Trees Falling in the Forest

I often ask people how they know things. I find it curious that how often we cannot identify an actual source of our knowledge. We just seem to know it. The oft unanswered question asks, When a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound? Its humorous corollary queries that if a man speaks in a forest and no woman is there, is he still wrong?

I ask, if a tree falls in your dreams does it still make a sound? I know that sounds in dreams can come from my own thoughts or external stimuli. Alarms, sirens or nearby conversations slowly merge into components of the very dream that I'm having. Our brains have an incredible capacity to take absolutely unrelated items and find some connection and then create a coherent story that combines the two elements.

Before I was married I would set my clock radio to music stations. My interest in music is rather broad so the styles would include rock, classical, pop, jazz; almost anything except I didn't listen to country music. I found that the rhythm and melodies from music led to a more gentle waking than the sound of people talking. I even took great care to avoid the DJ-laden stations or adjust my wake-up time to the moments they would play music rather than banter.

After I got married I learned that my wife preferred to wake up to National Public Radio and the news. It shouldn't require a rocket scientist to deduce that we decided to wake up to NPR. It didn't take long for me to adjust to the sound of someone talking just above my head and I have learned to enjoy the update of important events and the context that quality reporting provides to my world view.

NPR in the morning carries one unfortunate side effect. During the 1990s I used to teach an Old Testament Sunday School class for my church. I began to really love the Old Testament as I found teachings that I could apply to our modern life. I enjoyed finding analogies with what was happening in our day with teachings, warnings and lessons from our Old Testament prophets. I often created these analogies using news stories I heard on that Sunday morning with Bible verses.

As I would share these insights it would dawn on me that some of what I was saying didn't make complete sense. It might have been what I heard on NPR or more likely, I was sharing a fictional composite created from what I had heard on the radio and I transformed it as part of my dream. Obviously, the lesson would have been on my mind and so the leaps didn't seem that far in my sleep. In the light of day not so much. My solution was to add a fact-check disclaimer and to remind them that it is still unclear whether a tree that falls in a dream makes a sound.