Posted by giveawayboy on June 21, 2002 at 21:09:02:
Usually I feel like one of those guys who gets picked by Harvard or some heavyweight school to be their guinea pig for dream research or something, or perhaps like someone who has been trained in psychic spy procedures....whatever--i'm in over my head. It's more like I'm some guy who happens to have laid on his bed after one too many bowls of chicken noodle soup, and suddenly finds mummified and housed in some elaborate jade sarcophagus, and thrown into some bubbling sea of potentiality at the bottom of some ocean which has been so long lost to the awareness that the mermaids and nyads are only now rediscovering it. I feel like I must bounce around in this heavy case, slipping in and out of so many consciences until in lucky moments I can catch a glimpse of some sort of messed -up roadmap and realize that this odd, limbless journey actually does have a purpose. I feel like it's my lot in life to go deep into that otherworld, to push past the everyday greys, the everyday ambiguities to a whole countryside where those greys crystallize into even more ambiguous yet deeply clear evening-after-a-storm yellows, then perhaps into vivid magentas and other hues. I feel like I need to go far past the scary greys that threaten our colorscemes, into those yellows and magentas, to see brief appearances of the little red-winged-blackbirds of that other world, like Magellan rounding off the bottom end of South America or something. I feel like I have to be dead, mummified by the dreamworld, to catch a glimpse of the secret connections between the dream world and the waking world....they wait until I'm dead, they do, and then they teach me in bubbling streams and quiet de-furnished rooms, just how to be properly awake. I think that this applies to wanyone who is willing to be trained in the awareness skills that we need for navigating the world that is instantaneously present behing our closed eyelids.
If you have those skills or don't mind being trained by the 'coyote method', then feel free to read on as I lay out the description of the most recent dream, the DREAM OF STEVE GIVING BILL A CHURCH. First I will set the scene and the tone.
I had been travelling in this dream. I had been staying w different friends and now it had come time for me to stay w my friend Topher (a coworker who looks like Kaworu) for a few days. Only Topher knew that there was something I was wrestless about and had told me that as far as he was concerned I could do whatever I wanted, but he knew I needed to go meditate or relax or find peace or something. So, he abandoned me to whatever thing I felt would be the most helpful. Extending an offer for me to return and stay a couple days w him he allowed me to sink further into the greys and beyond them more into the yellows and magentas of a new colour world. Only in his understanding he was letting me go on a roadtrip. Just remember that a road trip, sitting in a room looking around and dreaming all use the same skills. Train yourself to observe, meditate on and recall every little detail and soon your dream journals may be full of life like some Opal Whitely journal or something from Audubon or Lewis & Clark. O.K. so I was on a quest for some kind of peace.
I think I was looking for love. I think I was looking for a friend, or perhaps myself or God, only I didn't know, but in my quest I was sensitive to whatever could help my mind rest and focus. I remember suddenly being in my aunt's house, but wanting to travel, to get away. I began to think of Brooksville, or other local possibilities. At one point I started to think about something that was LIKE the Ringling museum, and somehow Michael Cleary came into the dream. I suddenly knew something about art that he had told me about and was rather excited about, and I kept wondering if I could go there. As a result of thinking about Mike I kept seeing him prancing monkey-like through the dream wearing some kneelength brown or grey shorts and a clingy white short-sleeved Tshirt. In the dream Mike was bubbling happy w happiness and seemed to be at peace. His peace had something to do w art and his friends. Anyway, I navigated through thoughts of this 'secret place' Mike knew about and I finally ended up just traveling northwest in my dream. Usually in a dream I will progress northwest when I'm going to some new, undiscovered place, and usually I find that it is a bright, clear, substantial place, where meanings can fall out in streams. Or, it is a dusky electrical place with a breeze in the treetops and clean-dirty wind in the air which is a summer-time rainy air, but with a hint of the next season in it. This is the womb or the dreamworld. Soon you see how everything is realted. Here is where good thoughts get planted in grow into our waking reality. You see--it is necessary to see these two realities integrated. They are ultimately all pointing at one thing, and that has alot to do with the divine reality of love. So I was travelling northwest and I came to a small wintry world that was mounted like a jewel on a sea of green. It was like going to Brookseville and finding one hill out of the many there which was topped by a bizarre googy-styled sports bar complete w a simulated snow machine. The whole hillside and the facing sides of local neighboring hills are covered in or powdered lightly in machine processed snow, but in the dream the effect is so sucessful that you don't doubt that it actually fell from the skies. At this point in the dream we are way past grey and into the beginning of the crystallization process. Thing at this point get sharpened and clear. The first thing I remember was sitting in the sports bar and we are all seated on these benches, like skating ring benches and we are all surrouding this arena or something and somewhere we are watching this guy who I recognized as a particular coach or a particular sport who in waking reality I actually knew, and still know, but was NOT ALLOWED to identify in the dream. The funny thing was how absolutely clear it was in the dream and how I knew that I knew, but was NOT ALLOWED to know. so then I started talking to all these guys about that coach, and I think my friend Augusto was one of them. we all even mentioned names, and everyone was getting him wrong, and I really knew who he was so it frustrated me since I knew they were not right and yet I couldn't tell them who he was. If it is of any account, he is short, about 5'6" w short brown hair and he is less than mesomorphic wearing short sleeved shirts and dark pants. He really loves to coach, but he seems angry alot, but everyone knows he's a good class-A coach. Anyway, he is yelling and sweating and scrunching up his eyelids when I turn to look outside the glass walls and ceiling of the sports bar to see that across from our isolated hill the rest of the landscape is sunny and grassy and very summerish. I think I even saw orange groves, then I turned back into the sports bar scene and lo and behold it was no longer a sports bar and the people I ws with began to be more clear to me. I could see at least these individuals, Steve, Cari, my friend Augusto and mental images of Mike dancing monkey-like through the crowd in the room, with his knee-length dark shorts and his clingy white short-sleeved T-shirt. And I think I was aware of Sarah too but everyone else was implied by their presences so in effect it was the whole community of everyone any of us had ever known there in that room in that deep moment.
