9 posts tagged “dreams”

Dream of dathun -- it was held in a wharehouse sort of facility -- all attendees had to find somewhere to sleep in their sleeping bags within the spaces available among the aisles and rows and racks full of things.  It was kind of like a Costco, only more stripped bare, with no indication of what was in packaging. Also, there were hundreds of people, including my parents there. There was some kind of plush but old convention center attached -- rooms with brown couches, fake plants.

I remember stumbling around lost a lot of the time, trying to figure out why people were talking so much on a retreat, why everything seemed like a family dinner party or a convention.  I could never find Reggie, and the only dathun coordinator I found had no information about the retreat, but she could tell me where the self-described queer space was.

I went to the queer space--it was full of older gay men, and there was no room for another person. I thought to myself in the dream, "they probably all snore anyway", and so I kept seeking a place to bunk down. I ended up sleeping underneath something, like a table.

I noticed that the Poet was there at the retreat, and I wanted to sleep near her for familiarity, but she wasn't talking to me nor acknowledging me. She was busy pulling materials out of boxes so she could write literal reams of poetry.

I sat and had white wine with my parents and a bunch of older people.  We sat around a round table that was topped with one of those cloth-backed vinyl table "cloths" common in the 1970s. It was pukey green with a faint yellowish lattice-and-vines design.

At another point later, like a week in, I kept wondering when the retreat would start, and if I could bear another three weeks of this aimless wandering in confusion with no structure save for the towering racks of unlabeled boxes which rather resembled the hoppers at the Celestial Seasonings factory. No place to sleep -- I moved my sleeping bag every night, trying to find a comfortable, warm niche. No practice either. No stability, only the hard concrete floor.

Wherever I found clusters of friends, there was no room for me to join them.

Throughout the time there, I carried a sense of the presence of and connection to another who was there with me, but in her own separate experience. I never saw her, only felt her as if sensing the direction of the faintest breeze by sticking out the tip of my tongue.

I woke in the dark hours of morning from a dream that feels symbolically indicative of the tectonic shifts I'm experiencing in life/self/other/milieu of late.

In the dream, I (as I am now) was staying at my parents house with my older and younger brothers.  I remember a distinct sense of saying to myself in the dream "this is just like childhood for us to be staying here like this."  We were in our old rooms, which were only somewhat changed from childhood.  I presume we were staying for a holiday visit.

There I was, staying in my old room.  My mother kept coming in to put away laundry (she used to do this when I was a child, after I went to bed. It always woke me up), and so I attempted to stop this by locking the door.  Well, the door lock did no good, because anyone with a thumbnail could turn the lock from the outside. I moved my old nightstand in front of the door, thinking that would do the trick.  But no, my mother and father both came in, and were dancing together in the middle of my now much larger bedroom (where there could not possibly be room for dancing. still with the same icky yellow shag carpet), and laughing.  I was like "Mom, Dad, I'm trying to sleep here!  Could you give me some privacy?"  But no, my mother laughed and laughed and laughed and kept dancing (it was some combination of swing and salsa dancing).  She told me that my father was not my father actually, that I had been fathered by someone else who was long gone.  My father, who's usually a quiet man who does not dance, just kept dancing, looking happy and graceful in ways I've never seen him. My mother was dancing all around, my father always at the center.

I don't remember more from there on.  Of late I've been investigating my experiences of having a gender or being a gender, and I'm curious about the symbolic interaction of my dream with that work.

Into the comfortable and familiar is introduced a destabilizing exuberant feminine dancing with a stabilizing graceful masculine, but the masculine symbol has a sort of emptiness in its non-related-ness. Where I want to and expect to feel safe and secure, these energies burst in. When the feminine is alone, she's merely on maintenance.  When paired with the masculine, she is dynamic and powerful, unconventional.

There's nothing like a night of bad sleep to make my whole day seem a little shitty.  Things are going quite well at work today -- I've gotten good stuff done in preparation for ongoing committee work.  I've seen beloved friends and a senior project classmate, so things are lovely on the social front (although I could use a break where I sit and bask in some mutual adoration, sans complication.  Tea with a friend is needed).  But I slept poorly last night, had weird dreams, and spent a long chunk of the night awake, and so I feel not so great today.  Actually, I feel quite depressed.  I believe it's more multifactored than my sleep; life is complicated and stressful.  Despite earning an A on each of my midterms and both of my papers so far, I am very worried about my classes, particularly my term papers.  And then there's love.  And practice. 

