Only a Dream Away

A troubling character

A slew of dreams last night:

ACT I

I experience a series of snippets of time spent with my friend K. It's as though I'm running fast forward through months of times spent together, all fairly mundane -- sitting next to each other, talking, laughing, smiling, hugging -- but all pleasant. In all of these instances I feel my love and affection for him.

ACT II

K has flown in for a visit and I go to meet him. Only, it isn't him. This man *says* that he is K, and acts as though everything is normal. But he's sharp and rude and calculating. Despite the fact that a) he doesn't look like the K I know at all, and b) he doesn't act like the K I know at all -- I participate in the illusion and just go with it, thinking, somehow, that he is the same person, that I have forgotten what K is really like because he lives so far away. This man looks like your typical obnoxious slick '90s businessman, with the slick haircut, suit and tie and briefcase and impatient look.

Somehow I find myself having sex with this "stranger" and going though the motions, doing the dance, acting like I'm into it. It feels like he's using me. I let it happen, under the notion that this is K, and it is fine, and it is a person I know and trust. But I know deep down that something is not right.

At the end of his stay, I go with this man to the airport to see him off. We are waiting for his plane. I am having a conversation with him and he is being disrespectful, rude, offensive actually. He hardly looks up from his phone to talk to me except to give me a dirty look with some sarcastic comment.

Finally, I have had enough, and I say, "OK, what's going on here? You're not really K, are you?" 

And he says, "What are you talking about? Of course I am!" 

"I know you're not him. Tell me who you are."

"I don't know what you're talking about. Look at me! Why would you think I'm not him?"

"You don't look like him and you don't remember any of the other times we have spent together. I knew it all the time and I can't believe I had sex with you." I begin to walk away.

He rushes after me and says, "OK, OK. I'm not him. Look." He pulls out his wallet, and from his wallet a business card with K's picture on it. The card has some kind of a nature/rainbow theme -- not at all the sort of business card K would have in real life. The card shows K under a different name with an executive position. "That was his old job," the impostor says, stuffing the card and wallet back into his pocket. "Friends do this for me all the time," he continues. "I sent K out here to check you out and see what kind of a girl you are and get you ready for me."

This segment of the dream closes with me feeling ambivalence and betrayal about K, whom I loved and thought I knew, but who is apparently an agent for some lascivious jerk. Also troubling is that I didn't even know K's real name (as shown on his business card).

ACT III

I am in the airport again. I am telling some friends (not sure who these are) about the incident but somehow things have gotten better because the real K is returning. I lie on the floor in the middle of one of the main arteries of the airport and start rolling around and stretching. Out of the corner of my eye I see K -- the real one -- also on the floor, "swimming" toward me. He is wearing a shirt with tiny blue and green triangles on a bright white field.

We reach each other and I look into his smiling face -- yes, it is unmistakably him -- and I feel a great comfort and affection for him. We hug and cuddle. I tell him all about the other man, and I confess to him that I don't know why I still love him so much, considering the fact that he would do such a thing to me, be part of such a deception. He provides no explanation. The dream returns to a scene that could have been part of Act I, where we are sitting in a beautiful outdoor setting, the sun is soft, the air is warm, and we are enjoying each other's company.

(I have to admit, this dream is very disturbing. There is a double illusion going on here and I am knowingly participating in my own betrayal. In the end the most honest man is the jerk. This one is going to take a lot of processing.)

OTHER SNIPPETS:

I am a kid again (I think) and it is night time. I am on a steamboat on a river in deep woods. We are gliding toward what appears to be a giant door somehow spanning the entire width of the river. There are three boats, and I am on one. I can see the reflection of the lights on the top of the boats dimly reflected in the door's wooden surface as we near.

Next, I find myself off the boat and sitting on a bank watching some kind of entertainment by torchlight. It's very strange to have this voyage and gathering in the pitch dark night.

Then I find myself running deep into the forest with two other friends. Under a yew I find my 3rd-grade best friend Regina, who is weepily telling us about a dream she had (about her mother?) and how blessed she is to have such a dream. She is lying on her back under the low branches of this yew, and I can only see her from the shoulders up. The rest of her is in the dark of the deep forest. I have a sense that we will leave her there.

Unrelated to the above: I am in a garden tending a low growing plant with blue buds. An older woman who appears to be the owner of the garden/teacher is standing above me, talking to others. I ask her if I should snip the buds off. She says yes, and demonstrates by pinching them off with her hands, explaining that that is how she keeps the plant going all through the season.

