Crap of the World Distracting You from Your Power

This is a painting in a temple called Mulkirigawa.  

A demon is snacking away on someone, but no one seems 

to notice or care.  

I've been having a lot of dreams that are showing me how I get "distracted from my Zen," as a friend of mine says.  How I have the power to enjoy life and create what's most meaningful to me, but the Crap of the World wedges its way in and makes me forget that.  Here are a few of my recent dreams.

A man is in prison. A big inmate is torturing him. It’s almost like wrestling, but the other inmate has the advantage of being huge. He’s slowly pushing the smaller man into a stone bench and positioning himself so that the man (I’ll call him the protagonist) is being sandwiched between this massive body and the unforgiving stone bench. This will definitely hurt. Then the larger man is inching the protagonist’s head between the bars of the cell window. Once the protagonist’s head is wedged in there, the big man can do a simple twist and snap his neck. The horror is that it happens so slowly and the protagonist knows what will happen, a slow-building dread he can do nothing to ward off.

Except he does.  The protangonist says with all his earnestness and calmness, “I don’t want you to do this.”  

His desire is very pure, not tainted by fears (the "OMG what if it doesn't work!" or "What if I'm just kidding myself?" sort of fears).

Slowly, the big man changes positions. He will not kill the protagonist after all.

Did you ever beat a bully in school without lifting a finger? Realizing that the one thing the bully craved more than anything else was your reaction?  Remember the freedom of saying, "No?" and laughing, seeing the bully struggle to respond, not knowing what to do because you refused to play the only game he knew?

Yeah, it's kind of like that.  You remember your power.

***
And this dream was  a kick in the ass about not being distracted from the divine (which in this dream was symbolized by an advanced space culture) by stupid pop culture bullshit, the crap our society says is important.

D and I lived in a beautiful, old two-story house. We had installed in the attic a state-of-the-art home theater. It projected holograms that were fully immersive; our favorite was a giant squid swimming above our heads (more marine life!). It seemed like a great personal accomplishment–not just something we had bought.  We'd created this means to make our visions visible to others.

But then I got something even cooler than that! An iPad-like device was delivered to my house, sent by friendly space men. The device was something I should turn on when I wanted to talk. I might have to wait for a connection to open on their end, but they would get my message. The colors were very spacey–black, white, deep fuschia, deep green, cobalt blue.  The people were kind, gentle, and friendly.

Just as I decided I wanted to turn on the device, the actor Tom Cruise burst into my house! Tom begged for a place to hide because a group of obsessive women were stalking him. He wanted a place where they couldn’t see him. I felt kind of sorry for him so I agreed to let him and his handler go upstairs where our projector was. They didn’t give me a good feeling though, more like I was invisible once they had what they wanted. Unfortunately one of the women peeked in my window and saw, and then the fans were all trying to storm my house. Irritated, I went on the porch and threw them off, punching some and literally tossing them off the porch. One of the women’s husband showed up randomly–he was a lawyer and threatened to sue me for assault.

“Great,” I thought. “How did I get roped into this?”

I got into it because I engaged the stupid pop culture drama.  I was talking with alien beings--what an amazing, life-changing thing!  What would it mean for science?  But no, I got distracted by freakin' Tom Cruise (who is certainly not a favorite actor of mine) and his celebrity drama.  Is this like getting sucked into the Daily Mail website and going, "No way, Princess Beatrice did NOT wear those shoes to the Queen's Jubilee?!" Or in political theater, "No way, Mitt Romney did NOT just say that ridiculous thing!  OMG SO OUTRAGED GONNA RANT ON FACEBOOK!!!!!"

There goes your power--you just gave it to mass media and Facebook.  They say thanks, BTW.

***

And then there’s this one about using love to quell evil, and especially how evil will retaliate with threats and play on our fears.  Anything to distract us from what's real and beautiful and good.

My parents and I went to visit one of my mother’s friends. It was a snowy even and their house was built on a small cliff. The man who greeted us was dark-haired and had a wry sense of humor. I don’t know how I discovered that their teenage daughter was possessed. She lived in a sub-basement with bars on it, I assume to protect others from the demon. She was actually a very sweet girl but the demon, of course, was hateful. I started pouring love energy into her with my hands, similar to how I do energy healing in waking life. The demon hated it to the extreme! It made all sorts of threats but they were empty, and eventually it left the girl…

… and went into her boyfriend, who was staying at the house. The problem now was that the boyfriend was not sweet like his girlfriend. He had no compunction about using weapons. So he aimed a gun at me and I tried to duck and evade his aim. “Didn’t expect that, did you?” he said. Eventually I convinced the demon to use weapons other than guns and we were both using what seemed to be sledgehammers. But in the end, I used the same energy to drive the demon out of him, and when I woke, I realized the whole thing had a slow-motion, play-acting effect, as if I was never in any real danger and was only afraid that I was.

What exactly is this evil?  I don't pretend to have a succinct, accurate or comprehensive definition.  But I do know that it tries it's very hardest to make you forget your own power.  Just like a damned bully!

Geographically-odd water elemental dreams

D has been watching a cartoon series called Avatar.  I haven't been watching it with him, but apparently the imagery is seeping into my dreams psychically or something, because when I tell him about my dreams, he says, "It's like Avatar!"   We tend to share dreams and dream elements so it's no surprise, but today I joked, "Ok, keep your tv shows out of my dreams!"

