The Importance of Symbols…

There has been a long study of dreams by seers and psychologists alike.  In ancient cultures, dreams were often visions used to predict the future or to remove the artificial masks hiding the truth to people.  Freud spent a whole book on the Interpretation of Dreams.  Some experts seem to believe that dreams are merely the replaying of the daily activities, a mind's attempt to understand the daily experiences.

I have always had this problem that I never could actually dream in images.  I don’t see faces.  I don’t see people moving.  I don’t see any images at all.  I do dream.  But I dream in words; I dream in feelings.  I sense things, not like sight or touch.  Rather, I experience them much like I had a sixth sense.

I have never been much of literal kind of guy.  Every picture, every sound had some deeper meaning.  Life for me was much like the Rene Magritte painting to the left.  Truth and falsity coexisting in one image.  I tend to see the veracity of the statement.  It is not a pipe; it is an image of a pipe.

Things have meaning outside of themselves; it is hard for to understand the thing without associating it to some experience that we have had with the object.  I see a pipe, and I am wished back to times when my father, who smoked a pipe, allowed me to accompany him into a tobacco shop.  I recall him holding up different mixtures of tobacco with its rich, sweet aroma.  I also imagine him, pipe in mouth, smoking in the den of the house I grew up in, smoke rising from the bowl of the pipe.

The pipe, for me, is an image of warmth and home.  Trying to describe it to you, without your experiencing the same, without you having smelled the tobacco’s sweetness, without having to see the smoke rising from the bowl, you would not understand my feelings.  When I dream of pipes, I do not see or touch or smell a pipe, I sense the pipe that it is there, the warm feelings I associate with a pipe. 

Freud studied dreams with his patients.  He delved into the subconscious, made people believe that they were royally screwed up.  Men has Oedipal complexes; women had Elektra complexes.  People who smoked had oral fixations rooted deep into psychological problems.  The story goes that Freud himself smoked cigars.  When asked about what that symbolized, he replied, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Obviously, he never knew of Rene Magritte or his painting.  Like Magritte, I believe a pipe is never just a pipe.  Every thing has a meaning deeper than itself. 

I believe perhaps sometimes people forget this, and, in forgetting this truth, they become obstinate and misguided.  For example, there are certain denominations of Christianity who eschew any images of saints and even Jesus.  This is carried as far as refusing to show the image of Jesus on the cross.  These people lack the ability to understand the power of the symbol.  Perhaps it is their belief that the image denigrates the real thing. 

This assumption is faulty.  Assume for example a premise that these denominations would accept, it is the goal of every Christian to emulate Jesus.  (I am reminded of the bracelets that were popular back with the initials W. W. J. D., i.e., What Would Jesus Do?)  Certainly, said emulation is not necessarily for the benefit of the emulator but those who observe the emulator.  They become symbols for others. 

Symbols are important tools.  They allow us to understand that which cannot be understood be the mere use of the five senses.  Symbols are humanities doorway to the insubstantial and unexplainable.   

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