R O S E

In my dream, I am sleeping. I awaken, opening my left eye only, to find myself sitting in the empty classroom at my school with my  head on my arms. 

I go back to sleep.

I wake up again, opening both eyes this time, and I see that just out of the field of vision of my left eye is Althea, writing on the board. I am surprised to see her there. She has written on the board:

          R

E                 O

          S

And she is arranging the letters with a line through them so that the line ends up in the center. It reminded me of the Tarot/Rota on the Wheel of Fortune card -- you can read it in any direction, except I sense there was a fifth letter in the center. In my dream I understood the word to be "ROSE" but seeing it in waking life now I see "EROS"!

Bid Ben Bid Bont

Finished Simon Buxton's "The Shamanic Way of the Bee" last night. I cried myself to sleep. Dreamed all night restlessly and intermittently about the Bee Master collecting honey from the blessed hives. Exhausted and weepy today.

Edited to add: One of the things that kept awakening me was a piercing, stabbing, fixed pain on the inner aspect of my right thigh. This pain is not new to me (been happening for a year maybe) but it is very occasional -- months between occurrences-- and always at night. When it woke me last night I wondered if it is what a bee sting feels like. The pain always comes and goes within an hour or so and never leaves soreness -- but it is pretty excruciating when it is happening.

Seeking out the Sting

Another night of non-stop dreams last night, but only a few remain:

ACT I

I am in an upstairs room, maybe a cozy finished attic with pitched ceilings, with my mentor Althea. I say to her, "It's so nice for us to have time like this. We never do anything, just the two of us." She agrees, and I take off my top and lie face down on a blanket. She begins to give me a therapeutic massage. After a little while someone comes in (another mystery schooler -- Linda perhaps) and Althea sends me away to a private room with something in my hands. I can't remember what I was holding, but I am to go into a smaller, curtained room while she deals with the other person.

ACT II

Althea, I, and a handful of herb students are at a book signing. There is something to do with horticulture and herbs at this event but the author is -- get this -- the Queen of England! None of us is dressed appropriately for her arrival, which is announced and we are all to move to the sides of the wide carpet she is to walk as she approaches a table at the front of the room. We are all dressed as though we are going to do bodywork or are on an outing doing herb harvesting in the woods.

Queen Elizabeth II processes down, wearing one of her famous matching suits and hats and handbags. She takes her seat at the table and looks frankly rather annoyed. The lining up and signing begins, lots of hullabaloo, and I stay off to the side and just watch her to see how she behaves. Two teenaged girls come up and make small talk with her; she leans forward with a sparkle in her eye and says something that makes them laugh. I respect her grace and cleverness, and the way she interacts.

At the end of the signing, my classmate Claudia has hauled a large bag of elderberry powder onto the table. It's about the size of a bag of potting soil. It is open and I can see the purple powder inside. Althea says something about wanting a drink, and I get her one, but her drink comes as a strange viscous periwinkle substance... it has the consistency of face cream. And the only way I can serve it to her is to  use the scoop from the elderberry powder bag. I ask her if it's OK if there's elderberry powder in her 'drink,' and she says it's fine.

ACT III

This is the dream that I remember the most vividly emotionally but I don't have many more details than that. Basically, throughout different scenarios, private, not private, indoor, outdoor, clothed, unclothed, I am waiting for a honeybee to come and sting me. In this segment of the dreamtime I am quite literally obsessed with the idea and am waiting for a bee that never comes. I understand it to be an initiation of sorts, and while I want it to happen, I'm also scared about how much it will hurt and what my reaction will be (I have never been stung in real life).

Losing my shoes at the Indian dance

The flood of dreams has returned, after a dearth brought about by too much study and stress. The past few nights I have dreamed almost all night long, different scenarios flowing seamlessly into the next, dozens of them in a night, so many I can't remember all but a few aspects the following morning.

The night before last, a few snippets remain: looking at Dulac-style children's book illustrations, woodcuts maybe, and reading some illuminated caption about bees, which had to do with the illustration. The more I tried to focus on what I was reading as the words appeared before me, the more I tried to be lucid so as to remember it, the more the words would slip away. It turns out Dulac did an illustration for Shakespeare's the Tempest called "Ariel and the Bee" and also did woodcuts for Yeats' "A Vision,"(see left) neither of which I knew about before (consciously anyway). Interestingly, just before bed that night I was meditating in a milk and honey bath about Yeats' gyres and the lemniscate of the Mellisae tradition.

