OCDreams

I used to have very bizarre but rich dreams. Complex narratives, astonishing images, etc. Over the last several years, I guess my psyche has gotten stuck; most,, though not all, of my dreams show a distinctly obsessive compulsive structure.

Before I left my longtime admin job, they had gotten unpleasantly cramped, anxious and impersonal, almost two-dimensional. Once I made the decision to leave, the OCD structure remained, but the dream space immediately opened up and included people and wide natural landscapes, etc. Whatever task or project I had in the dream still had that repetitive and unfinished quality, but with way less pressure and alienation.

But I still find myself undertaking tasks, part of the time self-initiated now rather than imposed, which include gathering data and coming to conclusions. I go back over the issue but rarely complete the project.

Last night my dream was about recreating the role and meaning of the subdeacon in the Latin High Mass. Hey, it's a dream. Dreams are often bizarre.

There was a certain constraint of space in it, of course. Mostly the sanctuary of a church. And I went over a lot of the material more than once. But it was almost leisurely and it did have an air of pleasurable discovery about it. It involved reconstructing from memory the Latin liturgies of my youth, when one of the priests would dress in the vestments and enact the role of the subdeacon, the third of the sacred ministers at a High Mass. The other two being the priest and the deacon.

There was in the old liturgy --which, by the way, is now "legal" again and is starting to be celebrated in various parts of the world-- a sacred choreography, a complex interactive set of hieratic movements and gestures and words and objects and music and people, the result of almost 20 centuries of evolution. Even HL Menken found its performance moving.

The subdeacon was like a second assistant. Oddly, though, for part of the Mass, he was the most splendidly attired, carrying before his face, itself wrapped in a thick veil, the paten, the golden plate on which the bread of the Mass would be placed.

 Chalice with paten

 

The subdeacon read or sang the Epistle and he helped fill the chalice with wine and water and presented it to the priest. And in the Latin rite, for some strange reason, the bread was laid directly on a linen cloth next to the chalice for much of the Mass, from the Offertory til the close of the Paternoster, during which time, the subdeacon kept the paten safe in its veil.

Talk about Catholic esoterica. As for what it means...I have the rest of the day to ruminate on that.