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What keeps rich people
Going, when they reach their dreams And hungers lessen? americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]
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During much of this morning’s dream I was worming my way through the hallways and staircases of a vast series of interlocking, cliff-mounted structures. Sometimes I was alone, and sometimes hordes of other people crowded into the structures’ rooms, making it hard for me to move around. I was trying to get from one disc golf tee-box to another, but these were spaced far apart from one another and the layout of the place was confusing, causing me to climb many stairs and squeeze down many tunnels built into and through the homes of the people living there. Each time I threw my discs, they sailed out of view. Although I knew were they had landed, I had a difficult time figuring out how to get there through the maze of interlocking buildings.
At one point, I was standing at the top of a staircase conferring with some of the people judging the event (or who were at least doing something officious). Turning around, I found the stairs behind me so impossibly packed with people that my only recourse for descending to the floor below was to jump out over the side of the railing and hand-carry myself on the outside edges of the individual steps to the floor below. As I reached the bottom my legs brushed against the stockinged feet of a lass resting with two other women on a couch. She immediately stripped her socks off whilst giving me evil looks, to which I responded (as I was walking out a nearby door) by mocking her concern for her striped and colorful socks, saying something like “My legs aren’t that dirty.” Later in the dream sequences, I was in an alpine city built onto level ground that was covered with a few inches of slushy snow. Despite the presence of frozen precipitation I knew the city was on Bali, the Island of the Gods, somewhere high up the side of one of its towering volcanoes. The city was party ruined, many of its sparsely-placed high-rise buildings damaged or collapsed, but its streets were packed with cars, buses, and people attending to business. Twice whilst in the city I stepped up into a burnt-out single-family home in which stood a representation of my deceased father, an older man with grey hair but strong arms and big hands who embraced me in a great hug and asked why I was groaning in pain and weeping loudly. (After the second time meeting the older man I indeed lay awake in bed crying, hugging myself about the chest, and basking in the memory of those who have died before me.) Falling back asleep, I found myself sitting in the slushy snow talking to a bypassing woman wearing a tan overcoat, who had stopped to admonish me to seek a drier place to sit lest I catch the sniffles. The thick wool socks I was wearing, though they like the rest of me sat in mounds of cold wet, were nonetheless bone dry, which to my dream-consciousness seemed slightly odd. [ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ] [This dream occurred at roughly 7am, after I had crawled back into bed following completion of all twelve steps of my morning qigong meditation.]
We were driving down a steep hill in a grey vehicle. I was in the passenger seat greatly concerned that we would crash into the debris that dotted the grassy hill - beams and bars of steel, piles of sandstone blocks, and stacks of cut wood. At the top of a rise we stopped, where I voiced my concerns to the driver, who merely stared forward, his face an unreadable mien. Below the rise stood the first tee of a disc-golf course next to a dead tree, but my companion turned and walked back up the way we’d come. I followed him back upward onto a dirt path that lead along a ridge covered in snow, from which we surveyed the surrounding countryside of cultivated fields, scattered woods, and distant farm houses. Walking back down to the tee, we came upon a half dozen other persons kitted out for disc golf. Somewhere nearby but out of sight a person was screaming with horrible urgency, which scared me enough that I ran for shelter. The formerly dead tree had grown tremendously, great reaching tendrils of a hardened, textured, grey plastic that dug back into the ground, forming a wall. Finding my exit blocked, I turned to find the others standing close by, a massive newcomer in their midst. (He reminded me of a figure from my childhood, a giant scotsman dressed in battle fatigues.) The newcomer apologized for the screaming in a way that took my fear away, at which point the dream changed radically. [ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ] Dreams are, in essence, hallucinations. While dreaming, we see, hear, and feel things that exist nowhere except within the subconscious mind. Absent the type of appropriate sleep that facilitates reaching dream-state, we humans tend to become listless, our brains foggy, our moods sullen and prone to depression. Some research suggests that dreams help improve social interactions. Another theory is that dreams help us connect with our emotions, reducing the burden of negative ones such as fear and worry.
