What’s a Heaven For

I awoke with my dream still resonating.

My three sons, very young again, had arranged a birthday surprise, a Yankees’ game with special seats in the owner’s section, not a suite, just a part in the bleachers but near the bullpen. Then someone official, either from the State Department or the Russian Embassy (it wasn’t clear, at least not after I awoke) contacted us indicating that they needed one of our seats for Dmitri Medvedev, in the dream still president of Russia. I knew we had to give up the seat but at the same time that I couldn’t give up the opportunity of being with my three sons and the four of us wrestled with how we’d be able to accomplish both imperatives.

In a dream, anything is possible.

After I’d cleared my head and completed the daily waking process, my heart ached with longing for my sons, two of whom are very far away, and I experience a series of revelations, not epiphanies and not overwhelming in their originality, but emotionally important. Perhaps “revelations” isn’t the correct word, they were things I’d known and perhaps I was just revisiting them and maybe, rearranging them as well.

I tried to dwell on the dream, trying not to lose it but as it started to fade, it was gradually replaced by a series of speculations and I found myself musing. I seemed to remember that our existence, at least as we currently understand it, is premised on a juncture of time and space, but that our soul seems inclined towards another reality, that of rearranging that confluence so that, perhaps, heaven is that place where we can constantly relive joyful experiences we’ve had and also, rearrange them, adding other loved ones, or sharing places we’ve loved with people who weren’t there when we’d first experienced them. And then I considered that perhaps our goal in living a worthwhile life is in generating the memories we need to relive and to rearrange until we’ve attained the perfect experience, and then dwell there ever after. On reflection though, I think a dynamic, infinite and eternal rearrangement and reliving process would be best, or at least better than static perfection. Perhaps that’s what’s happening now in Divinities’ dream.

My musing veered off and I started speculating on what hell would be like. I know why; I’d turned on the morning news on this Election Day’s eve and the connotation and associations seemed obvious. Hell, I conjectured, would be the state resulting from an inability to generate an adequate supply of lovingly meaningful experiences, or if a punishment, a place where one knew those experiences existed but was unable to recall or relive or rearrange them.

I wonder if our dreams provide a foretaste of what we’ll experience when our physical form is gone. I dream regularly and fully, and in my dreams experience my vision of heaven, a place populated with old friends, especially my classmates at the Citadel and at Eastern Military Academy, a place where my three sons are the most popular stars but with a supporting cast of old loves unscarred by experiences that led to our transitions. I dream of people I hope to meet and of experiences I hope to share, and of a world where all my varied aspirations can be reconciled.

______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2012; all rights reserved