An Essay About The Most Elusive, Perplexing, Sought-After Element of Modern Life

Certain dream stories repeat themselves over time until they no longer hold my interest. I call these Dream Themes. One theme that has lasted a long time centers on my first year or two of college. 

I attended the University of California at Santa Cruz in the late 1960s. Back then it was an emerging experiment created in response to the Berkeley uprisings. It featured small classes built around themes, and combined large lectures with smaller, intensely interactive seminars. The first year consisted of only one class, Western Civ, which combined history, English, and art. You didn’t get to deviate from the core curriculum until after the first year or so. 

My mother had always waxed eloquent and grew emotional about going to college. She’d reminisce with a cigarette in her hand; and looking through the cloudy haze with a serious eye, dramatically state, “College will be the most important experience in your life. It will utterly change you.” 

My mother’s vision was prophetic on many levels. First and foremost, college meant leaving home to find out about the world, and, more importantly, discover your own self. My journey involved going to college in the 60s, which was an epic story in itself. Thirdly, I fell in with a group of rebels and original thinkers who fed each other dreams, urges, and ironies that would last a lifetime. 

The Santa Cruz campus was also the first U.S. college to offer alumni a Reunion of Rediscovery. Alumni were invited to return for a month in the summer to relive our college days, to update our brains, and to stir once more from inside the pot of magic. When possible, you reconnected with your old roommates and hangers on. I was again living with the ultimate existential rebel from those days, Bob. He always appears in my college dreams. 

In last night’s college dream, I’m again living off campus with Bob, and a few other close friends. We drink and study together, help with assignments and the big final test at the end of each year. (If you didn’t pass the final test you had to leave college, and that implied you put on a khaki uniform to wear in a jungle half way across the world, to fight in a war that you fought against back home.) The word conundrum described that fence that surrounded me at that point in my life. 

We took turns making dinner for the others once a month. You picked a meal you loved and grew up with. In the lead up to that dinner, you gave the background of your family rituals, the meal itself, and a few thoughts or quotes you were currently pondering. 

I began by pouring scotch and sodas to enjoy while the BBQ briquettes reached their temperature. I began by talking about my love of playwriting. I quote Bertolt Brecht and realize, once again, not many are interested in this polemical playwright. But I persist, cause it’s who I am. As we sit before the sizzling steaks, one person calls out, “Keep it short, Kimeldorf, we don’t want to eat a cold steak.” 

I settle on my favorite quote from the Swedish playwright, August Strindberg. I related how Strindberg was an exciting theatrical innovator and thinker. He and Eugene O’Neil were my first playwright-heroes. 

With glass of golden scotch held high, I tell the crew that I have only one short line to quote from August tonight. This very solitary figure once wrote, “The world had become an asylum, and I was begging to go mad.” 

Upon waking, I sensed this might be my final college reunion dream. Let me end now with a few favorite Strindberg quotes: 

“There are poisons that blind you, and poisons that open your eyes.” 

“I dream, therefore I exist.” 

“The further from one another, the nearer one can become.” “Those who won’t accept the existence of evil never get beyond it.” 

“We are already in Hell. It is the earth itself that is Hell, the prison constructed for us by an intelligence superior to our own, in which I could not take a step without injuring the happiness of others, and in which my fellow creatures could not enjoy their own happiness without causing me pain.” 

“I am a socialist, a nihilist, a republican, anything that is anti-reactionary! I want to turn everything upside down to see what lies beneath; I believe we are so webbed, so horribly regimented, that no spring-cleaning is possible, everything must be burned, blown to bits, and then we can start afresh…” 

One gets more and more humble the longer one lives,
and finally as we approach the shadow of death
suddenly many things look different.