Consequently, it is important to do everything possible to get a good night’s sleep that is neither too long nor too short. This author knows that strenuous physical exercise during the day helps him fall asleep quickly. He also knows that the presence of both light and sound keep him from sleeping well, wherefore he makes his bedroom dark and quiet before going to bed. One of the reasons he doesn’t drink booze is because he knows that the use hard drugs such as alcohol poses a danger to healthy sleep patterns. Also important is not eating food or drinking water before bedtime, as these can interrupt nocturnal cycles. There are few if any drawbacks to having the kind of sleep that allows to occur dreams, but many risks associated with poor sleep-related habits. For long-term health and a free bout of beneficial hallucinations, please skip the mind-altering drugs and try to get a good night’s sleep. [For help with addictions to drugs, including alcohol, consider visiting these websites: rehab-international.org, samhsa.gov, or rehab4alcoholism.com. For information on ways to recover finances and rebuild credit in the aftermath of addiction, consider reading this article from creditcards.com.] americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan The dream started inside a building, which I escaped through a side door that opened onto a street paved with cobblestones. The outside was lit by a bright, white light. With me (on the right-hand side) was as always my psychopomp, as well as a female (on the left-hand side) whose face and features have faded from memory.
Together, we climbed through the open rear door into a automobile that looked like a standard, black Londonite taxicab. It was hitched via leather strapping to four-legged beasts that at first glance appeared to be cats. The driver’s perch had been mounted onto the roof, meaning that I had to climb up through the car’s open sunroof to man the reins. We took off, rounding corners at speed, and were soon riding astride a seaside promenade made using cut blue granite and featuring an iron railing. People in Victorian-era dress strolled along the sidewalk to our right. Below and beyond them stretched the sea - deep blue and vastly calm, nary a wave or ripple. The vehicle stopped and I leaped off to see if there was a beach at the base of the cut-stone promenade. Using a nearby flight of stairs, I climbed down to its blond sands (with someone or something else in tow), and had just dipped a toe in (to check the waters) when I awoke. americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan I was in a house that was in the process of being renovated. With me were people I knew well. We talked for a long time, the people and I, whilst sitting cross-legged in a circle in one of the nearly finished rooms. The others and I were wearing tan colored ankle-length robes of some kind. The room had many windows, it was brightly lit, and its walls were painted white.
After our talk was finished we stood up for to have a stretch, whereupon I for some reason entered a smaller neighboring room, to change clothes or just have a look around. The room was empty but for a floor lamp burning a standard incandescent bulb that cast a yellow light. The room had wooden parquet flooring, wooden panels that covered the walls to hip-height, and dark green paint, above. Someone entered the room behind me and I had the feeling I wasn’t supposed to be in there. When I turned around to leave I saw that a square section of the roof above the green-walled room had been crudely sawed away, leaving a yawning gap that someone had tried to cover with a blue tarpaulin of some sort. Knowing I could mend it better, I went to a closet where supplies for fixing such a hole were kept, gathering up a ladder, hammer and nails, a square piece of plywood, some fiberglass insulation board, as well as roofing shingles and metal flashing. As I was removing the blue tarpaulin I discovered it was instead a heavy-duty Manduka yoga mat I had once owned. The mat was thinner than I remembered and smelled of ozone and heat, however, having sat under the hot sun for so long. I started shoving insulation into the gap and installing bridge-beams to carry the plywood and replacement asphalt shingles, which I had to wedge up under the existing clay tiles. americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥 The first dream I remember was a waking one in which my eyes were open and I was looking across the room toward the door. A face slid out from behind a patch of darkened wall and I greeted it out loud, saying, “Hello.” Something scared me - either the face greeting me back or a subsequent but forgotten part of the dream - and I awoke into full consciousness.
