Ps. 55.6-8 (the dream of despair)

So I say
“Oh that I / had wings / like a dove!
I could / fly away / and be at rest.
Indeed / I could flee / faraway
and live / in the wilderness;
I could hurry / to a shelter / for myself
from the wind / of a furious storm.” 

From the nightmare the psalmist turns to a dream, and from the reality of an invading dread, he turns to the imaginative flight from his distress. These are intimately related: the force of the dread gives birth to this almost achingly beautiful vision of winged freedom. As intensely real is his current situation is the illusion of freedom he now indulges in. This is the dream of despair. And it is terrible. The contrast is marked. The lines can read: “horror overwhelms me…Oh that I had wings of a dove!”. From the sense of being crushed beneath the weight of the evil “moved onto him” (vs. 3), the psalmist envisions himself becoming as small and agile as a dove. He simply soars out from the midst of chaos. The prefacing of the dream by “If” and the repetition of “I could…” drives home the impossibility of his dream: “If I had wings…I could fly away…I could flee faraway…I could hurry to shelter”. What he is striving for also reveals the ache: “rest…wilderness…shelter”. These goals stand in total contrast to what has ‘invaded’, ‘overwhelmed’ and ‘fallen upon him’: “terror of death…fear and trembling…horror” (vs. 4-5). One detail that should be pointed out is his desire to “live in the wilderness”. This geographical designation is important for what emerges in the next section. There, we will see that the psalmist vision of the city he is now living in is one of complete infestation by wickedness. Indeed, it ‘patrols the walls’. For him to seek solace in the ‘wilderness’ then stands in marked contrast to where he now lives. The wilderness is that borderland between complete desert and the city. Along the spectrum of human habitation, it stands in the middle but is in almost opposition to city, or urban, life. It is the place where shepherds tend their flock. This is not, however, a ‘romantic bucolic’ dream. Again, it is the fact that the city is infested that he seeks this escape. One final note: just as impossible is this dream will be the reality that comes crashing down in the next verse. This dream, in other words, is a hiatus, a brief interruption. Once the dream fades, its counterpart of total violence and destruction begins.