This week I got my teeth cleaned. The dental hygienist, let's call her Lulu, led me to the first room, just off the lobby with an excellent view of the parking lot and all the pedestrians strolling by, strapped a bib around my neck, and asked me how I had been since the last time I was there.
"I've been working on my dream journal," Lulu said. "My cat came to me in a dream."
"Oh, that's nice," I replied, as she lifted a pointed metal probe. "What was your cat showing you?"
"Not to be afraid." I opened. She went in with the metal stick. "Then he turned into little bits of golden light and ascended into the sky."
"Wow." What else could I say with her hands in my mouth? It came out more or less as "Ow."
"Then my dog appeared and led me up a hill to a beautiful lake." She dug into my gum and then pulled the tool out, leaving it hovering somewhere over my nose. I stared at it cross-eyed as she added, "He was made out of pure love."
Before she resumed her assault, I said, "That must have been really satisfying," or something to that effect. Watching a dental torture tool hanging over my nose, ready to dive back into my mouth at any second, has tampered with my unreliable memory. I'm not really sure what I said.
Lulu stared out the window and then went back in. "My problem is, I want to put images to my dreams."
"Ungh?"
"Yes, but I can't draw. I can see the images so clearly! I want to publish them in a book, but I don't have the drawing skills."
"Ehh Aay," I said around her hands. "Eeely ice arrr, eeey uhhh caaa ake arrr." I was trying to say "AI. Really nice art. Anyone can make art," in case you were trying to translate my gibberish.
Her brown eyes examined me through the lighted microscope. She wore a mask, but I could tell she was skeptical.
I didn't bother complaining about AI scraping art off the internet and not compensating or crediting the artists who created the stolen art. Why get into the weeds with someone who thinks their dreams have cosmic significance?
"All beings are made of light and love," she said, scraping the grunge from behind my lower front teeth.
Held captive, all I could do was grunt.
She finished picking around and reached for the polishing gizmo. She loaded it up with the gritty minty paste and attacked my back teeth. Rowrr, rowrr, tooth after tooth, with no break, until she reached my bottom teeth. She paused the polisher and held it above my mouth.
"I really think everyone has the power to access the spirit world," she mused, leaving me with my mouth half open. I knew if I tried to swallow, I'd gag, choke, and die in that chair, so I clenched my hands, held still, and tried not to breathe. I didn't nod or blink for fear that would distract her from finishing the polishing task.
Finally, she finished with the minty grinder (doing a half-assed job, in my opinion), grabbed the water pistol, and sprayed my teeth with cold water for a good minute.
I resumed breathing and swallowing.
I felt like I had to say something, so I mumbled, "The world is a mysterious place." To myself, I was thinking, I respect and even admire your interest in the spirit world, and I hope I never see you again. I didn't say it, of course. I try to respect all forms of creativity, no matter how wacky. She wasn't hurting anyone. She was just trying to understand her human experience.
I used to believe---no, I used to want to believe---that the world was magical and mysterious, that there was some alternate reality in which our animal guides came to us in dreams and led us to new insights. More than once, I meditated in a room full of other meditators, who all seemed to receive something that eluded me. I felt like a fraud, and so I left that group and looked for another path to understanding.
I've come to understand that there is no path except whatever we make up. Who can truly understand reality? Not me. Everything I encounter is filtered through my senses and distilled through my preconceptions and biases. That realization used to bother me, that I couldn't ever know reality. Now I don't care.
What is the human experience? We live, maybe we live a long life, maybe we have a relatively happy life, but in the end, we leave the way we entered, attached to nothing. All the wacky theories we use to explain our experience are left behind, signifying nothing.
Believers are sometimes endearing and sweet, like Lulu. They can also be destroyers, no need to name names. It might be better (safer) to believe in nothing.