In the the second dream I was inside a long, rectangular room that was filled with diner booths or work cubicles. There were people sitting in most of the booths, and the room was loud with conversation. For some reason I kept walking from the front of the room down the corridors separating the booths to my own cubicle, which was in the back. At some point I met a dark-haired man of about my age, whom I allowed to sit at my booth. I went again to the front of the room and when I came back there was another man sitting at my booth also, a bald and aged fellow. I was concerned for the valuables stored inside my booth and became angry with the two men, telling them to leave my area. Upon waking up soon thereafter, I remembered my expressed desire to be kind to and accepting of the people visiting me in my dreams, and felt remorse for yelling at the two men. The third dream I remember involved me looking into a mirror, adjusting my hair. (This is unusual, since I rarely look at myself in the mirror while awake.) I was in a poorly-lit bathroom wetting my forelock when I noticed a crescent-shaped tattoo that ran across my forehead from one temple to the next. The tattoo was an image (such as the one seen here) of a sunset viewed from behind the little or seaside shrine, Pura Luhur Enjung, located in Canggu, Bali, Indonesia. Above my right eye were the curved tops of the shrine’s holiest of holies, above my left eye was a sun setting over the waves of Old Man’s surf break. americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥 It was a bright day and I was bicycling along a footpath on top of a concrete dam. Next to it was a park or greenswarth that was partly submerged in water. Ancient and rusting iron railings ran along the top of the dam, to keep people from falling into the park. Far above the tops of some tall trees to my left stood a cluster of improbably towering walkways, huge and sweeping glass-bottomed ramps that twisted and looped through the sky. I recognized the structure from a previous dream and was briefly saddened, for I knew there was no graffiti there for me to photograph.
Up ahead, the crest of the dam curved sharply to the left and merged with an earthen abutment. At the merge was a swinging gate, which stood open to allow pedestrians and cyclists through. It was equipped with reflective panels so that, when shut, it would be visible to motorists at night. To the right of the gate was a single-storey, dilapidated brick structure with a tile roof. Having seen a lot of stickers plastered to the gate and railing at the point of the merge, I doubled back to photograph them, the bicycle beneath me responding nimbly. As I was photographing stickers out by the gate, a man walked past me, whom I for the most part ignored. I had the feeling that I was being watched from the park’s thick foliage, which was now to my right (since I had turned around), which compelled me to bicycle into the brick structure. Its windows were missing, allowing isolated shafts of bright sunlight to stream into a dark, cool interior with a churned-up dirt floor. A pair of wooden pillars supported the roof overhead. The wall to my left featured one standard-sized door and three windows. At the far end of the structure was stood another set of open double doors. Near the double doors through which I’d entered were a number of interesting bits of street art, which I photographed. Feeling emboldened by being inside (and away, I figured, from prying eyes), I removed a sticker from my wallet and cast about for a good spot to stick it. As I was searching for the best possible place for my sticker to live, I glanced down at it where it was poised in my right hand. As is customary, part of it had been torn off upon completion, the other part showing an intricate, black and white drawing of a mask that resembled that of a Mexican lucha libre wrestler. americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥 Two others and I were working in a brightly-lit living area. It was a single room bifurcated by a shaft that opened onto a less-well-lit area below. The right side of the bifurcated room was fully furnished and finished, whereas the left side needed sleeping accommodations as well as work done on the walls and floors.
