Dream of Good, Bad, and Grace
Dec. 30th, 2009 04:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qosI dreamed last night that I was back at an odd version of my undergraduate theater department. Another student and myself had been called in to a special, closed meeting of the staff and our peers, and we were going to be required to make a choice between two options: to declare ourselves "good" (a kind of artificial, goody-goody "good") or declare ourselves "bad" -- so bad that we were beyond even the grace of the gods to redeem.
What's interesting to me is that what I felt most strongly was disgust: disgust that their version of good was nicey-nice, not robust and meaningful, and angry at the idea of the gods' grace being insufficient to deal with certain types of mortal "badness."
I woke up before I actually had to make a choice in the dream, but I am left with the sense that I would have chosen to identify myself as "bad" rather than live within the constraints of false goodness that would have been required otherwise. I wish I'd had more sense of what would have happened in the dream if I had been able to get past that point of choice.
The idea of being called in front of a committee and forced to declare one's status like that came from the book I'm reading, War Trash, about a Chinese soldier who is a prisoner in an American POW camp during the Korean war. At one point, all the Chinese prisoners were required to declare whether they wanted to be released to Taiwan or to mainland China. The latter meant -- in the minds of the Americans and the strongly political Chinese in the camp -- that they were Communists, even if their only reason for wanting to go back to China was to return home, to family and loved ones. They refused to acknowledge that someone could make a choice like that for anything other than political reasons.
What's interesting to me is that what I felt most strongly was disgust: disgust that their version of good was nicey-nice, not robust and meaningful, and angry at the idea of the gods' grace being insufficient to deal with certain types of mortal "badness."
I woke up before I actually had to make a choice in the dream, but I am left with the sense that I would have chosen to identify myself as "bad" rather than live within the constraints of false goodness that would have been required otherwise. I wish I'd had more sense of what would have happened in the dream if I had been able to get past that point of choice.
The idea of being called in front of a committee and forced to declare one's status like that came from the book I'm reading, War Trash, about a Chinese soldier who is a prisoner in an American POW camp during the Korean war. At one point, all the Chinese prisoners were required to declare whether they wanted to be released to Taiwan or to mainland China. The latter meant -- in the minds of the Americans and the strongly political Chinese in the camp -- that they were Communists, even if their only reason for wanting to go back to China was to return home, to family and loved ones. They refused to acknowledge that someone could make a choice like that for anything other than political reasons.
