I'm in a big empty museum room with a strange stained-glass-video installation piece--a tall slender golden luminous waterfall of glass in one corner. Talk with the artist, who's tall, slender and golden herself, in the glow of her stained-glass window.

She writes a dream-blog or -website. A Hindu/Buddhist slant, with a meditative stance on dreams more concerned with slow soul-growth than my own shamanic approach--I assume dreams prompt me to action. Still, we have a lot in common.

Curious, she asks "How do you explain dreamwork to novices and skeptics?"

I sigh. "It's hard. A pseudoscientific type seems to be spreading; they think dreams are chaos the waking mind imposes meaning on."

"Like, they think a dream's a mathematical chaos? Messy details, but shaped by strange attractors? Then the job of the conscious would be to notice the hidden shape, the attractors underneath. Huh! Like the unconscious is all artist-woolly-right brain, the conscious all logical left-brain..."

"No, no, I wish! It's way simpler... and way worse. This bunch think dreams are CHAOS. Brain-static, noise, garbage. You can't even challenge that--the mere fact I explore dreams at all tells them I'm naïve or superstitious. They just tune me out. Closed minds!"

I'm tentative, just working this out as I say. But... it's true. Sad but true. I've seen so many individual cases of it, but only now see it as a meme. A meme of meaninglessness.

It's why perfectly solid dreamwork gets dismissed--by a certain type of guy.

Trust me, it's always a guy.

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