Dreamword from the Dream World

It was not the voice of a Marine drill sergeant, or a wise old man like Gandalf, but softer, more mysterious, like some poet dropping his voice at the end of a deep poem to draw the audience in. The line was: “Modemus is the key to the future.”

AI tells me: “I’m sorry but I couldn’t find any information about “modemus”. Could you please provide more context or clarify your question?”  Further dialogue with AI got no further than “there is no such word.”

I love it that AI does not yet have access to dreams (but they are close). My dream is not at all bothered by the fact that there is no word “modemus” in the known languages. This tells me the dream knows more languages than we know, or perhaps the dream likes to make up words.

The word has a Spanish flavor to me, so I asked Paco his take on it. Paco writes:

It only makes sense to me as a conjugation of the verb moderar, which means “to moderate,” or modelar, “to model.” But in either case, modemus would be incorrect. I don’t know any verb moder, thus no modemus. You could say, moderamos (present indicative), or que moderemos (present subjunctive) “let us moderate.” But if it came from a dream, it might yield to more whimsy. My fantasy says, how about trying: “Let us moderate.”

So, this throws us back to another word: moderate. Let’s unpack this word and see what lies beneath its shell. It comes from the IE root -med, meaning “to take appropriate measures.” This developed into the senses of “to abate excessiveness,” “to regulate,” “mitigate,” “restrain,” “temper,” “set a measure,” “to keep (something) within measure.”

Clearly, we are in times of unrestrained intemperateness, excessiveness, and lacking in keeping things within measure. So, we lack moderation as things become more extreme. In Paco’s fantasy, “let us moderate” is the key to the future. Surely, this would be good medicine for curing our preset ills.

But can we, as divided as we are, willingly take such medicine? The medicine may be available, but will it be taken? So far, there are precious few signs that this can or will happen.

As I was working on the dream, I was struck by a strong intuition that the dreamword was a name: Modemus! This did not get me any closer to the meaning of the name, but the sense of personalization had a strong impact on me. My immediate association was to the figure that Jung referred to as “the coming guest.” My sense is that only something of this dimension would have the “power” to break through the miasma we are sinking into, something from realms that are beyond our conscious realities. So, I wrote out: The Coming Guest, Modemus, is the key to the future. This sense of personalization implies that the coming guest is coming closer, closer in time, closer in space, closer in some sense.