The man and I worked inside for a while setting up curtain rods and curtains, then exited through the tall, wooden front windows to unload mattresses from a truck parked outside. The mattresses were inflatable models, a light blue bladder underneath a darker blue woven covering, complete with tie-down straps. He’d hand them to me, I’d heave the mattresses up onto the railing above us. and then the blond-haired woman would pull them inside. After I had delivered a couple, though, she closed the blinds. And when I leaned up to pull them back, I disturbed her in the process of fixing something, or setting something up, in a corner. americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥 dreamstate writing 3 April 2017
(After my pre-dawn qigong practice I had crawled back into bed, at which point these dreams occurred. It had had been a difficult, trying practice, the right side of my brain raging and intrusive.) I was sitting with a blonde-haired girl on a concrete sidewalk next to an asphalted motorway. We were on the top of a low hill. It was bright, daytime; the sky was blue. Brick structures stood across the road to our front left and farther down the rise to our right rear. Walking paths had been worn into the scrub grasses that covered the now-empty lots around us where buildings had once stood. My bicycle lay in the grass behind us, and some part me remembers having just left a cluster of abandoned and crumbling single-storey buildings somewhere nearby. A person drove past in a rocket-powered sled of some sort, gunning the engine to maintain speed. Though it was a warm spring day there was still enough snow on the motorway to allow the the sled to slide along quickly, without its steel skis kicking up sparks. I pointed it out to my companion, who seemed nonplussed, saying something like “Oh yeah, that’s a...” (I forget the name she used for the contraption.) The next thing I remember was being in a house with colorful walls, watching a couple - a man and woman I knew well - getting ready to venture forth on an outing. They bustled back and forth within the large kitchen where I too stood, gathering things and talking to each other in quiet, friendly tones. Bright, golden light streamed into their abode from windows set into its thick outer walls to my left, warming the parquet flooring and wooden kitchen furniture. To my right was an inner wall painted an earthy red. The two were dressed in mismatched but colorful clothing, leggings and long-sleeved undershirts under shorts and t-shirts. Both wore what appeared to be straw hats with bandanas tied around their chins to keep the hats in place. They vacated the structure through a door to my rear, leaving me behind. I went to a cupboard at the far end of the room where I knew I would find a vacuum-sealed coffee thermos and a rolled up yoga-mat. The items were indeed there. I spoke with a companion, the blonde-haired girl perhaps, explaining something to her as I took out the items. I remembered, then, that I had similar items elsewhere, and put them carefully back into the cupboard. Realizing that I had other places to be, I exited into an inner courtyard with red walls. Rectangular stones paved the courtyard, which was littered with wheeled contraptions, ancient wooden pushcarts perhaps. As I was walking toward the gate that led to the outside, I passed under a broad arch that led to the exit. In the adobe above my head, directly in the center of the arch, was an opening that appeared to have been hastily-patched with a rusted ventilation register, into which I peered, finding however little of interest. americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑 a dreaming carnivore
To my rear was a broad and flat stretch of railway bordered by a low metal fence. To my left, parked upon a darkened cobblestone street, sat a police car. From within it I was being watched by something of infinite and massive proportions, That Which Cannot Be Named. I had bought a piece of meat in a nearby store, which I cooked using a pocket-sized flamethrower. The thick steak bent in upon itself sharply as it reacted to the scorching heat. Every juicy tendon and sinewy muscle fiber, the milky envelope of fascia, was clear to me, as was the essence of the beast slaughtered to produce it. (Soon after awakening, I realized that eating animals raised in conditions of torture and neglect contributes to sad and aggressive thought patterns.) Other dreams followed in the hours I spent sleeping rather than practicing my usual morning meditations. They have vanished, however, from memory. americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥 dreamstate writing 3 Mar 2017
In this morning’s dream, I was walking around outside (in an overgrown lot) looking for a place to bed down for the night. There was little ambient light, the sky above me a gray blanket trimmed with the rosy promise of dawn. Rounding the side of a one-storey brick building, I started to make my way through the trees and bushes that grew beside and behind it. Treading carefully so as not to alert the people living nearby to my presence (taller brick structures stood beyond a chainlink fence on a rise above the first building), I made noise nonetheless, the underbrush below my feet crackling loudly. On my way to the rear of the building I passed two makeshift blinds, one a flimsy construction of bent cardboard, the other a sturdier model made from a metal framework and some type of plastic cloth. Behind each blind was a pillow and a worn-down area where someone seemed to have slept recently. Security lights turned on, illuminating the area brilliantly, and I became aware of the presence of what