Saturday, November 10, 2007

What Dreams May Come When Darkness Falls

There seems to be an inverse relationship between craziness levels and creativity levels. Meaning, my life has been completely and utterly crazy...and my creativity has plummeted. It's not that I don't have those creative moments, however, because I do. I just don't have the time or energy to massage them in to something more....like, say, writing. So it's been awhile since I've written. And even though I now have the time, the residual of that anxiety keeps the stillness (in which the creativity blossoms) from really taking root.

Oh well..... it is what it is...

I need to go back a couple of weeks and reflect for a moment on dreams. Two weeks in a row I had very vivid dreams about death. Not my death, but deaths of others (although I was present to both).

Dreams are familiar territory for me. First of all, I remember them (for the most part, at least). I also have experience with them...their form...their content...their quality. And it's the quality that I want to focus on, because more than anything, it's that "quality" that moves me to either find meaning in them or to write them off as psychological babbling.

And like many people, I think we can probably write-off most of our dreams. It's the scientific explanation, right? Just our minds way of taking care of random pieces of information, etc... But there are some dreams, and you know when you have them, that are something more. It's like they come from a different place. And therefore, deserve a different type of attention. These death dreams were like that. It wasn't just the content that stood out, but the quality.

I don't really know yet what the meaning of them could have been. I don't necessarily see them as "predictive". I don't think my dreams have ever had that "foretelling" sense. It's more about the "why?". What in the dream has a message? And what IS the message? It could be that it's just my reactions to what happen that are the important thing...reflecting back to me something about myself that's difficult to see in real life because the "trauma" of the experiences are less. In that way dreams can be a great boon....teaching us something about ourselves without having to experience the tragedy in real life.

Thinking about things in that way can be tremendously helpful. And certainly you can learn a lot using that kind of reflection...whether what you are reflecting on is "real" or "dream".

But is there something more? I tend to think that there is. Not because I believe that all dreams are messages, but because I recognize when a certain type of dream stands out as unique from the others. I also probably believe this because of all of the other experiences I've had (ghosts, OBEs, lucid dreams, etc...). It's not so difficult for me to believe that "Life" is so much more than we perceive it to be, because I've already witnessed things that lie behind the normal veil of perception. Once you've seen behind the curtain, suddenly everything seems possible.

Dark.

Can you believe the darkness? A number of my friends have mentioned to me what I had already been thinking... it seems darker this year. Of course, it probably isn't...but why does it seem so? Perhaps it's also a reflection of what's going on inside of us. Or even a reflection of the overall universal consciousness. There IS a lot of darkness. And it compounds the absence of the sun. Which in Seattle right now seems non-existant between the hours of 5p and 7a.

See how I just keep moving from one subject to another...without a creative segue??

Well, in keeping with that, I injured myself last Monday night (this is an addition to the lingering injuries, of course), and it never ceases to amaze me how much that affects my mental state. There are so many issues wrapped up in my body....my "athletic-ness"... It's not just that I'm physically active...although that alone would be enough to drive people crazy. It's also that it reflects upon my career... and my stress-reducing methods...and in many ways, to my self-esteem. It's funny how we package ourselves up in our own minds. The image that we carry around about ourselves. In many ways we live so small. So confined. And in some cases, totally delusional.

I'm pretty sure that this is the point where I would talk about all of the other meaningful things that I've thought about....but alas....none are coming to mind. It's only 9pm, and already the weight of the darkness has me leaning towards sleep. Well, that and the end of an exhausting week. And the fact that I woke up at 4am this morning. Ok, so maybe I'm not doing the math correctly. Still, it seems early to feel this way...

Oh! Wait! One last thing... and I guess it's back on the death issue. It's interesting how you can work yourself in to an INTELLECTUAL place of peace regarding "death"...whether it be your eventual death or the death of someone that you love. But it's quite a different experience when the potential moment of death arrives. It can cast so much unrest on your conceptual ideas of "ok-ness" with the whole thing. I have walked on that boundary before....and observed both my delusions and my insecurities. As for me...and this has been shown in both my real-life experiences and my dream-experiences...my deep deep discomfort comes not from the death itself but the horror or agony or pain or suffering that are present in that moment. And I'm especially referring to the cases of other people dying. It's the thought of their pain or suffering in that moment that shakes my core and causes the emotional reaction. I can barely sit with it because of how strongly it affects me. I, of course, don't enjoy pain and suffering, but the thought of the people that I love experiencing it is the thing that induces horror in me.

Ok, so...ick. That's probably not a good subject to end this post on, huh?

Let's think of something lighter....just for a moment...

Hmmmm...I want to end with something that Gene Ching (I think?) wrote on Kung-fu On-line back in 2003...mostly because visualizing it always makes me smile. He was describing his stay at a Buddhist monestary...and the rigors of trying to meditate all day long...

"Tea is the meditator's friend and I sure wished I had some then. I was losing this battle, and like losing any fight, I feared the embarrassing thud of my head hitting the floor. You never want to hear that sound from the inside."

:)

And with that, I bid thee adieu...



1 comment:

alyssa shane said...

I think the only constant right now in my life is the craziness. More for me, it is that there is never not something to do. The rare times I actually do stop... force myself to stop... I'm still thinking about what I need to do. Truth in fact, would rather be doing anyway because I want to complete my projects.

I rarely remember my dreams. They always seem to be flashes and fragments of abstract pictures rather than something I could ever derive anything lucid from.

The few I have remembered were intense, sometimes very disturbing and hmmmmmmmmm, I guess those were more than psychological babbling...

Can you ever really know the meaning of them?

LOL, the lack of creative segue. Then again, you warned us in the beginning of the blog your creativity has plummeted, so I guess you are not at fault here.

The rest, amazing as always. I smiled. I cried. I laughed. Oh wait... That was the movie I was watching.

Seriously =) Great Blog