The theme of death, resurrection, and wholeness suggests itself to me in the dream that follows:

After teaching my classes at the college, I am on my way home. I’d been told I might experience some delays, but it is smooth sailing as I drive eastward toward the Verrazano Bridge. Then, nearing the bridge, I encounter an obstacle. There is a huge excavation site with even layers of fine brown soil filling the bottom. This massive dirt hole [I originally wrote “whole”!] is shaped in a neat square, and is obviously under preparation for the construction of something new. It is quite impossible for me to bypass the excavation to get to the bridge. [In recording the dream, I realize what the bed of brown earth reminds me of: a grave. It is what a gravesite looks like before a body is lowered into it.]

At this point in the dream, there is a vague sense of being accompanied by my wife, Marlene. Unable to depart Staten Island, we need a place to stay, so we go up a mountainside to a motel. Once there, I run into a colleague of mine, an older philosopher whose work is widely known. Speaking casually and in his typically self-possessed fashion, he comments that he quite likes this motel, and that it is a lot better than it used to be.

At a certain point, the philosopher and I hug each other. When this happens, it seems as if our bodies merge. In the prolonged embrace, it is as if we are fused into a single being, so that the philosopher’s body becomes an integral part of my own. What a feeling of ecstasy this brings! He is present. His strength is there for me. And I sense with certainty that it always will be.

*      *      *

Upon awakening from the dream and for much of the morning, I feel the afterglow of that embrace. It fills me with joy every time I think of it. In retrospect, it seems clear that the obstacle I encounter earlier in the dream is my death: a bed of brown earth has been prepared — a burial ground. But this is also a construction site, and the ground has been cleared for the creation of “something new.” Is this brought to fruition on top of that mountain? Could this be a dream of death and rebirth providing a glimpse of the unus mundus?