I woke dismayed by my dream. My behavior shamed me. The depiction was so unjust! What did my mind have in mind! If another had portrayed me thus, I’d have forsworn them forever! Me I’m stuck with. Why was my mind punishing me this way!

Though way too early, I winch my hulk out of bed and open my laptop. I’m not up for writing but I’m not up for anything else – and dreamland is a hellhole. I’m upset with myself. But which me is me – accused, accuser, defense counsel, or the detached observer of this brouhaha?

Do your dreams shame you? If they did, would you say? Such a conversation jimmies open a Pandora’s box. I wouldn’t even tell my shrink, if I had one, which I don’t. (I am my own – the price is right.)

If only I hadn’t made this deal with myself – to say what I see no matter what! To flee this scene would constitute cowardice. Haven’t I the guts to face myself?

Why we see what we see, think what we think, believe what we believe is a mystery beyond the reach of science. Am I originator or inheritor, original or obedient, cause or effect? Well, yes – no – maybe. Sometimes I feel like the inventor of my words, at other times (my happiest) their amanuensis. When God visited me a few years ago He was real as real can be – but what does “real” mean?

We simplify ourselves for easier handling, as we dress to go out. We choose how to appear, knowing, deep down, that this version of our self is, at best, partial, and to some degree, misleading. Our every article of attire, every word I choose, is manipulative – I am not who I pretend! Then who am I? If only I knew!

Some people are persuaded by their own narrative. They know who they are, they insist. Then some eruption surprises them. “It wasn’t me,” they protest absurdly.

Each of us is our entirety – what we think, what we don’t, all we do, our feelings, phantoms, choices – a complicated mix, the ingredients of which can’t be known even if we wanted to. And as long as we live, we’re evolving, so who I was isn’t who I am and neither’s who I’ll be. And our vision’s blurred. “A man’s memory,” observes Santayana, “may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interests in the present. This, when it is not intentional of dishonest, involves no deception. Things truly wear those aspects to one another. A point of view and a special lighting are not distortions. They are conditions of vision, and spirit can see nothing not focused in some living eye.”

Identity is our necessary delusion. We must identify ourselves and others to move them across the chessboard of consciousness. Amorphous, we’re useless. We can be knight, rook, or bishop, but not all three.

The challenge of maturity is to accommodate our actuality to the fiction we’ve settled on. For some, this process is so easy they barely notice: they’ve “always known who they wanted to be,” they purr annoyingly. Others wage war on their restrictions, their uniforms intolerably tight.

My life project, I recognize in hindsight, has been to accept myself, to acquiesce to all I am and, most painfully, all I’m not. It’s taken some doing, because my vanity dressed me up in all manner of flattering outfits. My dreams prick the balloon of my pride with mischievous glee. “You think, Carll, you’re not the ruthless rascal in that dream-saga? Think again.”