Here is a dream that one of you shared with me last week:

"During my teens and into my thirties, I commonly dreamed that I was in a public place and suddenly realized I was missing some essential piece of clothing. I would panic and look around for a means of covering myself. There would be nothing within close reach and I'd have to either run some distance or hope that no one noticed. The most memorable sensation during this dream was one of severe embarrassment."

I hadn't really noticed when I set out to do a service on dreams that it would fall on the day after All Fools Day, but there may be something fortuitous in the conjunction of these two ideas. April Fool's Day, as you may know, started in France. In sixteenth-century France, the start of the new year was observed on April 1^st. It was celebrated in much the same way we now celebrate New Years with parties and dancing into the late hours of the night. Then in 1562, Pope Gregory introduced a new calendar for the Christian world, and the new year fell on January 1^st. There were some people, however, who hadn't heard or didn't believe the change in the date, so they continued to celebrate New Year's Day on April first. Others played tricks on them and called them "April fools." They sent them on a "fool's errand" or tried to make them believe that something false was true. In France today, April first is called "Poisson d'Avril." French children fool their friends by taping a paper fish to their friends' backs. When the "young fool" discovers this trick, the prankster yells "Poisson d’’Avril!" (April Fish!).

There is something of this calendar confusion that persists today; I fully expect a few people who forgot to set their clocks ahead to come tooling in here just as the service in ending, thinking that it's 10:30.

Fools are a big topic in the UU pulpits today, if I can judge by the interest in my laughter sermon which I preached last January. I mentioned it on a minister's chat list on the web, and have sent out about 25 copies so far.

But the fools that I want to talk about today are not the ones that used to hang around court making the king laugh, like poor Yorick. They are not the fools we make of ourselves day in and day out. The fools I want to talk about are that visit us in our sleep.

The concept of dream is one that is used metaphorically at a bunch of different levels. We have dream as a vision of the future as in Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech. We have dream as standing in for the imagination, as you've got to have a dream. A fair amount of popular songs and other products of the Great American Entertainment Machine urge us to have dreams, to follow dreams, to believe that dreams may come true. Indeed, that Entertainment Machine, which is rapidly becoming America's most economically important export product, might be said both to be made up of dreams and to sell dreams as its principal commodity.

The dreams I want to talk about today are not the metaphorical ones, though these are obviously important. The dreams I want to talk about are the ones real people, you and I and the person sitting next to you, have in the course of a real night's sleep. Or maybe a real morning's sleep. Like maybe some of you are having right now, or will have before I'm through this morning. As Harvard Chaplain Peter Gomes told the state House of Representatives this week, "it is my job to speak and yours to listen. And should you finish your job before I finish mine, I hope you will be kind enough to wait. I will catch up with you as fast as I can."

We all have dreams, though many of us can't recall details of them after waking up. The question is, what do they mean? Since my article of faith is, as you know, that the really important questions don't have just one right answer, I want to put to you three possible answers to the question of what our dreams mean. The first is, that they mean nothing; they are random firings of neurons, a sort of brain-yawn by which extra electric potential gets discharged. The second idea, loosely based on Freud, is that they tell us a lot about what is going on in our unconscious minds. And the third idea is that our dreams are some form of contact with or apprehension of a reality beyond ourselves.

Let's start with the first. We know that what we call consciousness, a normal waking state, is actually a welter of thoughts, feelings and perceptions associated with different areas of our brains and different sets of neurons. The idea of brain activity that I like best says that it builds up by a kind of Darwinian mechanism.

Maybe dreams happen when the system is just exercising itself, or cleaning itself for some reason. We know that dreams that can be consciously reported don't seem to happen in all phases of sleep, but only in those light phases associated with rapid eye movements and called REM sleep.

Maybe dreams are a result of these neuron clusters sort of firing at random during those phases of sleep. The sleeping mind experiences these firings as bits of remembered data, images, narratives, and feelings. Dreams on this view are just a reshuffling of the flotsam and jetsam lying on the mind's floor, much as you might kick your way through a pile of fallen leaves in Autumn. Indeed, it may be that what we can remember well enough to write in our diaries or tell to our friends, however bizarre and disconnected a story it makes, is only the most coherent part of what our mind experiences. It may be that there were other things that you went through in the course of the night which were so deep and fragmented that you could never remember them, let alone find words to describe them.

So there is our first view of dreams, a product of random brain activity.

A second view is that dreams are a window in the unconscious. Sigmund Freud held this view, and wrote a book called The Interpretation of Dreams, though what I am laying out here is my own version of Freud, not anything from that book. We are all creatures of instinctual drives for sex, food, elimination, dominance, and we have these taboos which prevent us from acknowledging these drives. Civilization is a process of institutionalizing these taboos and distancing ourselves from our primary drives and desires.

Thus the unconscious becomes a kind of Second Self Within, whose drives and doings are hidden from our conscious minds. They are hidden because our superegos, the "parent" part of our personality, with all its oughts and shoulds, has erected a firewall between our conscious mind and these unseemly desires. Fore example, I have such a sanctified image of myself that I can't acknowledge to myself an unworthy emotion, like jealousy, even when I'm clearly feeling it. Urges that come into conflict with our views of ourselves are simply denied or ignored. Yet they are ignored at our peril, for those same urges and drives can lead us into patterns of behavior that are very harmful to ourselves or to others. The object of psychotherapy, similar to Buddhist mindfulness, is to understand the forces that are at play in our personalities, and dreams can be a key part of this discovery.

