Here’s a funny thing

My revision efforts are firing on all cylinders, and last night, even my dream-producer stepped in to help me solve a question in Aristotle revision that has been playing on my mind: IF we love our friends for the sake of “the noble” (sort of, doing beautiful, noble things), can it be that we also love them for themselves? Also, can it be that both motivate us to be kind to them?

I should warn you that after I recounted this dream to a friend and running partner, his immediate question was, “Have you ever had therapy?” I can see why, but (perhaps more worryingly!) I didn’t find it at all disturbing, and it’s here for your amusement!

Dream:

So, I’d been meant to talk to some children about Africa during their school trip, but I hadn’t brought the pen drive I needed, so was being driven back home to collect it in quite a rush by one of the teachers at the school. As we turned a corner  on the road, we saw a line of traffic moving very slowly down the country lane. Once fully around this corner, we saw why the cars had been slowing (the cars had now disappeared):

There were lots of dogs on the road. The dogs were all quite small breeds, and various shades of sandy, honey-brown. And they were all unusually cute and often fluffy. We manoeuvred around them, but it was a single track road, and it was difficult. The dogs were largely not moving. They became increasingly hard to miss and the driver wasn’t slowing much; eventually, I saw that in many cases he was almost certainly just driving over them. Why?! He seemed like a perfectly nice guy! But he’d spotted what I hadn’t, which was that the previous cars had killed most of the dogs, and they couldn’t be killed twice! That was why they weren’t moving.

Then we looked more closely, and I saw that one dog (former-dog) had been skinned, and it’s sandy-fluff-covered skin had been roughly cut up into patches and was scattered around the carcass. Something was seriously up.

We looked to a lane on the right, and there were two Japanese teenagers, a boy and a girl. They looked to be around 19 years of age. Their hair was medium length but very coarse and scruffy, coming slightly over their faces. They were wearing cheap-looking clothes: faded jeans, and the girl wore a white t-shirt with a messy red sprawl on the front. And they were wielding machetes, using them to continue hacking and killing the dogs around in front of them on the road.

“It’s a massacre”, said one of us.

And the perpetrators had seen us, and clearly did not want to be seen. They began the chase.

My driver, rather than heading back down the road, took the odd decision to turn into a nearby field with incredibly long, thick grass, and to his but not my surprise, the car couldn’t keep driving. We got out and ran across the field, the machete-wielding students only metres behind us.

We made it to a Boots. Civilisation! Inside the four walls, around many onlookers and lots of CCTV: we were safe. We explained to the other shoppers that a massacre had happened and the perpetrators were hot on our heals- lock the doors. The doors were already locked. The other customers listened. And then, as one, they turned to look straight at us. And began moving towards us. Each with their own, rusty machete. Whatever spirit had taken the Japanese pair, it obviously had control of these bodies too.

We dodged and fought back and begged. The man attacking me, who seemed to be a sort of leader, said, “You kill animals.” It was a reference to the dogs that had been killed, but somehow, this was also a sort retribution for the dog-murders, and all the animals who’d deaths we’d caused. He then said, “Humans too. You treat humans like instruments, tools for you, just like animals. Human beings only have instrumental value to you. You don’t love them for themselves.” And here he was, therefore, not loving me for myself.

He said, “We won’t stop trying to kill you until you love us for ourselves, not for intrumental value.” Well, this was a sticky situation. I looked at his face as he attempted another hack with his rusty machete, and I wasn’t feeling the love for him in himself. How was I meant to muster up anything other than weak instrumental love for these guys who were trying to hack me to death in a crazed, cultish sort of way?

But his face was human, and somewhere underneath, I perceived or imagined a human being. Then I realised: I could love him for himself as well as loving in instrumentally- in fact despite strongly disliking him instrumentally! I cared about him, a little. Success!

“I can love you for yourself as well as loving you instrumentally!” He listened, as did my teacher-partner, while dodging the blades. The killer seemed to be thinking about this. It seemed he was going to be convinced and the violent attempts would end. The lesson would have been taught to us, and we’d ‘wake up’ and continue as normal, and it would all feel like it had been just a dream.

And then my alarm clock went off.

If I had a choice, I think I’d rather my dreams took less violent approaches to assisting my revision, though I’m sure they’d laugh at that and say, “Oh come on, it was all in good fun!”

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