Bedtime Story: A Nighttime Fable for Our Polarizing Times

I had a dream last night. I woke up only to the ideas struggling to find expression from it. All I remember of the feeling was that it was as if some new solution was forming, trying to precipitate out of a chemical reaction that I didn't quite yet understand.

It started with an equivalence. That the issues on the left were being equally and oppositely reacted to on the right (to borrow from Newton!), and that both were moving outside of the delicate balance of human connection. Something was rotten in this state of Denmark (to invoke Shakespeare!).

There was a strangeness present. The specter of the objective death of facts was there hanging before me, and it was tragicomically juxtaposed with the Peter-Pan like subjectivity of moral relativism. Each were fighting with the other.

The juvenile trickster boy who wouldn't grow up on the left, insisted, in its postmodern way, that it could be anything it wanted, that its truth didn't rely or even trust in reality, that it would not and should not be limited. This side was free and unimpeachable and because, like a shapeshifting trickster, it could move so fast, it evinced no shadow. You could say nothing wrong about it without oppressing its divine innocence, or becoming wrong yourself!

On the right side, there was an authoritarian paternalistic king, so sure of his absolute standards that whenever doubted, he ferociously questioned the nature of facts themselves. If the light shone down on his omnipotent certainty--so detestable because the light was only meant to come from him--he would deign it conspiracy. When this didn't work, he went for the jugular, calling it a fake, imperiously rendering it a childish myth! How foolish he made his subjects feel in the presence of these new daily proclamations. Like Alice's Red Queen of "Off with their heads!" fame, his decree was meant to arrest and intimidate.

I saw the limits of both sides of this strange equation: the idealistic, yet somewhat juvenine entitlement of the left's expectation that reality was a nuisance and could be vanquished in an undifferentiated utopia, and the equally immature insistence on the right that when you offend me, I can cut out of the game, call you a liar, and retreat to my fortress of absolute and independent perfection.

I could see how both of these sides saw the enemy in the other, and yet how each of them could't see how they were each becoming more and more alike. Worse yet, they were becoming more and more dangerously far from what holds human connection and creativity together.

In his beautiful and poignant work demonstrating the beginnings of human attachment and creativity, child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott spoke eloquently about the importance of balancing and intermingling reality and imagination. His concept of the transitional object--where the real stuffed bear merges with the magical fantasy of the child's imagination--is the foundation and cornerstone of personal vitality, collaborative creativity, and interpersonal connection. There was no need to smooth out or even question the contradictions of these two worlds--in fact, to do so would be destructive!-but instead, to be human meant to carry as Donald Kalsched calls it our 'dual destiny', to live between and within two worlds, and in so doing, create a third, one that is Real-like the Velveteen Rabbit!

As that old song Love and Marriage suggests, reality is nothing with imagination and vice versa--'you can't have one without the other.' While reality limits us, it also allow the child to begin to connect to the wider world outside its internal control, enables him or her to interact with the larger community and culture. At the same time, the personal magic of his own inner world and imagination is respected and honored by the fact that he has imbued the bear with its own name, history, mythology, and special powers. This is the best of both worlds that allows the beginning of true negotiation, enjoyment, and fulfillment to emerge.

The equation in our country right now does not encourage this stance on other side of the political aisle. Either extreme position fails to account for the importance of human limitation and imperfection, and the need--not just the desire-- to find a bridge between these two essential worlds. Without creatively negotiating and merging these zones--Reality and Imagination, Self and Other---the world becomes divided, split, and deadened. In short, it becomes a world of continual trauma!

What brings us back is a witnessing, a healthy and necessary disillusionment that moves us outside of omnipotence into human power and possibility. As Lisel Mueller's poem "Bedtime Story" illustrates:

The children come to the banks to be healed 

of their wounds and bruises. 

The fathers who gave them their wounds and bruises 

come to be healed of their rage. 

The mothers grow lovely; their faces soften, 

the birds in their throats awake. 

They all stand hand in hand 

and the trees around them, 

forever on the verge 

of becoming one of them, 

stop shuddering and speak their first word. 

But here's the thing. The poet tells us this is not the beginning but the end of the story. In order to get to this beautiful, connected, and creative place, we must find the courage and heart, the mothers and fathers and children, to go our own way. They 

must find their way to the river, 

separately, with no one to guide them. 

That is the long, pitiless part, 

and it will scare you.

My hope is that if we can proceed with courage, heart, and insight, we might be able to find our way back together, and be careful of the false leads that might seem to bring us closer to power, but further from our humanity: limited, imperfect, beautiful, and real.

Wouldn't that be a wonderful waking dream?