All I remember from last night was going to an East Indian party. When I arrived, dozens and dozens of women were outside and had arranged themselves to a do a complicated dance. They were all wearing saris but not the sort that were glamorous or of very high quality; it seemed to be a village folk dance, and they were common women gathering for a festival. I looked down at myself and was dressed similarly. I took off my shoes and put them with the others off to the side. We were in a semi-enclosed stone courtyard. It was daylight and warm. Yes, probably in India. Some of the women looked at me like I didn't belong, and I felt like I didn't quite belong either, but they went on with their dancing. 

I went inside where there was food and some friends of mine (whom I do not recognize) were helping to set up and keep the food coming out. I was in a large 'kitchen' -- nothing indicated that it was a kitchen except for a large refrigerator which wouldn't always close properly. I remember volunteering to take some things out of the freezer to help it seal. The room was sunny, lots of big windows, warm, not air-conditioned, and was carpeted. The main party was going on in some other place but I never went there.

At the end of the evening I went back to retrieve my low-heeled shoes -- which were a curious yellow color, not something I'd ever wear, and I couldn't find them. There was one pair of shoes left that resembled mine but I was entirely sure they were mine. I put them on, and they did fit, so I took them.

Babaji

Here is an abbreviated version of the dream as I wrote it to my teacher:

I dreamed last night that Babaji died. 

 

Wherever I was, throngs of people came around a mountain while I photographed a gigantic, dead, but very fragrant tree stump. Where I could pick the bark off it smelled spicy and perfumed. I chewed on some of the bark.

 

You appeared in the crowd of people, who were all shouting and making their way to the funeral, and I felt as if I hadn't seen you in years. We found each other and embraced for a long time.

 

Then we followed the crowd and attended a celebration for Babaji -- lots of garlands of flowers and petals falling from the sky and white animals running through narrow streets, all laden with flowers around their necks and on their backs and in their mouths.

----------------

After the funeral celebration, I walked around the city. It was strewn with performers -- they all looked like Commedia dell Arte performers, but in ghoulish renditions of their usual costumes. They leered and laughed as I poassed by but it didn't seem unsettling -- just part of a carnival atmosphere. Tombstones littered the streets.

One performer took advantage of a slab of concrete missing from the sidewalk to lie down in the gravel, imitating a corpse in a fresh, shallow grave. He was masked as a bishop -- his whole head and mitre were made of a very old, grey, mostly flat piece of would with holes for the eyes. His robes, however, were shroud-like -- grey, dirty, close and not very stately at all. I asked if I could step over him, with one foot on each side of his torso, and take a photo. And he said no -- he did not want me to accidentally step on his clothes. I honored his request and took my photo from the side.

The setting changed and I was in an all-girls home. Something not modern. Someone was with me -- not sure who, a girl/woman -- and I found a tiny adorable pink and grey kitten sleeping on a cushion. Again I tried to capture this sight with my camera. The kitten awakened and hissed, and that was the shot I took. I noticed that it was a Scotch Fold kitten. I moved elsewhere in the room and found another cat, a bigger one, also a Scotch Fold, sleeping between chair cushions. This time I approached it and pet it so as not to take it by surprise. All was fine.

Russia, India: tenderness when things are not quite right

Last night:

I am a man, and I understand that I am in Russia and I am a prisoner of war. I am being led out of a dark room into another room where people are assembled -- men and women, but they are relaxed. I'm scared, and I'm standing in a doorway. I know I'm going to some kind of judgment.

Before I can cross the room to the waiting people, I have to go by several tables on which are arranged baskets of herbs, baskets of bottles, beakers, burners and other lab/medicine-making supplies. I walk forward from the people who are holding me and run my fingers over the herbs, look at the assortment of amber bottles and jars, and other instruments I do not understand. What are they doing here? I feel a tenderness for these plants, and I am drawn to the table almost desperately, like remembering something long forgotten but suddenly and profoundly remembered.

My captors, who had let me walk freely in my sadness toward the tables, take hold of me again and lead me to the group of people who are seated in chairs by some windows. They don't look like a judgment committee at all. Many of them are corpulent women, who look like grade school teachers, just chatting. I am confused. The unseen people who are handling me push me down and make me sit on the floor. 

I feel something small and wet on my partially bare lower leg (I'm wearing tatters). I turn and see what looks like a paintbrush just leaving a bluish viscous daub of something there. I suddenly notice that I am not alone -- there are many other prisoners also on the floor, and they have all been touched with the swab. I ask what is going on and they tell me: "This solution is poison. Slowly, your heart and breathing will stop and you will be dead."

It flickers through my mind that that is probably what they have been preparing with the plants. This seems perverse and grotesque, because my memory of plants is that they are used to heal, not to kill.

