The lecture hall's long and deep and narrow and steep; in fact, it's a gigantic, surreal Winsor McCay staircase, receding up into a shadowed infinity. And the endless stair is jammed--people fill the steps and hang off the banisters.

And they're all waiting for me. It's my turn--time to tell my chapter in the long story.

My old math teacher, Mr. Mahaffy, introduces me. I don't want to speak. Stand there frozen... until I realize it's not just shyness, but reluctance to recite my prepared speech. It feels wrong now!

So I throw my notes on the stage, and whisper: "say what you want, dream!" And begin speaking, slowly, steadily... and coherently. As if I'd planned this all along.

Whoever "I" am...

"My specialty's the psychological results of abuse. There's no point in assigning blame to yourself OR OTHERS. Game theory is useful, when looking at love and hate. Love's not a zero-sum game: everyone wins. Hate's not a zero-sum game either: everyone loses. But... blame IS a zero-sum game. You're apportioning limited resources: innocence, responsibility--good and evil. You're slicing the pie of blame--who's responsible for how much? Blame isn't really a feeling. It's a MATHEMATICAL judgment.

"Abuse itself... abuse is not a zero-sum game either. It may seem to the abuser like it has winners--you hit your kid to get back the power you lost when your parents abused YOU... but in the long term, it's like nuclear war, where ALL sides lose! In fact, so much loss is actively created, you can never neatly apportion the resulting guilt and victimhood, because the percentages add up to more than 100. It's a mistake to even try. Better to see it like a flood or a fire--just a disaster to rebuild after. Though of course you may not want to rebuild on a flood plain... and some abusers are flood plains just waiting to flood again. But that's just self-protection--not blame."

But the infinite stair and the rapt crowd fade, and I wake in bed... and feel my clear-headed analysis slipping away, dwindling into a single line:

"Love is good, hate is bad, blame is, uh... pie?"

NOTES

• The lecture = my friend Xanthe called today. She's been looking at her childhood. "I made a bad choice--I sought approval. Didn't have to." She's working to forgive others now. I'm not at that point and wonder if I'll ever be. The dream seems to be saying that forgiveness is just the flip side of blame--it's part of the zero-sum world, because you have to know the score before you can forgive it! And my past's unclear--inherently unclear. The dream suggests I give up trying to pry loose the truth. My abusers were brainwashed, and I was brainwashed into provoking them. What matters now is SEEKING and SPOTTING win/win situations. Like someone who loves me, who I can love back!
• Math teacher, game theory? = mathematical game theory, with its focus on outcomes and whether players as a group gain or lose or break even, is a better model for me than psychology or twelve-step programs, with their emphasis on acknowledging feelings and reaching forgiveness. I may never know, let alone forgive. And so what? Forgiveness, like blame, is just a pointless... pie.

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