dream-state writing

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