looked like many cameras watching, unblinking eyes that tracked my every move. I attempted to lay down in an effort to avoid their gaze, but a thin beam of piercing white light shot through the chainlink fence, thwarting my every effort to escape it. Time passed, for the sky had lightened considerably. I was standing in front of the one-storey building speaking to its proprietress. She had dark hair, an attractive face, and the type of exaggeratedly-proportioned body normally found on girl’s fashion dolls. Apparently, this woman realized I found her attractive, for she turned to one side to show me her large breasts and slender waist. Then, a different woman - this one with blond hair tucked into a tattered baseball cap and wearing a bulky coat - walked out from behind my field of vision to enter the brick building, a basket of what looked like soiled clothing in her arms. I then examined the structure in front of me more closely and discovered it was a laundry-mat of sorts. The last thing I remember before waking up was that all of its washers appeared to be running at full blast. Huzzah, mahalo, and om swastiastu. americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥 dreamstate writing 2 February 2016
The entire dream is lost to me. I remember though, that at one point toward the end there was a very tall and lanky man chasing me through small and cramped hallways that were lit by an ethereal glow. Only a few times in previous dreams have I turned around to see what menace was hot on my heels. Once, I slipped from the small and cramped hallways into a filthy room, where I found an enormously fat man-beast pleasuring itself in front of a computer. Upon my intrusion it had struggled out of its rolling office chair to chase me out again, a silent howl of rage spewing from its cracked and swollen lips. While I was in the recent dream and turning to flee from the lanky man, I made eye contact with a handful of normal-sized humans who were standing about or rushing to get out of the way. One of them was a woman holding a small child. Most of the others were adolescents who appeared to be cowering in the shadows. Each of them, however, regardless of size, had eyes that were completely black, no whites showing. Their onyx pits flashed brightly at me as I picked up my feet and fled. JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑 I was again in a house, but this one had lots of windows as well as blond beams of wood exposed to a bright blue sky above. Its roof was gone in places although I was confident in the structure’s overall integrity. I’d gotten to the house after climbing a steep hill, meaning that I had been climbing a steep hill and then found myself inside the house. Unlike in previous dreams, the house was not too scary, dark, or replete with series of ever-smaller doors I felt compelled to crawl through until I was squeezed in so tightly I could not move. I experienced the sensation that the house was moving or rolling as if floating on high seas. For some reason, I climbed up onto the roof, discovering it was a hybrid between hill and house. A Buddhist temple and other shrines stood on the roof’s peak, and as I was walking along it I wondered where the hill had gotten to. To my left were other buildings, a quaint town constructed in a medieval European style. To my right was the hill, an impossibly steep mountain shrouded in mist. I was running past the temple toward the shrines at the roof’s far end when I awoke back into full consciousness.
© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥 I am aware of being in a tunnel or basement of a building, its walls white or off-white, its paint or stucco flaking, its ceiling rounded. It is partially filled with water, but I am not wet, and the water seems to be sticking only to the walls. The tunnel is lit as if by the light of day, but it has no windows. As with most dreams of this sort, which I have been experiencing for decades now, there is a presence in this lower space, an awareness, something there besides what I have learned to recognize as me, something that guides me through the now bright but normally dank and terrifying warrens. (Roughly a year ago, I was in a dream and sensed this presence, from which at the time I was fleeing, turned around, looked at it as it was diving for the shadows in the dark room I was standing in, and made eye-contact with it; an incredibly slender and pitch-black human form, it froze and looked back at me, its eyes glistening, impartial, and scared, but curious.) Usually, I am guided by this presence into ever and ever smaller rooms until I am squeezing myself through tiny spaces hidden in closets, under stairs, and around the corners in hallways. This time, however, I ascend a flight of stairs into a large and well-lit chamber with a high and vaulted ceiling, toward a longer flight of stairs to what feels to me like the place's upper levels, yet as I am approaching the longer stairs it shrinks from my approach to reveal a flight going back down into the lower tunnel, and a woman sitting at an antique wooden desk there. I focus on her blond hair but as I do a cupboard of sorts made of light-brown wood slides into view, blocking me from fully seeing her face but not the glint in her eyes. “Use these to create something that would bring me joy,” a voice I think was hers says, and hanging from the cupboard, or framework of cubbyholes similar to one found at a hotel, is a sheaf of lined, yellow paper stuck in a clipboard, with bronze push-pins in it but not in it, somehow resting upright, there on its vertical surface. I arrange them into a smiley face, ascend the stairs, and awake from the dream.
