TALES FROM THE CARIBBEAN

After a brief moment of anger over his mother’s malady — the chronic alcoholism into which she had fallen — a wave of a certain kind of relief passed over Dave the Shark Boy. As long as she was in Big Jessie’s powerboat, Jessie would keep her from harm. Dave worried about his mother when she drank too much alcohol, but the bond between them always remained strong.

Now that Dave knew she was O.K., he quietly slipped over the Dream Weaver’s rail, started the dinghy, and headed for Rosa’s Star to tell Mona and Catrina Analusleiscu about the mysterious blue ball of light he had seen hovering above their boat. The two sisters welcomed Dave aboard as he excitedly told them about the mysterious light; the sisters were of course concerned, but they were as mystified by it as Dave was. They wondered out loud what it could have been. It had disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared, which added it to a host of other Caribbean mysteries for which modern science could provide no plausible explanation.

That conversation, however, was soon shrugged off after the sisters inquired about the monk’s whereabouts.

“I left him on Lovango and the last I saw him, he was headed towards the chicken ranch pushing a big yellowfin tuna in a cart. He had high hopes that their three fingered Japanese cook would feed him, and that he could at last meet the Amsterdam girls, before he started the task of cleaning up Santana’s old cabin and corralling the goats.”

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“The hungry monk never did adjust to the roll of the ocean, you know. He’s a landlubber at heart. His expertise is in making goat cheese, not sailing. Big Jessie fronted him enough cash for rent to get him started, and as soon as he can begin distilling the long-fermented molasses left behind by Santana, he’ll be able to sell the rum, make a payment to Jessie, and still have enough money left over to pay the governor’s alcohol tax.”

The two sisters looked at each other with great satisfaction. The events which their magic arts had foretold about the monk, were already beginning to come to pass.  Dave said good-bye to them, but when he saw that his mother’s cabin light was still on, instead of returning to her boat, he motored over to Ryan’s sloop. Dave wanted to wait until she was sound asleep before he returned her dinghy.

As soon as he got alongside, he called out, “Ahoy Ryan, mind if I come aboard?”

Ryan came up from below deck and sat in the cockpit while he and Dave talked. Dave told Ryan about the blue ball of light he saw over Rosa’s Star and Ryan confirmed that he too had seen it, but it was as much a mystery to him as it was to Dave and the Analusleiscu sisters.

Ryan smiled and said, “I wish my physics teacher could’ve seen that light. Maybe he could provided us with a simple explanation, but even he is frequently forced to admit that modern science knows but little and there’s more we don’t know and cannot explain than what we know or can be explained, especially when it comes to spiritual matters.”

Ryan continued, “Dave, have you ever had any reoccurring dreams, and have you ever heard of Carl Jung?”

“I think so,” said Dave, “Wasn’t Jung a famous Swiss psychiatrist who was an associate of Austria’s Sigmund Freud?”

“Sort of,” replied Ryan, “both of them were pioneers in the field of psychiatry and Freud had expectations that Jung would become his understudy and promote his theories, but Freud sometimes injected himself with cocaine and because most of his theories were sex-based it finally caused a parting of their ways. Carl Jung’s belief system was centered on the spiritual realm and archetypes, but both men agreed that our dreams have significance and they both dabbled at interpreting them.”

”Once when the two great men were traveling together on their way to America as guest speakers at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, they agreed that each would interpret one dream that the other man had had. Freud being the older man, considered himself a father figure to Jung, and insisted that Carl go first.

“Not wishing to reveal any of his personal peccadillos Jung made up a dream about descending a set of stone steps down into a musty, cobwebbed chamber with a dirt floor where he saw a skeleton. When Freud inquired to whom the skeleton belonged, Jung lied and said, ‘My mother-in-law.’”

“Freud exclaimed, ‘Perhaps, Herr Jung, you have indulged in wishful thinking?’”

“To which Jung replied, ‘Perhaps, Herr Freud, but at the least, it wasn’t a dream about the Oedipus complex.’”

Dave interrupted at that point, “Ryan, have you ever had a reoccurring dream?”

“Well, yes, I have,” Ryan answered. To be continued…