| Last night I spoke to someone about dreaming, and, what becomes possible through knowing this terrain. The person asked me for a source about what I described. I didn’t answer. The source is my own experience, my explorations of consciousness and of the language of spirit. I am the book I read; my dreams, and what they teach me, are my source. |  |
I love best my deep-in-the-night dreams, the ones with metaphors and symbols so dense they might as well be hieroglyphs. I dutifully write the content, then go for a walk or drive through the hills. Motion seems important.
I tell the dream I am going to speak it aloud, and I do, slowly, and in detail. As I do, the dream unspins, the dense metaphors unfold, and I understand that the source of my dreaming is far more intelligent than my ordinary self. If I pay attention, as I walk, or I drive, I enter a territory that is ‘here’ in this dimension, but not quite. A ‘here’ that isn’t quite here, a truer place or a truer me than I usually know. In this half-step away is the dreaming way of living.
No, I don’t believe creation is an illusion. But I do believe reality can shift, and we can learn to choose the one we inhabit. This one I enter when I am awake yet also in the dreaming world, the one in which I understand the language of spirit, understand the metaphor I inhabit, is far richer. I am lifted, not confined to the body, or even the galaxy. The ordinary world becomes sensual and delicious, a source of ecstasy. Ordinary, but not.
The road is no different. The elk still graze. The crows shake off the rain from their brilliant feathers. But the ‘here’ in which I and they are, is a dream world, one in which faith requires no effort, in which anything might happen, the road might take me to Zanzibar or Mongolia, or the delightful place that is my usual destination. A cow elk lifts her head from the grass to look at me. The eagle follows the car. The metaphor has found me.
Books about metaphor are usually the territory of old, tired words, or at least this is so until we understand what is said. The mind tries so hard to know, the same mind that is blown apart when finally it does. Something within or behind the metaphor is always reaching, something that does not want anything less for me.
The elk in the field must know about this, the eagle above the car, the trees bending over the road, even the pink fog between hills; they must know when I’ve arrived in the ‘here’ they inhabit.
The destination was always ‘here,’ so near, and sometimes so difficult to find. But I know the terrain now. I have the map. And, if I do forget, the elk will remember for me, and the eagle above the car.
I tell the dream I am going to speak it aloud, and I do, slowly, and in detail. As I do, the dream unspins, the dense metaphors unfold, and I understand that the source of my dreaming is far more intelligent than my ordinary self. If I pay attention, as I walk, or I drive, I enter a territory that is ‘here’ in this dimension, but not quite. A ‘here’ that isn’t quite here, a truer place or a truer me than I usually know. In this half-step away is the dreaming way of living.
No, I don’t believe creation is an illusion. But I do believe reality can shift, and we can learn to choose the one we inhabit. This one I enter when I am awake yet also in the dreaming world, the one in which I understand the language of spirit, understand the metaphor I inhabit, is far richer. I am lifted, not confined to the body, or even the galaxy. The ordinary world becomes sensual and delicious, a source of ecstasy. Ordinary, but not.
The road is no different. The elk still graze. The crows shake off the rain from their brilliant feathers. But the ‘here’ in which I and they are, is a dream world, one in which faith requires no effort, in which anything might happen, the road might take me to Zanzibar or Mongolia, or the delightful place that is my usual destination. A cow elk lifts her head from the grass to look at me. The eagle follows the car. The metaphor has found me.
Books about metaphor are usually the territory of old, tired words, or at least this is so until we understand what is said. The mind tries so hard to know, the same mind that is blown apart when finally it does. Something within or behind the metaphor is always reaching, something that does not want anything less for me.
The elk in the field must know about this, the eagle above the car, the trees bending over the road, even the pink fog between hills; they must know when I’ve arrived in the ‘here’ they inhabit.
The destination was always ‘here,’ so near, and sometimes so difficult to find. But I know the terrain now. I have the map. And, if I do forget, the elk will remember for me, and the eagle above the car.
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