Outside my room in this physical realm, a distant loudspeaker at the nearby mosque is announcing the Muslim call to morning prayer. The sun has not yet risen, and I breathe into my 2nd chakra, filling it with white and loving light from my 4th, feeding it energy from the white-gold swastika at my 3rd. I can sense the presence there at my 2nd chakra as well as the five other, rounded containers I became aware of while meditating last Tuesday night, and I wrap the figure in blankets of loving energy, to keep her warm and absorb the layers of black gunk that usually coat her. For a moment, the layers of blanketing love soak up the sticky pitch with which she is covered, but it keeps returning, and so I keep drawing down strands of love from their central, radiant source. I have the notion to get up and start my day, but stay instead in bed, as I realize it is my ego telling me not to fall back asleep; for most of my life, I have been and, my ego keeps telling me, should still be afraid of those nether realms of consciousness, of the darkness and the presence there, of the now bright and watery but for so long fear-ridden warrens hidden away down below. Retreating from the head-space, slipping out of the ego's grip, I focus on and breathe down into into the lower chakras, and fall back asleep. When my alarm sounds at 7 a.m., vague memories linger from the rest of my morning's dreams, but a series of numbers remains stuck in my mind, and those numbers are 4 11 17 24. Mahalo, aho, om swastiastu, and namaste. JPR / Ee Ee H'oto This morning, I awoke at 3:45 and stumbled over to sit on the toilet. There I sat for 7 minutes, dozing and finishing up the rest of my dream. With a start, I forced myself awake, stood up, pulled on my underthings, and went into the back room, for yoga. I lit sage and prayed to the four directions, sang three morning songs, and at around 4:10 am started my two hours of sweat-lodge yoga. It was a new class, one I had not done before today, one focused entirely on going deeper and peeling back the layers of self-mutilation with the intention of healing the psyche's rotten core. After stretches but before starting abdominals I paused the playback and went into the living room (taking care to keep the heat in by shutting the sliding door) in order to write down the fading details of the dream I had been having just before I woke up. (In this dream, I was about to run cross a 6-lane freeway during heavy traffic, even though I had the option of using a nearby bridge to cross over it.) After writing down the details of my dream I stepped back onto the mat to do many sets of abs with a roll and as well as twisting abs with a roll, during which I began to feel muscles and tendons in my pelvis that I haven't felt in an age. The class continued and I followed the spoken instructions, breathing into and peeling back layers of hatred and self-doubt, delving with each pose deeper into the ripples of my mind, rooting around in the dank and fetid cellars of my soul. Oh what I found there! Thoughts and feelings, heartbreaks and ecstasy, all types of energies twisted up into complex knots and pulsating balls, all types of memories choking the free flow of chi, of prana, of joy. The distress I felt upon discovering these choke-points was so great that I turned off the recording and finished my session on my own, warming down gradually and granting myself a long final resting. I know that these blockages won't dissolve by themselves; it will take many more years of effort and breathing and yoga to loosen their deathly grasp, to bring healing to the zones they but poorly hide. Sitting there on the mat frustrated with myself for ending class prematurely, I remembered that in my dream, just before waking up, I had run through a gap in traffic and successfully crossed the freeway, eschewing the beckoning footbridge and landing in an entirely new world, in a place with giant walking robots and mists shining in soothing neon light. Patience, I told myself, salvation lies in patience, in practice, and in persistence. What tomorrow holds is mystery, but today is drenched in hope. Aho.
mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥 |
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