Bewildered

The news reporter stopped me on a busy Berlin street and asked if I had seen her missing O-umlaut. I told her that my Umlaut detector was malfunctioning. Perhaps she should ask the police investigator across the street. I pointed to a traffic signal at the intersection where I had just been conversing with the investigator. He was gone. That’s when I realized the investigator was a fraud.

Then I woke up. Not only had the dream been bizarre, I was flummoxed by the fact that I had been dreaming in the German language. The last thing I heard the reporter ask was, “Wo befindet sich die fehlenden Umlaute?”

Dreaming in German hasn’t happened since my high school years. Even then, the experience of dreaming in German always mystified and amazed me. I shouldn’t have been surprised then, because German class was my favorite subject as an eleventh grader.

I have not taken any formal German language courses for at least 40-years. In fact, I’ve been concentrating on rudimentary Russian and have been brushing up on long-neglected Spanish. I wish I could dream in Russian and Spanish, but those dreams haven’t happened yet.

I love the mental state of being positively bewildered. It’s the flip-side of the frightening state of being confused or disoriented. Being bewildered and mystified is a gateway to learning and growth. Besides that, being perplexed is challenging in a fun way.

Perhaps neurologists can tell me why I had a dream in German and why such dreams are so infrequent. Why have a German dream when I’m trying to learn Russian? Do German skills get filed away in the same parts of the brain that Russian skills go? Why don’t I ever dream in Spanish or Japanese even though I’ve invested a great amount of time with them, too? All of these questions leave me even more stupefied.

“The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one’s preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.”–Jean Cocteau

Curious people and scholars have studied the arbitrariness and randomness of life for ages. In their attempts, humans have invented religion, astrology, numerology, plus “isms” and other “ologies” along with philosophy and science. While many things about life have been explained, many of those explanations are seeds that grow into more puzzles.

I love meeting people who are positively bewildered and awe-struck by the world around us. The most interesting folks are the misfits who want to converse about more than the inconsequential chit-chat that fills our daily lives.

The Universe is filled with countless astonishing, bewildering phenomena. These big and small things will keep us thinking until the end of time. Among them are the questions about this morning’s German dream. Why did it happen? How did it Happen? Can we dream about any subject on purpose? These are mystifying questions.

Ciao
The Blue Jay of Happiness quotes Nobel Prize winning poet Saint-John Perse. “Astronomers have been bewildered by the theory of an expanding Universe, but there is no less expansion in the moral infinite of the universe of man. As far as the frontiers of science are pushed back, over the extended arc of these frontiers one will hear the poet’s hounds on the chase.”