Dreams are a Mirror
I have had two signals from dreams. The first is that my actions are, if not admirable, at least comprehensible, and well, I am struggling to express what I believe.
You may be very different! But in my dreams, I often wandered in a haze. I became obsessed with something. I fawned over women with exaggerated sexual characteristics, pining but never receiving. I pursued missions with unclear goals. I drove all night. I grew old in the service of dimly perceived masters -- I wouldn't even call them ideals.
But now I see myself struggling to explain, to defend. The words are halting, but I wake up feeling like I tried, instead of just more brownian motion. Here is one:
I flew around the world with advanced technology, evading all systems that tried to contain me. Flew into a nuclear facility. To hide, I went into a little area. To my surprise, somebody crawled in with me. It was a worker! He said he could help me. He asked why I did this.
I began giving a speech. I said, governments and people start businesses, they sell things, and folks like you are working at these places. They can try anything they want, but they won't make a profit unless your spirit, your love is threaded through the process.
If you are asleep, your life force is used to power these vast, important and high tech systems. They are quite meaningless, as you have seen. You feel this, so you come to help me, an outlaw. It is time to wake up.
I woke up smoothly during that last paragraph, such that by the end I was awake and talking to myself. Initiation is giving up your dreams, giving up your sleep. My mind's days are numbered now. This dream was an elaboration around my deepest wish, and I began to speak in the dream, and continued speaking outside the dream.
This is a good dream. If one must dream, at least let it be costume and music around your truth. This is more elaboration than illusion.
And perhaps elaboration is the space between grasp and reach. It's elucidation narrows the gap as strength grows.
The other signal from dream is kind of humorous. My psyche is playing with me now. A goal is to achieve lucidity. I mean regularly. I've done it a couple of times, but it was so labor intensive, and my actions were so predictable once lucidity was achieved that I gave it up as a dead end. Always, always, I would fly. The moment I knew I was in a dream, I leapt into the air, and flew. And soon after, fell back into dream.
The sadness of this is that I started with a noble goal: truth always! Let me peak behind the veil of dream! The moment my wish is granted I compose another dream, even, a less instructive one. Who knows what my psyche was trying to convey before? I cheapen even that, turning it into a stage for flight.
I quit doing that with a feeling like "don't indulge the child."
However, now, I'm ready to work. To ask questions. To face unpleasant situations. And so my desire for lucidity is there in me. I'm beginning to check myself. To ask in daily life, "is this dream?"
(The idea with that is that if you make this a habit, then your personality in dream will exhibit the same habit. If it suspects the answer should be "yes," then, like a callback function in code, your full consciousness will be invoked. Viola! Lucidity.)
Note that in the preceding rather "technical" note, I describe the personality as something other than the "real you." Of course. Wake up some morning, and note how bit by bit, you put on the heavy technical jacket of the personality. How you "re-member" all those attitudes, stances, behaviors, one by one.
The personality is only your jacket, nothing more. To the wise man, it is an increasingly threadbare jacket, whose defects begin to outweigh its strengths. The whole thing is a put on.
So, perhaps because my readiness to work is felt at deeper levels, the dream characters are becoming coy. Last night I dreamed I was in an elevator with a man and woman. The man had a thick cigar in his shirt pocket. He called it a "sugar cigar." He did this repeatedly. I kept looking at it and thinking "but it's a cigar. An ordinary cigar. I don't even know what a sugar cigar is, but it must be more like candy -- like a novelty gum for 1960s children or something."
Thinking back, his stare was rather hard, and there was a slight emphasis in his voice on the end of his sentence: "...sugar cigar."
He was baiting me.
I consider this good.
It means that eventually I'll begin to play with him/it/the-psyche, who is offering these clues.
I can only be grateful.
You and I. We ride atop a system about which we exhibit a vast incuriosity. Should we begin to inquire, we find that the system wants to be known. It awaits the surgeons hands.
For what did you ever do, that you did not do for an audience? Though you despair of its arrival, your redemption lies in being witnessed. In Having Been Regarded.
That desire is present at every level of being.
The child needs the loving gaze.
The plant weeps when she touches him.
Your subconscious, vast supercomputer, ever striving. Awaiting your regard for her efforts.