In one my partially-awake/partially-asleep stages of the night, my cat curled up next to me in her usual place: tucked into my right armpit, with her paws against my head and neck.  As usual, I kept moving my head away from her paws and she kept putting them back.  I half-dreamed that she wasn't my cat but was instead a large black cat with whom I'm developing acquaintance, and so when I was more awake than asleep, my cat seemed so small, kitten-like.  And her paws stank of litterbox and cat breath.  Bleh.

I laid awake for a long time, many things on my mind, and two someones.  Eventually my mind settled, but not even ten points practice put me to sleep.

Later, I did sleep, and had a partially lucid dream.  I was in my apartment, it was dark (none of the light switches worked, and so I knew it to be a dream).  Moving through the texture of dream with the awareness that it was a dream was like swimming in molasses -- everything was a slow, strained effort.  I went to my living room, where I saw in the dark the default Windows XP screensaver blinking across the screen of a laptop.  Faintly illuminated by this was a youngish man, 20s-ish, sleeping on my couch.  His head was shaved with about three weeks of stubble on. (when going to a "buddhist-inspired" university, one becomes accustomed to the appearance of various stages of shaved-hair growing in).  I slipped more into dream as I felt embodied fear of physical safety, but remembered: this is a dream.  G, you can do this.  Wake him up and ask him why he's here: it's your dream, your mind. And so I did, moving through space with no slight effort.  The thick texture of the space was blackish red, brownish clear, like partially-dried menstrual blood smeared on a mirror.  I reached over and knocked on his skull: wake up, wake up, why are you here?  who are you?  He was as groggy as the space was sticky, but I got his name and a sense of his appearance. I have the impression that he was there because my upstairs neighbors/landlords said he could crash there, but he was as confused as I.  Then I woke to my alarm.

In Jungian terms, I rather wonder why my superego has sent an aspect of the animus to the lower levels of embodied existence to stay temporarily, with a business-like link to the outside world.  But I never really liked the heteronormativity of Jung.  What is the message of my dream?  Perhaps more awareness in process as I work through and wonder about Abhidharma and gender (term paper topic), and personally juggle that with things about active/receptive roles and role-switching of sexuality and how I relate to those as expressions masculine/feminine principles.

In other lucid or semi-lucid dreams, the molasses texture has been there -- everything occurs with great effort of concentration against what is, methinks, the weight of sleeping habit.  With practice/experience, I believe it will become lighter.

I had a wildly meandering and multi-hued dream.  Therein were familiar landscapes of central coastal California redwood forests, deciduous forests of my Indiana hillcountry youth, and a strange setting mixed of the two, to which I've returned in dreams more than once--the forests of my nighttime mind.

In one segment, I was hanging out with Ani Difranco and her beau and her bass player.  I had stumbled across her in a little ramshackle Boulder Creek style cabin in the middle of the woods, where I was wandering lost.  I saw into a window and recognized her, and then went on my way, not wanting to intrude.  She came out and called to me, not like an old friend, but a vague acquaintance whose company is sought after. After much stumbling humility, I talked about IndoTibetan Buddhism with the aforementioned rockstar.  I tripped over my tongue much, feeling inadequate to speak, but eventually talked about the element of emptiness, silence, and the anticipatory gap within Difranco's music, as well as the general principles of awakening as might be found in the lyrics in her more recent work, and how I thought she was in some way serving as a bodhisattva and I looked forward to how being a mother would further shape the increasing wakefulness of her perspective and gift.

Later, I went with friends to her concert...before which there was excess concern as to what I should wear.  Pink underwear was involved in some way, seeming as intentionally queer in my dream as it is in my waking life.

