Do you ever receive dreams that seem to be either transmissions from a source external to you, or dreams that seem intended for a different recipient?
I do, all the time.
I have what I consider “my” dreams- dreams where the landscape is familiar, the characters are recurring or recognizable from my “waking” life, the issues are “my” issues, or the craziness and play and disjointedness are all familiar, repetitive, reflexive patterns easily identified as arising out of my own territory of mental constructs.
The airplane crash dream.
The Japanese Hotel elevator dream.
The cop dreams.
The Coast Guard dreams.
The Farm dreams.
The Grandparent dreams.
On and on they go.
But sometimes I get a dream that is just totally unfamiliar to me. I’m a five year old girl in an all girls school and I’m worried about my pet cat who needs surgery to remove the rabbit ears growing out of its head. I’m an old lady standing in a grocery store and I can’t read any of the labels on the food and I’ve forgotten to put on my shoes and when I rummage in my purse for my money the purse is jammed full of shoes that I keep pushing out of the way. I have no money.
And really, where the juice is in dreamtime is in the emotions. It really doesn’t matter what’s objectively happening, it’s what these things make you feel that carries the information. At least in my dreamtime. And the emotions are what’s so strange to me- it doesn’t feel like me in the dreams. It feels like being a little girl. It feels like being an old woman. It feels like being a guy from Lithuania who is trying to get a taxi out of the city but left his wallet in his uncle’s apartment and doesn’t have the key and the uncle has just left for Klaipeda to ship out on a freighter.
I always feel a little bit perturbed by these dreams, while I’m having them, I think. Maybe the perturbation arises after the dream. But it feels invasive. It feels like either I’m on the wrong channel or the wrong channel is being broadcast into my head. And that seems doubly strange to me. Like, if the dreams are a product of my own subconscious but they’re just odd, they’re just unusual- then where does this feeling of alienation or intrusion come from? Am I dreaming these intrusive dreams so they will give rise to this feeling of alienation? Or could they really come from somewhere “outside” of me?
I’ll bet you know what I think.
Yep. I think they really do come from someone else, something else, somewhere else. It’s easy for me to think this because I imagine that everything is kind of empty and permeable and that there’s very little difference between waking life and dream life. What I don’t know is if there’s any meaning to it, or if it’s just random ‘signal leakage’ of some sort.
I think I sound pretty much like anyone who has intrusive thoughts right now. Not that I would admit to having intrusive thoughts. Except inasmuch as dreams are thoughts, and sometimes I have dreams that I don’t identify as “mine.”
Maybe there’s a neurological deficit behind this phenomenon. Do you smell that? Burning feathers?
No, me neither.
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In the meantime, the path has got me all loosened up around suffering. I still experience it, but I don’t really mind. I keep laughing all the time about what my mind is doing. I don’t take it personally.
I think in some way my relationship to the path has shifted. It’s come inside now, it’s not something “out there” at all. It’s not external to me in any way. It’s totally rubbed in to me, totally permeated my mind. I’m infused. I’m soaking in it.
This is a good thing.
I feel in some sense that I’ve been immunized. I still get sick, but I get a more manageable illness. Perhaps as I continue I will become more and more robust.
I think that is possible.
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I want to live outside. Sleep under the stars. Get wild again.
Stop wearing pants.
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Namaste, dreamers!
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