Blood in the wine

Most dreams evaporate from memory within minutes of waking, but this one has persisted for several days and keeps coming back to mind as something potentially significant. It's a dream, and as such obviously can't be expected to make sense in a linear, point-by-point manner, but I still feel as if it were trying to communicate something.

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A couple had arrived at house and were taking groceries out of their car. I think I was their guest or something, and I felt that courtesy demanded that I help them by carrying the heaviest items. I was too slow, though, and they were already carrying everything themselves. It particularly bothered me that the woman was carrying a big cardboard box which was full of various things and looked quite heavy. I tried to take it from her, but she wouldn't let go of it. Feeling that I had to do something to help, I took a few of the heaviest items out of her box and carried them -- three bottles of wine, one red and two white.

Since I was only carrying a few things, I got into the kitchen first and was about to set the bottles down on the table when I noticed that one of the white-wine bottles had started leaking profusely and was about to fall apart. Although it felt exactly like glass in my hand, it wasn't breaking the way glass breaks. It was more like a piece of ice that looks solid but has little seams of melt inside which have compromised its structural integrity. I felt that some parts of the bottle had sort of slipped down vertically -- I thought of that collapsing ice sheet footage they always show in global warming documentaries -- and that, while the bottle was still in one piece for now, it would shortly break apart entirely.

I knew that wine wasn't cheap, so my concern became how to save as much of it as possible before the bottle shattered. There were a few items of glassware on the table, including a wide-mouthed hobnail glass carafe. It looked slightly dusty but otherwise clean, and I decided to hold the collapsing wine bottle over it and let it catch as much of the wine as possible. I guess I salvaged about half of it.

Now that the wine was in a clear container, I could see that it wasn't white wine at all but rosé -- and then I saw why. There was a long, curving laceration along the periphery of my right palm, from the base of the thumb almost to the base of the pinky, and it had been dripping blood into the carafe. (I hadn't noticed before because there was no pain; there generally isn't in dreams.) I found that a large, very thin piece of broken glass had slipped under the skin of my palm. (I assumed it was from the wine bottle, although looking back on the dream now I can see it was much too clear and too thin for that.) I slowly drew it out, grimacing and inhaling through my teeth as I did so even though there was no pain. I was still bleeding a bit, though not nearly as much as you'd expect from a cut like that, and I dabbed at the wound with a tissue.

Then I looked again at the half-full carafe and realized that all my efforts had been wasted. "They can't drink this, I said. "This is my blood."

Immediately I checked myself: "'This is my blood'? That's blasphemous!"

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Besides the fairly explicit reference to the Last Supper at the end of the dream, I think there's also a clear allusion to Jesus' saying about wine and bottles. (He was actually talking about wineskins, not glassware, but the King James uses "bottles.")

Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved (Matt. 9:17).

In the dream, this is reversed: It is the new bottle (or newly bought, anyway) that breaks, and some of the wine is saved by transferring it to an "old bottle" (the dusty carafe).

My sense immediately upon waking was that the breaking bottle represented the ongoing collapse of our civilization -- particularly of what used to be called "Christendom." That civilization has been the carrier of much that is of great value (the expensive wine), of which I wanted to save as much as possible before the collapse was complete.

The new wine bottle thus represents the modern System, and the dusty carafe must represent something older that I was attempting to transfer the wine of Christianity into. While I don't consider myself at all "reactionary," and tend to think of the Romantic Christian project as something fundamentally new, it is in a certain sense a return to the old -- to animism, for example, and other pre-Hellenistic ways of thinking (Hellenistic philosophy being the glass bottle in which Christianity was immured almost from the beginning). At any rate, the carafe was obviously just a stopgap measure, not a long-term receptacle for the precious wine.

The change from the tinted glass of a wine bottle to the clear glass of the carafe could also represent an increase in clarity, a little less "seeing through a glass, darkly" than before. (Yes, glass in that verse means "mirror," but my dreaming subconscious reads the KJV more naïvely.)

There are many possible interpretations of the blood. At the most basic level, it represents the (minor but certainly not negligible) element of risk, suffering, and self-sacrifice inherent in the project.

It also represents the addition of the personal, the embrace of a more participatory role in faith and in Creation. Instead of passively imbibing something that I figure ought to be good because it was bottled up a long time ago in "a good year," I add my own life's blood to the mix. Not intentionally, I might add; it just happens in the process of trying to salvage the vintage wine.

As the end of the dream hints, there is certainly an element of presumptuousness in taking a DIY approach to Christianity, as if one were arrogating to oneself the role of the religious leader -- almost as if one were trying to usurp the role of Christ himself. ("How can I say, 'This is my blood'? That's blasphemous!")

"Priestcrafts are that men preach and set themselves up for a light unto the world" (2 Nephi 26:29), but in the dream I say (changing the emphasis a bit), "They can't drink this; this is my blood." The blood-wine concoction is suitable only for myself. As for the couple, well, they still have a bottle apiece.