My dream finds me walking down a relatively narrow path. I might call this a tunnel, since it is covered, but the sides are mostly open, so it is more adequately described as a covered path. At the end of it, I come upon what looks like the tower of a Gothic cathedral of, err, towering proportions. A cathedral is, indeed, my destination but I know it is not this one. However, I do expect to find here some means of ingress to the place I seek. I enter. There’s nothing standard about the interior. There’s a large dais in the center. Mounted on it is a structure I can’t recall or describe very well, other than to say it is narrow and tall. Although there’s nothing especially neoteric about the hall, I get the sense that this pole, or whatever it is, is older. On the dais, around this structure, a number of people are sitting or lying. I expect what is in the center of the dais to be my gateway to wherever it is I intend to go. I ascend the dais and am surprised to find that, belying its appearance, its surfaces are extremely soft and yielding, pleasant to the touch. (Perhaps that is why so many people are lounging on it.) I walk toward the thing in the middle, which I expect to use to ascend (to heaven, I wonder?). However, this doesn’t work as planned. Although I seem to have correctly activated the mechanism of this pole, it only raises me several meters above the dais. In waking life, I’d doubtless be overcome by vertigo, but here I am simply stumped, wondering how I can ascend further. Perhaps it is my agitated perplexity that causes me to awaken.
This dream parallels a passage I hadn’t read or thought of in years but just now opened up anew:
“With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration! And now my chains are to be broken; I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which I live, — opaque, though they seem transparent, — and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to life, and renovate nature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more be a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they may be discerned from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my birth-day: then I became an animal: now I am invited into the science of the real. Such is the hope, but the fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls, that this winged man, who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into the clouds, then leaps and frisks about with me from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is bound heavenward; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving that he does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a flying fish, a little way from the ground or the water; but the all-piercing, all-feeding, and ocular air of heaven, that man shall never inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my old nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be.”