The school yard and the hollow man

A dream about resisting the “school of the world”.

Photo by Patrick Case at Pexels

I had a dream about a school for boys. It was a four-story, red brick building comprised four wings, arranged to create a rectangular structure enclosing an open-air courtyard at the center. From the interior windows of the upper-floor classrooms and staff rooms, one could look out the windows and see the rectangular central courtyard down below –an sunlit space for football and other games.

A group of eight-year-olds, around 15 or 20 of them had been locked inside one of the classrooms on the fourth floor. I didn’t know who had locked them in, but they’d been in there for a long time and were feeling anxious and claustrophobic. The windows were all shut so there was no fresh air. The boys had no food or water and were becoming afraid. No one appeared to be aware of their confinement in the classroom. They’d been forgotten.

In the courtyard, I saw six older boys who looked like they were about 16 years old. They were carefree and playing football in the sunshine. One of the young boys inside the locked classroom on the top floor started to sing. The other boys in the classroom joined him. Soon their singing could be heard in the courtyard below. One of the older boys who was playing in the courtyard heard the singing, looked up and saw the faces of the eight-year-olds pressed against the window of the classroom, pleading for help. The six older boys ran up to rescue the younger boys, opening the door and setting them free.

In the second part of the dream, I see a group of men and women in suits and formal dresses — the school principal, administrators and teachers. In their company was a tall boy, maybe 20 or 21 years old — the school’s model student. The administrators were introducing this tall boy to a couple — parents visiting the school and thinking of enrolling their young son as a pupil here. The formally dressed adults lauded the tall boy, telling the couple how their school creates upstanding, well-mannered young men, like this tall boy who was the epitome of the type of good citizen the school nurtures.

But I looked closely at the tall boy and sensed something was wrong. His eyes looked dull and glassy. His greasy hair, pale skin with an odd greenish-blue tint, and long face with sharp, wolf-like features were unsettling. His smile was sad, sullen. There was no warmth or joy in him. The tall boy’s soul was broken. He was sick, he was a hollow man.

This is how I interpreted the dream.

There are three groups of people in the world. Like the eight-year-olds in the locked classroom, there are those who are trapped within the structures, institutions, families and belief systems of the world which were designed to kill us, deprive us of our freedom, kindness, and the sunlight of the Spirit. They are locked into circumstances or ways of being or thinking that make them prisoners. The second group, like the 16-year-olds in the courtyard, are those who live free and play in the sun. There are fewer of them than there are those locked in the classroom…for now.

If we belong to the first group, our task is to sing. To sing as loud as we can despite our fear, our wounds, our oppression, in the hope that someone will hear us and come to our aid. If we belong to the second group, our task is to always keep our ears and hearts open and attentive to the singing, to go in the direction of the songs, so we can open the door and set our brothers (and sisters) free.

If we neither sing nor open doors for those who sing, we end up in the third group, we become like the tall boy. We become puppets of the school of the world, molded into “model citizens” who exist only to obey and promote the agenda of the administrators. We follow all their rules, until we know neither how to sing nor play. We become hollow men and women, our spirits becoming more and more grey and sullied each day as we smile our dead smiles for those in positions of power.