The dream that I related at the beginning of the sermon, of a person being without essential clothing in public, is so common that Freud categorized among the normal dream types. Of course, we may not realize it's common because the dream creates so much shame that we don't even want to tell anyone else about it. The taboo against being naked in public, or in inappropriate clothing, is very powerful.

What is a dream like this telling us? Not that we are about to lose some of our clothes in public. Maybe it is telling us that we are acutely ashamed of something that has happened to us, and the nakedness is a metaphor for that shame. When we have a dream like this, it is good to ask where the shame is coming from.

The dream that Vicky related is of a different type, playing not on shame but on wish. A wish for a better house, anxiety about the house one lives in, is fairly common, I think, among people raising children, for one of the responsibilities you took on when you had children was to keep a roof over their heads. My first wife used to have a recurring dream that she found a hidden stairway in our house and it led to all kinds of extra rooms.

Looking at this in terms of a wish or even of a fear lets you know just how important housing, the place you live, is to you, and that might help explain to you some of your feelings and motivations around housing issues.

Here are two dreams from one of you in which the fear is palpable:

"A more recent dream was when my youngest child was just learning to walk. In the dream, we were on a colorful tubular play structure. The baby somehow got just beyond my reach and was in great danger of falling to certain death. I had to maneuver my way over to him before he fell."

"Another recent dream _ by no means the first I've had of this type. I'm on an airplane ready to take off. As the plane taxies down the runway I grip the armrests and try to convince myself that everything is alright. The plane lifts off and climbs a few hundred feet and then slowly turns upside down and plunges toward the ground. I wake up in a sweat."

While these two dreams demonstrate a high level of fear in the unconscious, that is not to say that the fear is generated by the situation in the dream. The mother may not actually be that afraid of the baby having a playground accident, the playground accident may be a metaphor for her fear of losing control of the child as he gets older, or it may reflect an incident from her own childhood. The therapists say that you are every character in your dream.

So we have looked at the proposition that dreams are random firings of neurons, and that they are a reflection of our unconscious. The third view of dreams is that they are a connection to something that is really there in the world.

One aspect of this idea is that dreams are where there is communication between ourselves and deities or messengers from deities, an idea which is found not only throughout the sacred scriptures and stories of many religions, but also in myth and legend and secular high literature as well. In the Hebrew Bible, the Promised Land is deeded to Jacob in a dream and Joseph as a prisoner parlays his skill at dream-interpretation not only into liberty but a job as aide-de-camp to the Pharaoh. In the New Testament, the angel appears to Mary in the dream to tell her that she will give birth to Jesus, and comes back to tell the Magi not to return to Jerusalem after they have paid homage to the child.

In ancient Celtic religion, as we learned at Halloween, it was conceived that the everyday world existed side-by-side with a spirit world, and that one of the ways the spirits communicate with us is in dreams. Elves and fairies and other inhabitants of the sidhe, the Other Kingdom, communicate with mortals through dreams.

Here is a dream from one of you:

You know, if you're going to have a visitor from the Beyond, you couldn't do much better than this! What a wonderful gift!

However, I expect that few of us have had dreams about God, Jesus, or angels, and if there are other divine or supernatural beings, they might take guises like the Dog. The more common type of spirit communication that we have in dreams is with people whom we have known who have died or moved out of our lives.

My father died in 1977, and I started going with Jacqueline in 1997, but shortly after our relationship started, I head a dream in which I introduced her to him, and asked him where he had been keeping himself. He reminded me that he was dead and that is when I woke up with a great sense of loss. But who knows, maybe his spirit was trying to communicate with me, to answer my desire to root this new relationship deep into my life history.

And consider this one from one of you:

"I tucked that dream away and use it whenever I feel at a loss for what to do, for the times I feel I don't have the strength to carry on. There were no instant answers/foods in that dream, everything was a combination of ingredients, which, when mixed together, were nourishing. What I love about this dream is the humor our psyches have. This dream deals with comfort food and comfort words and comfort from my mother!"

So we have these three views of dreams: random neural activity, messages from the deep unconscious, and communication from beyond. You can choose whichever one suits your mood of the day, and I will not try to argue that one is more valid than the other, nor will I try to argue that each one is equally valid. What I want to leave you with is a different thought+ each approach is equally holy.

For the holy inheres in randomness as well as order, in chaos as in reason, in laughter as in logic. The random firings of your brains are as much a part of the holy order of things as any theory put forth by your psychologist. We search for meaning in the world because we are genetically programmed to do that, but the world is the way it is whether or not we succeed in explaining it all, and the parts we can't explain are as holy as the parts we can.

So in a sense it doesn't matter whether my dream of my father was my father trying to reach me from beyond or the fulfillment of my wish to knit together parts of my life separated by two decades. What matters is that it gave me some measure of comfort, as the dream of your mother gave one of you comfort.

What is real? Well, we cherish this distinction between dreams and waking, between reality and unreality, between fact and fiction, and the distinction is a practical necessity. However, it has its limitations. Is this Chuang Chou dreaming he is a butterfly, or is this the butterfly dreaming he is Chuang Chou? What we dream may be emotionally and spiritually real to us, and may be more so than many of the things we encounter in our waking lives.

I'd like to close with a last dream from one of you:

This is one of the finest qualities of dreams: the ability to collapse time. As the closing hymn says,

Number 350. Let's sing it.

Amen.