Dream Discussions and Warren Ellis

I had a dream this morning. I was with a whole bunch of friends, sitting around someone's living room and talking. The first thing I noticed is that they were all real-life people, which I don't see much of in my dreams. The next thing I noticed is that these were all friends who I especially admire for their intellect, people who make me feel, at best, haphazardly and inadequately educated. People that I love to hang out with, when I get the chance, because even their random conversation is informative and fascinating.

And we were really talking -- not just telling stories and bullshitting, but earnestly and seriously discussing things and dissecting their meanings and searching for the pearls of truth scattered amongst the swine of belief and interpretation. We didn't all agree on every point, but it was exactly the kind of passionate but respectful discussion that I love to be part of, even peripherally.

Just before I woke up, I was making a point about how nearly every culture in the world has some variant on the Golden Rule. And what did it mean -- what truths could be extracted from that fact? Was there, in fact, a universal morality?

And now I'm wondering: why am I dreaming about intellectual discussions of morality? Am I starving for intellectual stimulation? Missing those pre-child days when deep discussions might indeed erupt at any gathering? Do I long to expand my education? Am I working toward an inward examination of morality and spirituality?

It's a conundrum, but it does seem, oddly, to have stimulated my thought processes. As I was driving to work after dropping the kids off to school this morning, I actually started composing a discussion of Warren Ellis as an author and a philosopher, trying to get at the theme that runs straight through his work that I've enjoyed the most -- Transmetropolitan and Preacher and The Authority and FreakAngels -- and that a mind capable of holding onto that theme is almost certainly not really as cynical as the angry and acerbic front he projects. Or at least, that it it capable of that cynicism, but it is also equally capable of a matching and balancing optimism.

That's about as far as I got with it -- it's a short drive from Penny's school to my office -- but I really wanted to put it down, because it's not often that I consider these kinds of things anymore, and I miss it. But I couldn't just suddenly throw it out there without telling you about the dream, because I think it's relevant.