In the God’s Dreams

Am I a character in the dreams of the god Hermes the messenger? Certainly many of my dreams have nothing to do with the common life around me. There are never any automobiles or airplanes in them. These dreams belong to an age in the distant past, to a time perhaps when nothing was written down, to the time of memory. I chose Hermes not out of vanity but because from what I’ve read about him he had a pretty good time, was not just a drunkard on Olympus. In his traipsings delivering divine messages he must have met some pretty girls who gave him pleasure. We know that he invented the lyre for the benefit of poets, and Lucian relates in his Dialogues of the Dead that he was the god of sleep and dreams. My dreams are not frightening, they are not nightmares. But their irrationality puzzles me. What is Hermes trying to tell me? Is he playing a game with me? Last Monday night I dreamt about a school for young children who had heads but no bodies. Last night it was a cow that was galloping in our meadow like a horse. Another night, and this one was a bit scary, I swam across the lake with my head under water, I didn’t have to breathe air. What is the message of these dreams? Into what kind of world is Hermes leading me? It’s not the world described daily in the New York Times. A world of shadows? A kind of levitation? How can I pray to Hermes to lay off these senseless fantasies, tell him that I want real dreams such as my shrink can explicate. I’ve looked up lustration in the dictionary. Its definition is not encouraging: “a prefatory ceremony, performed as a preliminary to entering a holy place.” That’s too impersonal. I want a man-to-man talk with Hermes, telling him to stop infesting my nights with his nonsense.