I begin to launch toward panic for a few seconds but I know there is nothing I can do. I calm down and consider trying something -- anything -- magic, meditation -- to stop the absorption of the deadly poison into my system, but I give up even on that. 

I don't know what to do with my last few moments. I get up and walk into another room. They do not stop me. It is a small apothecary. I look at the bottles and jars and begin to feel a tremendous sadness over the doom I am helpless to prevent.

I begin to walk out of the apothecary when a small, thin woman with short dark hair and sharp features appears in the doorway. I don't know if she seems short because I am a tall man or of she is really short. Somehow I know this is my real-life teacher Althea. We look at each other for a moment and I begin to cry. We embrace tightly and both of us are wracked with sobs.

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Here is my dream from June 18, the night of some uncommonly strong storms in my area. It is about a man whom I have never met in person:

There is no vision, no kinetic sense or physicality to the first section of this dream. It is just a 'knowing.'

I know that am with my friend M, and we are listening to ragas, reading and writing Sanskrit. This part of the dream seems to go on not for just hours, but for years; probably lifetimes. There is a cyclic sense to it. Just unending learning and activity, very safe, sheltered even. I can hear the music, I have a sense of the mystery and the meditation of it, there is a strange sense of very relaxed yet focused and continuous study. There is also a youthful sense to it, many childhoods and young adulthoods, and a feeling of "this is just what you do," no desire for anything else or any other experience. Like we didn't know there was anything else to life.

There is a color: It is a light gold/pink. There is a sense of sunlight. There is a sense of deeply dyed Gujarati mirrored fabrics. But no forms whatsoever.

Most pronounced is an aroma: Sandalwood and saffron incense. Very heady and very strong throughout the whole dream.

Just the sound, the 'knowing,' the color and the scent, and the years rolling by -- that's all there was to this section, and it is the first time I've ever had a dream like that.

But then all of a sudden, I feel that I have a form -- I am curled in a fetal position, sleeping. I awaken and when I open my eyes, there is M, in the same position, next to me, facing me. His eyes are closed. We seemed to be in some kind of womb-like enclosure. The gold/pink light was still there but had shifted to a pinker hue, darker.

And when I awoke in the dream, I had a sense that something had gone 'wrong' -- that our interpretation of the scripture and music had bifurcated. To my mind, M had begun interpreting our time and our texts as something personally romantic (I'm not sure how else to put it here), and it seemed to detract from the Work I thought we were doing. I told him this was not right, that this was not what I wanted. His eyes stayed closed, though he responded that he understood and that he could hear me.

I wondered why he did not open his eyes.

Then the aroma of the sandalwood and saffron changed -- it became sickly sweet, almost overwhelmingly so. And I looked at M and somehow knew he was sick, or getting sick, and I immediately felt horrible for admonishing him. I was thinking how bad I felt, and what to say next, when --

A peal of thunder and flash of lightning woke me up for real. I jumped out of bed and ran around closing all the windows in the house as the rain blew in, all the while feeling quite distressed about the dream.

Turtle-dile or Turtle-gator

Been a while since I've updated; to tell the truth I've only had maybe one or two serious dreams since the last time I posted, and went through a very unusual dry spell of dreaming. It was probably related to stress and overwork.

Last night:

I am in class, probably shiatsu class, and my friend Tom is sitting next to me. I've brought something special to class, which I am excited to show off. It is a strange animal: a tortoise shell holding inside of it an alligator (or crocodile). I think it looked more like an alligator.

When I pull it out of my bag, only the shell is showing; the alligator is hiding its head, legs and tail inside the shell, just like a turtle would. (It strikes me now as I type what bizarre creatures turtles and tortoises are.) The shell is thick, strong, bumpy. It seems impenetrable. In fact I get on top of the shell and sit on it as though to test its strength. It is completely sturdy.

Then Tom starts poking inside the neck hole to try to get the alligator to show its head. It just peeks out a little.

The scene shifts and I am watching the classroom in the middle of the night, as a disembodied viewer. No one is there, of course. Suddenly the room is flooded almost to the top with water. I see a figure in the water -- he looks like something out of a sci-fi TV show, literally like some kind of alien/human hybrid. He has yellow eyes. I know he does not belong there -- that is, he is not familiar, he is a stranger, but he has been let in with my knowledge.

My perspective shifts and I am viewing the room as this character, with the water level a few feet above my head. Breathing doesn't seem to be an issue. As this character I see something swim toward me out of the gloom. It is the alligator, with no shell this time! I am threatened by it, and it is swimming fast right toward my head. 