Suddenly, Steve began paying great attention to me, and I noticed that as I would engage in conversattions w other people, Steve was just watching out of the corner of his eye and being very silent. Let me mention something else too. The Sportsbar was now almost the same type of room as the current church building that Parallel Universe meets in. Only the north wall was still a window and you could still see snow blowing about but it was now evening and you have that dark, brooding, Post-Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas phantom hanging about. I was saying something utterly unintelligable about love, or friendship and about feeling utterly disconnected from people in significant ways. I was saying something awfully real about my life right now and about all our lives, but, although I was speaking in English, it was as if I had gone under the depths and was speaking in some Slavonic tongue or perhaps Navajo, or yeah, even Basque. That's it. Anyway, I was saying all these things and there was great sadness in it, but there was great hope in it and I was losing my awareness of everything I was saying as soon as I was saying it. The only thing real to me was the room and wanting to get back to Topher's house and then wanting to go to Mike's museum. It seemed like I could not endure much longer in that deep reality in that sportsbar, now turned-church at the far end of the dream reality. I felt like I was under the ocean and would be crushed. I needed something local and real to grab onto. I needed tangibility. Funny, at a certain point I saw Steve approaching. One thing I forgot to mention was that there was also some sort of church service gonig on in there, and we were all there sort of as visitors, but having our own little conversations together. Overall, we didn't distract them, and they didn't mind us so it was like a symbiotic relationship where we provided them some warm bodies and they provided us w some shelter from the artificial snowbanks. Anyway, here comes Steve and I knew how he was thinking and I knew that he had been listening to me and looking at me out of the corner of his eye the whole time. I also saw something curious in his hands. Here he was with this paper model of a church. It was the classic, here-is-the-church-here-is-the-steeple variety, a total insert-tab-A-in-slot-B contraption. Apparently someone had constructed this out of one of those books where you punch out the sections and fold it and link it together to form a simulated church. On the outside you could see the stained glass windows and bushes w flowers and butterflies flying by, you could see a front door and even a hymn board w numbered selections on it. Then you could see the shingles on the roof and the little steeple, mounted tackily yet lovingly on top. Then Steve came over and gave me the church, without saying much and as he handed it to me, he turned it over to reveal the huge crowd of people inside the church. And as he was about to ask me something I immediately fixated on one guy in there, who had dark skin, black hair and a blue shirt. The thing I liked about him though was that he was carrying a book. Then, Steve asked me..."Which one of these people would you like to be?" I had already picked him out. It was the book guy. Then, if anyone knows about dreams there is this knowing what something, some symbol, does and does not mean. Steve was not actually giving me a church, but he was acknowledging a reality of communion that DOES EXIST. He was basically validating me in the dream and saying that all of my relationships count. What he was saying was not local about a particular church, although it can have those very local applications. What he was saying was universal yet particular to me in that moment. However, what he is saying to all of us is broader. Here is a group of people: it could be a church or a universe. They are gathered together doing something significant. You have an opportunity to be a participant in this group of people. Will you accept this opportunity? If so, which person would you most like to be? I wanted to be the person who had a book. I wanted to be the person who HEARD something and SAID something. I wanted to be that person. But there were so many other people in that little flimsy paper church too. The possibilities were multitudinous. So, I forget the way the dream ended, only recalling us milling around in that church in the northwest part of dreamland, somewhere to dreamland like where Odessa or Holiday is compared to say mid Tampa. We were all walking around and talking about great things and we were all loving our company and everything was terribly important. I wish we could gain that type of focus in our waking realities, but it takes time.
I don't think I ever got back to Topher. Infact, I woke up before that, but it's O.K.
My last observation of dreams is that if experienced w a certain awareness they can be like a series of very pronounced and stunning radiant jewels, embedded on the dark velvet fields of dream electric knowledge. It will be supposed ambiguity punctuated with living liquid light. It is like the Jews or Buddha suddenly waking up from one level of reality into a new awareness of something. It would be like the Wise Men, arriving at Emmanuel after journeying through a desert. This is waht it is like. You have lots of greys to go through until you get into colourfields again and then something crystalizes and when the imagery is the most clear the conversations and thoughts might become unintelligible but then your conversation dissolves into a greater, higher communication and your conscience is heightened and you are brought into an awareness of something greater than everything else in the dream that puts the dream together without necessarily solving it, so that it retains a beautiful sense of mystery. I have begun to see dreams in this way. This is why I despise dictionaries of dream symbols. Ack! My favorite part of a dream is when some higher symbol enters the dream, something out of the deep consciousness, something that suddenly links everything else up. Usually then is when listening to conversations in the dream can be funny. At these points everyone is usually saying something on one level which has a local application and then you realize a universal level of conversation and the borders between those two worlds are erased. it's a crossroads and some of the people in the dream might not know they are there and they all become oracles of god.
later, bill