In another segment of the dream was something like a replay of Tuesday night's First Turning class, where we congregated as a group to discuss logistics before meeting with Rinpoche for the main teaching of the evening (exegesis on the Four Noble Truths).  But as it turned out, it wasn't exactly Rinpoche, but instead a western academic who was there to present a lecture and discussion on gender.  Students in the classroom wanted to talk on the DSM-IV classification of gender disorders (referring to it by the number 23, which isn't the number, but we all knew what it meant in the dream), but the professor wasn't a psychologist, but rather a postmodernist Buddhist who was there to talk about what I was going to write my paper about: gender and the Abhidharma.

This morning I woke from a dream in which I was on retreat, which was a combination of the upcoming "Contemplative Community Retreat" at Shambhala Mountain Center (in which the BA Contemplative Psych program takes all of their majors there for a weekend.  I'll be going (if I go) as staff), and the monthlong Dathun in Crestone.

In one part of my dream, there was a collection of folk from the Dharma Ocean sangha walking down from the stupa, singing an Indigo Girls song and looking all glowy, radiating a kind of peace and happiness idealized in Coca-Cola commercials of the 1970s.

In another part, I was standing around one of the side rooms off of the main shrine room, with other staff, watching the first two week retreat-attendees depart.  We laughed and joked about the upcoming two weeks being a breeze after the first two.

When I woke, it hit me that I'm definitely going on a month long retreat.  And no, those first two weeks last winter weren't easy.  And I know that once I'm two weeks in I'll be fine; nonetheless I feel a great deal of trepidation about a whole month.  A whole month. 

However, a lingering sense from my dream is that I was serving on that retreat -- I was there working for others.  I was practicing, of course, but I was mostly in a role of service. Rather than focusing so solely on my own work, I took a role in the creation of the supporting structure for that intense personal work.

In other news, I'm feeling a kind of reluctance about Dharma Ocean, and am thinking of SMC because of a dear friend who's on staff there, and how I'd like to deepen a practice relationship with her.  But the SMC retreat is with Judith, whereas Dharma Ocean is with Reggie.  I guess I'll see which of my teachers I feel more resonance with by the registration deadline and decide then.  It'll be interesting to watch myself through this.

The path unfolds with its own perfect and appropriate timing.  Things are tracking themselves, but intuition indicates a recent acceleration and intensification.

Quite recently, as heralded in a conversation with fellow queer dharma practitioner, the flashing-green-eyed beastie has been making her appearance in my life, feeding me the rough, ragged, dry, raw, choking richness of her offspring for my practice to digest.  My friend's sage advice, which I readily heed: be gentle with your heart and honor the necessary pain of its vast opening.  I sat in the Padma room, seeking to work with the subtle capacity for discernment that underlies/runs parallel to the confusion of overwhelming energy.

Yesterday, I meet with the graduate advisor of the Religious Studies department -- I am practically a shoe-in for the Indo-Tibetan Buddhism master's program -- there's just the formal processes to finalize.

This morning: I call Rising Tide, to schedule a consultation with Phil Bartell, the dharma-practitcing tattoo artist who was recommended by dathun friends and acquaintances whose skin wear his work.  This morning: I slip over to the library to pick up a copy of Vajrayogini: Her Visualizations, Rituals and Forms, so that I might study some of the form that will someday be in appearance on my left arm. I'm still waiting to hear back about a particular tattoo design-in-progress.  Ideally, it is my first, but I know not its status. 

I chat with a coworker about tattoos and their meanings and suddenly remember some of the content of my dream last night/this morning:  I was wandering in a dream landscape reminiscent of Boulder's most conventional of settings: Pearl St.  In the dream, I noticed that everyone, simply everyone had tattoos--noticeable, bright, colorful, fluid, artful, striking.  As I remarked upon this noticing (either to the invisible audience I usually talk to or to an unseen dream companion), a flowing, dancing, leaping, gorgeous archetypical woman came leaping into view.  The visual texture changed to a field of pastels.  Across her round bare abdomen were the brightest zigzagging lines of color, tattooed in vibrant, lush green and flaming, furious orange.  She embraced me. 

I woke.

Do my dreams prime me for my waking life?  Or does my waking life provide the content for my dreams? 

This morning, I woke from a dream in which there was a man cleaning strawberries with an excess of precision, gently brushing around each individual seed with some sort of brush that reminds me of the soft bristles used to clean mushrooms.  Although strawberries too grow close to the ground, they do not soak up excess water as do mushrooms.  Rinsing is sufficient to clean , with perhaps a little citrus juice spray to help loosen particles, pesticide and paraffin.