I put out my hand and some kind of golden electrical force shoots out of it, not just stunning the alligator but throwing it back. The force is so powerful, the animal hits the back wall, ricochets, hits the front wall, and shuttles back and forth like this through the water a few times, until finally it is presumably dead from all the hits. 

There is an 'outside voice' or consciousness, the part of me that belongs at the school, is part of the family there, that knows the alien character has been mistaken in killing the alligator. This part of my consciousness mourns the loss of the animal, but understands that the alien character was allowed into the school and was only acting in self-defense.

Valerian and Skullcap sprouts

Another herb dream last night!

I can't recall the full details but I am harvesting three different kinds of herb sprouts with someone -- it feels like a family member.

The herbs are skullcap, valerian, and some other herb which I can't remember. The skullcap and valerian sprouts are small, plump and pearlescent, something like mung bean sprouts. The third herb's sprouts are more squat and red. (I wish I could remember what they were!)

I harvest these sprouts indoors from a tray of soil. They do not cling tightly to the earth because their roots have not had time to develop. I drag my fingers through the soil and pick up the little sprouts, letting the dirt fall away. I place the sprouts in a basket. My companion and I (is it my little brother?) are very happy as we do this, knowing we will make good medicine -- there is something special about the quality of medicine that will come from the sprouts, very different from the full grown plant/root.

I have placed all the skullcap sprouts at the bottom of the basket and begin to harvest the valerian ones. I put the first handful on top of the skullcap sprouts, and just as my companion is coming with his first handful of valerian sprouts, I put my hands over the basket saying, "Wait a minute. If we put the skullcap and valerian in the same basket, I'll never be able to tell them apart unless I sit here and smell each sprout individually" (knowing that the valerian will have their characteristic perfum-y warm pungent odor).

Meeting bupleurum at Michael's house

A bunch of herb school classmates from Chicago and I are at a place I understand to be my teacher Michael's house. (I have never been in his home in real life.) It is a large and sprawling place. He is nowhere to be seen.

The house has many hallways, narrow ones, with hardwood-sided walls and floors. It reminds me of a Japanese house with sliding screen doors. I have a sense that just beyond any wall or door there is water.

I am standing at the threshold of a wide panel of glass sliding doors that look out into the 'backyard,' which looks more like a huge meadow with pathways and tall grass. It is raining softly and the clouds hang low. It is warm out and the air is still. I begin to step outside onto a gravel pathway to be out in it when someone behind me asks where I am going. "Outside," I say.

I come up to a plant on the path and "know" that it is bupleurum. (I have never seen bupleurum in real life either.) It is dry, yellow, feathery. It does in fact resemble the real bupleurum, as an image search reveals. The variety in my dream seemed to have a finer, more feathery quality, but perhaps it is because it was dry. I wondered why I didn't see my herb ally, white peony, instead.

I stand up from squatting before the plant and see that others have come out onto the paths.

Heading back to the house, Michael appears. He doesn't say anything and neither do I, but he smiles warmly and takes me by the arm and we begin to walk briskly toward the house. I pass my teacher Althea and his wife Lesley, who seem to be selling earthenware on the path (?). They smile as we hurry past but they are very engaged in whatever it is they are doing.

Inside the house, Michael is leading me swiftly through the maze of hallways. "Where are we going?" I ask, mostly unconcerned and actually getting giddy at the speed at which we are moving and the unpredictable twists and turns in the narrow passageways.

At a rare wide 'T' in the hallway layout we appear to be coming close to our destination when we hear a voice coming from around a sunlit corner. Michael hurries me toward a terminus in the hall. I look behind me to see my classmate Mary Anne coming around the corner and calling my name. Michael pulls me inside a door and as I look up I see it is the men's room! He slides into a stall, and I slide into a stall a few feet from his, lock the door and stand on the toilet so my feet can't be seen. Someone comes into the washroom and leaves.

We leave shortly after that and a man outside the men's room looks at me funny. "I accidentally went into the men's room instead of the women's," I say to him. I look back and see that the women's room is directly across the hall from the men's. An easy enough mistake. It doesn't really explain my teacher, who once again has my arm and is leading me somewhere, so I say, "I really  had to go, so I just followed him in there and didn't realize there was a separate room for women." There, that makes sense!

As we begin to walk down the hall away from the restrooms I see a little black cat with a tiny fleck of white fur at its throat sitting along the wall under a chair. I bend down and begin to summon the cat. I wake up knowing that this is a form of my totem animal (as mentioned in the previous post).