I'm considering blinding myself. It's all the rage. A cult recommends it. It's supposed to make you a more sensitive listener. After all, seeing is distant and impersonal. Blind folks are warmer, more intimate & vital.

My mom's an enthusiastic member of the Cult of Blindness.

Is it worth losing my eyes to be in?

For a long time, I practice this Blind Superhearing (while keeping my eyes) by listening in on a class that meets downstairs. Pick up a lot. Finally go down and try to impress the professor into letting me join while I still have eyes. I'm confident I can finish the class and sure he'll say yes; I display broad knowledge. All from listening--through the floor!

But the Professor, an obese German with a white beard, says "No! You only have the gist of it. My students have first-hand knowledge and details. Your ability to grasp underlying principles without even being taught is amazing, but it's no substitute for real experience. If you join, you'll have to take the introductory class." The one where they jab your eyes out.

Suddenly I'm less eager to blind myself to join. If they won't credit my own sharp perceptions, how perceptive are they?

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• My mom's cult: my mom has always wanted me to ignore intuition and just try to fit in. It's never worked, but I still have an inner mom nagging me to blind myself to obvious idiocy and just do as the others do.
• Class I want to join: the class of couples, I suspect. Sex, dating, relationship skills?
• Learn by eavesdropping: I sense so much about people they're often upset I've guessed at secrets. Dream suggests my mom is part-right; others won't accept my intuitive knowledge.
• ACTION: Rethink whether I really want to join this class. Would I trade my eyes for acceptance? For sex? Yet this (dating?) class is predicated on blindness!

At the Stanford Library, the Portal Pundit, this obese guy guarding the security portal who pontificates all day while the rest of us tune him out, faces a conundrum: a blind woman with a guide dog. The library rules forbid dogs without exception. An exception for blindness never came up before. In the end, he lets her in.

GRAND CONCLUSION THAT EVENING

My mom's nagging, my concerns about dating, all that's true enough; but when I dream of blind people and an obese gatekeeper, then run into them next morning, all I can think is: "So much for symbolism."

2017 NOTE

Decades later, I also note that this isn't just an apparent predictive dream, it comes close to being a self-flagging dream (a dream that prompts you to go lucid by mentioning lucidity, a psychic dream that brings up ESP, a literal warning dream in which someone TELLS you it's literal not symbolic...) The next morning, I thought the Cult of Blindness meant the Cult of Normality or Cult of the Five Senses, and that my eavesdropping through the floor meant a sixth sense. In short I was already interpreting the dream as about the costs and benefits of ESP/intuition... only to find, a few hours later, that the dream was itself predictive.

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