We are broken people in a broken culture. How else to explain the madness both within and without? Last night I had such sorrowful dreams that I did not want to get out of bed this morning.

Dreams of forgetting to feed my little caged bird, of wild birds in the room. A dream of Bob coming home from work and my yelling at him. He was leaving me for another woman and she was pregnant.

I dreamt of walking through the mall trying to get people to dig deeper to find their sorrow. It felt like they would be better off.

I saw someone that said Joan Rivers was dying of bone cancer and then I reunited with her. She was getting married and I was going to the wedding. I was a poor lonely widow and picking up tiny pieces of gold jewelry left on the steps I was climbing with others on the way to the wedding.

I couldn’t find my way back to my hotel, which was a grand one downtown. I was nothing. I was sorrow. I woke up weighted down with the suffering and sorrow of my own dreamed character.

What to do? I can remember that everything happens in the only way it can happen. “Man can’t do.” That was said by G. I. Gurdjieff and that is the ultimate truth. As Maharaji said, “God does everything.”

Compassion is completely ignored in our society. Given lip culture, it descends into the fake lifestyle we are all forced to live. The only way out is through acknowledgement that we are in the swamp. We get out one by one. Others can only try to pull you deeper unless they are trying to get out as well.

Time for a wake-up call. We are all dreamers.

Vicki Woodyard