent storyteller can insert his one line, I heard a voice. No one around me was saying it. It was just there. And it said this: It is like a man who looks in a mirror and immediately forgets what he looks like.

Finally I found a street where these beings were not swarming. There was a glimmer of hope at the end, like a ray of sunlight. The mob of demons dispersed as I walked, and I soon spotted a gate. Then, like the eye of a storm that appears unanticipated, the horrible people were gone. The rays of a morning sunrise illuminated the sky on the other side of the gate, and I walked through it and into the light, at last feeling safe.

I gasped awake, heart pounding through my chest. Incoherent in the early morning, I lacked confidence that I was among the real. Anxious and on edge, I stumbled out of bed and into the bathroom, afraid one of those creatures could be lurking in my hallway. The shower restored my confidence and brought me into reality. I was awake.

But I could not stop thinking about the dream. It terrified me. Even more so, it baffled me. The voice I had heard paraphrasing an obscure biblical passage. It is like a man who looks in a mirror and immediately forgets what he looks like…

I got ready and had a few minutes before I had to leave for school. I pulled out a Bible and sat at my desk and turned to the book of James. I read the verse that had intruded my dream, “…if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man looking at his own face in a mirror; for he looks at himself, goes away, and right away forgets what kind of man he was.”

I pondered for a moment what the dream could mean, when suddenly it hit me. I gasped, like someone breaking the surface of the water, and tears began to well up inside. I had it figured all wrong. It was worse than I could have imagined. The creatures were not actually chasing me. I was one of them.

Loneliness can be a beautiful thing.

photo by jill nance

The scene moves me every time. Bruce Wayne, alone in the dark, awakens a million bats. He has feared these creatures his entire life, but today he has come to the cave to face them. As the bats swirl around him, Bruce rises to his feet, lifts his arms, and breathes in.  What once brought him terror has now become his home.

Let’s be honest for a second.  Facing and overcoming your fear is hard.  I think if I was Bruce Wayne, I would have dismissed my fear with excuses. This isn’t me. I don’t like bats. Forget it!  I’m doing something else. But Bruce chose to face his fear, embrace it, overcome it. Beyond that, he chose to become what he feared.

How natural, how comfortable it is, to lean on your excuses, to dismiss something you fear, say this isn’t me, and move on.  The question invoked in my mind from the image of Bruce Wayne is this: What could we become if we embraced our fears? What would our lives be like if we chose not to be afraid?