Tarot: The Tower

The memory of a fragment of a dream: I drew The Tower and immediately felt a surge of panic. Someone next to me—I remember them as an indistinct shadow figure—tried to calm me down. They explained the meaning of the card: It is like Death, except that whereas Death signifies a change in the self, generated by the self, The Tower is a symbol of external change of a more drastic or unpredictable character. But chaos is a void, and it was in the void that life gave birth to itself. There was more to the explanation than that, but I forgot it after waking up, and would rediscover the meaning only later.

I was left with the sense that this explanation was not entirely honest. They were trying to soothe me, and even if what they were saying was truthful, they were leaving out the more difficult aspects of the whole.

When I woke up, I went and drew a single card. It was not The Tower. This surprised me; the dream had been so strong that I had really expected it to play out again. But it occured to me that “time” in dreams is more general than time in wakefulness. There is a kind of thematic coherence to dreams—the same coherence that in wakefulness manifests almost exclusively in the form of time,1 but which in dreams can be many things. I understood that soon enough, the two different streams of “time” would meet, and then my dream really would repeat itself, even while I was awake.

  1. Though it can also manifest as synchronicities, déjà vu, and various other phenomena. Indeed, these phenomena probably occur much more frequently than we notice, and it may be possible to train oneself to see such hidden relationships. But for the most part, events that happen while we are awake seem to mostly follow upon each other insofar as they are adjacent in time, whereas in dreams, adjacency in time is only one structuring principle among many. (“Time”, in the sense meant here, is more or less synonymous with “causality”, but time is the more proximate phenomenological observation, whereas causality is a more abstract construct.) ↩