This morning, I made breakfast with bananas and strawberries.  The bananas are darkening to a yellow brown reminiscent of my favorite sorts of mustard, so I must eat them before the weekend arrives with the possibility of an overnight guest for whom I make pancakes in the morning.  There are two left, which will hopefully make it through the rest of today and tomorrow.  The strawberries are not yet overripe.  I rinsed off 4 which approximated the same mass of the banana.  I removed their greenery and remnant of stem and the tougher, whitish pith with a paring knife, slicing a conical section off the top of each, leaving a heart-shaped fruit, which I sliced into spoon-size bites.

Perhaps the raspberries will survive to the weekend, where they might be part of a pancake, with chocolate.

The fruit called "strawberry" is not a fruit at all, according to the laws of botanists.  Rather, the "seeds" themselves are the fruit.  I don't know why this matters, but it's something I've known for a long time, probably since I read it in the encyclopedia as a child.  It's rather like the strawberry is inside out. 

Perhaps it's part of the inner structure of my dream -- the connection between flowers and fruits and the bodies of women and the problematization of nature and the vulnerability of what is ripe.  How we are turned inside out by both love and brutality.  The former may easily withstand transcendent signification and the imposition of meaning. The latter is something of which we do not speak.  Not enough. 

How can I describe my interior disruption at the sudden shift in my waking moments?  On several consecutive days, I've woken next to a lover, near enough so often as to begin feeling comfortable and accustomed to her presence, but still surprised each time to find someone, anyone, not a cat, there.  After a night of solitary sleeping, I have such dreams as to signify the shift as yet unnameable but known to the pieces of me still capable of glimpsing the soul sliding subtly behind the eyes of lover, stranger, or friend.

Lastnight/thismorning, I dreamed of bringing bright red clawlike toothlike grasping scraping fireplace grates to a black wood-burning stove which seethed simmered raged.  I spoke to the fireplace, saying that these were what felt to be an appropriate gift, but I was scared to give the new accoutrement, lest the fire become more angry so as to burn all down.  The fire responded threateningly to my reservation, and so I handed over the gift, gesturing to somehow communicate how the grate/door/covers? might fit horizontally or vertically, as the fire (she) preferred.  I ran from the room just as I saw them settle into frightful place, like gnashing bloody teeth on a sideways mouth. 

Vagina dentata?

Upon my return, she was no longer the animate red steel and black iron and dancing flame, but instead a human woman who was somehow, in ways explicable only in dreams, still the fire and its container. The shape of her belly, though round and smooth, reminded me of the fireplace full of burning wood.  I thought of roasting sacrificial feasts (of the thanksgiving variety) not in her, but for her to consume.

To say that her gaze was smoldering would be an understatement of hyperbolic proportion.

...

My interior disruption is, by no means, a bad thing.  'Tis the result of yet more ethical self-queering, which I still cannot yet adequately describe.

...

My therapist asked me yesterday: do you think you can fall in love again?  I replied that I did not know--the last time I fell in love was so long ago, so different, such an old version of myself, that I would not know what falling in love would look like now.  Certainly, I seek no Relationship to repeat, nor a relationship to mend past mistakes, nor a balm for burns, nor a salve for my savaged heart (consonance can be corny).  I seek none of that, and will keep a careful eye out for that subtle self-serving selfish intent (see, it's corny).  And in that, I still do not know what falling in love is.

My therapist seemed satisfied with my answer.  I do note, however, that my therapist's role is not to look at all satisfied -- instead, like my recently former lovers, she is ever just beyond my grasping, in no way does my relation to her arrive at a signification of any kind of known status (other than counselor and client), predictability, or comfort. And I watch my tendency to project relational patterns of the most casual sort at her...how to get her to laugh or smile, or to engage her in conversation about ideas instead of about me. It's not about that either. Her role is to evade me just enough to keep me chasing my tail and coming back around to understanding myself better or seeing myself afresh.  Or something like that.

She's there to keep my sense of self ever-changing and yet somehow grounded.  She's a magician.

