During an early morning dream there was a persistent buzzing, and in the dream I said, "Oh, we must do something about that noise!" At that point I woke up to find my alarm clock ringing loudly. Mundane "reality" penetrated the dream and destroyed it. While dreaming, I had been unable to recognize or respond effectively to the real situation.
Is something available to us today to pierce the would-be, smothering influences of mortality and materiality? Several current thinkers—men like Jacques Ellul, Herbert Marcuse, Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan. and others—have seen the need for ways in which we can rise above and beyond being totally absorbed by everyday experience. We need a vantage point from which we can view life and put it in proper perspective. What is the "alarm clock" that will sound through the dream of material existence and awake us to spiritual reality? Because of the increasing complexity of society and its tendency to gobble up individuality and privacy, the need for transcendence—for rising above the limits of material existence —is even more urgent now than it was when a nineteenth-century poet wrote:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
William Wordsworth, "The Word";