I know well, however, what crushes look like, and am gleefully free to pursue them, or not, as it should please me. It is curious to have this open heart where I previously held so much back, reserving love and affection for a Relationship, as if love and affection were so easily quantified and in limited reserve.  There certainly is an upper limit to the love and affection I am physically capable of giving (only so much time in the day and stamina in my body), but there is actually no boundary on the love I actively feel. There is no end to feeling. Perhaps even especially after I've felt past the boundary of pain/anger into a space where it is love again. And again.  And again.  But not "in love", even if I don't really know what that is. 

What is it, to be in love, to fall in love?  How would I recognize it?  How would I distinguish it from interest, from a crush, from a longing, from angst, from adoration, from attraction?  What role would anxiety play in it, given that anxiety is a subtle undercurrent of so much of my emotional life? And what of loneliness? And what of grasping? And what of neurosis?  And what of health and wholeness?  What of attraction? What of warmth, camaraderie, togetherness? What of scintillating conversation, cross-pollenization of ideas, intellectual stimulation? What of inspiration? What of lust? What of admiration? What of intimidation? Do I distinguish only the whole and healthy as love?  Or is there an aspect of love that is also grasping and self-aggrandizement?  Is love possibly all of these things, all variations, all manifestations? 

What is it to be in love?  How does it differ from loving?  What distinctions do we draw, and why?

The process of attempting to recall dreams after waking is unfortunately quite the opposite of defragmenting a hard-drive: all of the pieces become more scatted, less connected, de-sequenced, and de-contextualized.  It becomes a cloudy, a haze, a mist, a mess of memory.  That said...

Somewhere in my dream a miracle (of the Catholic sort) occurred:  A vision of the Magdalene and the Mother (the Marys in Christ's life) appeared in the sky with all the clarity and richness of a Renaissance fresco.  Betwixt the two female faces was a symbol that kept changing shape.  Sometimes it was like the snake that twines about the caduceus, but it was in constant motion and therefore incomprehensible.

Everyone in the dream could see it.  When it appeared, I was in some sort of dive of a diner (the kind that becomes immediately popular with hipsters because of the genuine acerbicness of the female wait staff) in a place that I suspect was Austin, except that there was the smell of ocean.  As I stepped outside and saw the persistent image in the sky, I (of course) experienced a great depth of wide-ranging spiritual realization.  At times, the faces changed to the Taras and what cavorted betwixt them was Vajrayogini.  It was always a female/feminine image.

Then there was a random sidebar to the dream, where a cute older fellow of Asian extraction (Japanese, I believe), came to talk to me about motorcycles and show off his own.  It morphed into a 70s camero, and then into a vintage Ford with flaking chrome.  All were a rather unappealing shade of orange, matte finish, that somehow worked best as part of an old and aged, but cared-for-and-loved piece of machinery.   Within that sidebar was a bubble moment where I was on my old Suzuki SV650, losing traction and threatening to fall sideways on a curve.  Somehow, I pulled through it with intention and was upright and on my way and back into the sidebar and then out of it.

Then...

Someone, of the governmental agency variety, noticed my spiritual ecstasy and decided that I must be one of the pranksters involved in projecting the image into the sky without a permit.  And so she was directed by her superiors to apprehend and interrogate me, by any means.  She wore a judge's black robe, which she shed to reveal very tastefully unconventional fashion on a body that screams "dangerous curves ahead."  As it turns out, this role in my dream was played by (one of) my Lover(s), so the interrogation was not a terror at all, and I (of course) converted her to the way of seeing such that she became an agent of the Revolution (which was heralded by a new spiritual reality in the sky, not by me).  It took several hours that felt like a delicious lifetime, but I knew she was mine/I was hers from the start.

But first, before she could commit to the Revolution, we had to put her old boyfriend into a massive truck tire and roll him downhill into the river first--I'm not sure why.  He was very amicable about it, and looked forward to the adventure of death by drowning.  I watched his face under the water as he calmly met death.  Light filtering through the water was green.

Later in the dream (I think it was later, but who knows), I was watching a series of artistic interpretations of the vision in the sky, ranging from realism to impressionism to surrealism (one was very Dali) and so forth.  Some were clearly Tibetan, some were very like Russian icons, and so forth.  All were striking in their beauty, each was true to what I witnessed.