Apparently the show has a lot of water imagery, which is heavy in my mind lately due to my love affair with the ocean.  Here is the one I woke from this morning.


In this dream, I had traveled to  coastal Virginia, a place I've never been in waking life.  Virginia had barrier reef islands, rows and rows of these long, thin and green islands, some no more than a foot across, and others big enough to put a house on. You could jump or swim easily to each one.  They were incredibly beautiful and my vision was overlaid with imagery from an old-time map, something more suited to the South Pacific.

This was Virginia?  I was floored.

I was there with two friends, one a Virginia resident who showed us around.  The ocean water was cold but shallow in some places and safe to get into. It flowed stronger in two places.  In one, it was a small river or rushing creek curling around the sand.  We gasped because the rushing water opened its eyes and looked at us!  It was in the shape of a woman sort of bent in on herself, long hair braided and flowing.  I assumed she was a water elemental.  The other fast-moving water was a large river flowing rapidly over a perfectly flat, smooth area into the ocean. I was hesitant to enter this water, unsure of the currents.

The whole thing was astoundingly beautiful!

My friend, the Virginia girl, took us into a very old, dungeon-like building that had many underground levels.  I passed by some rednecks (?) having a conversation.  I passed by rooms with skulls and bones barely visible behind crumbling stones.  It actually wasn't creepy and was warmly lit with torches.  We were adventuring and enjoying each others' company.

Can you consciously develop passion?

Steep Ravine near Stinson Beach, Photo by Evan Blaser

I'm back from a beautiful weekend with old friends. We camped under gnarly cypresses (I think!) above Stinson Beach in Northern California. The fog hung on the hills in the early morning; dolphins jumped and seals poked their heads through the oncoming waves, either curious about us or wishing we'd get the hell off their beach. I opened my tent one morning to see a buck, two does, and two fawns staring at me. Little quails scurried away from me as I walked. At night, I could see shooting stars and the Milky Way through the clear sea air, and we spotted many satellites.

Career coaches sometimes say, "What you want to do on your day off is what you should be doing with your life." If I won the lottery, I would get myself a cabin overlooking one of the more primal beaches in this area, and then I would sleep.  When awake, I'd walk and meditate until I grew tired, and then I'd sleep again.  I try to come up with someone more productive, but I can't get past simple sleeping and observing nature. That's my deepest personal desire. I suppose this indicates that I've coped with profound exhaustion by avoiding passion.

Yikes ... let me say that again and make myself really see this:  I've coped with profound exhaustion by avoiding passion.

I don't think I'm alone. If you have lived with exhaustion and illness since childhood, you might shy away from anything that gets you too excited and uses too much energy. After awhile, it becomes default.  Consequently, you coast and do whatever takes the least amount of energy.  When you do indulge your interests, exhaustion forces you to stop before you can do anything productive.  This is a serious problem because passion is what moves people to put up with hardship required to get them where they want to be.  Passion is what distinguishes "This hobby is pretty cool and I'll work on it when I feel like it" from "I will do whatever it takes to indulge this activity as often as possible and make it my life."

How does one regain passion?  Can you regain it if you never actually had it?  Can it be consciously developed and if so, how?  How can you sidestep the exhaustion that comes from a chronic illness and regain passion?

In the meantime, I'm planning for our next excursion to a campsite on the sand, under palm trees near Santa Barbara.

Lines and Stories

A random thought: if I were an alien investigating an unfamiliar Earth and its human species, I would probably not be enthralled with youthful beauty.  I would probably be more interested in very old people, viewing the lines on their faces as beautiful, intricate maps.

Also, here's an excerpt from a 2008 dream I rediscovered:


How weird it was!  It was a dark room lit by blue-green Christmas lights.  Two figures sat on thrones.  They were Auberon and Titania, the King and Queen of the Fairies.  They were surrounded by a throng of people, including many small children.  They were all asking questions and the place had a warm, friendly atmosphere but also an air of awe.

I sat down next to Titania.  She looked a lot like how Charles Vess drew her in “The Books of Magic” but when I looked closely at her, she was not ageless.  She had small lines under her eyes, making me think she was a bit older than me.  She turned to me and I understood that I could ask her a question.

“If fairies are real,” I said, “why can’t I see them?”

She laughed and I got this sense of “Oh my, that’s a loaded question, are you sure you really want to know the answer?”  She passed some technical information to me that I couldn’t quite grasp (“technical” as in “here’s the reason”).  I indicated that I wanted to see the fairies despite this.

“All right,” she said.  “We’ll try to arrange some special events and see if you notice.”

At that moment, I realized that everything around me had faded and that underneath that scene was a man’s voice speaking English but I couldn’t follow what he was saying.  It had been there all along.  That’s what the fairy encounters would be like, I realized.  It was about being aware of the voice underneath.


I suppose that's what any phenomenon is built on: a story running underneath the events.  Or perhaps story-telling is a synthesis only we humans have mastered.  Regardless, I'm trying very hard to listen for the voice underneath reality, but my monkey mind chatters so loud sometimes.  Give that monkey a banana!  It can't talk when it's eating delicious bananas.

(Photo "Cuba Camaquey" by Anja Disseldorp)

Dream techniques for dealing with nastiness

I had a few recent dreams that illustrated how subtle energies affect me, and techniques I can use to lessen the effects of nasty, disturbing energy. This first one occurred while I was sick.  I snipped the beginning, in which I was showing prospective buyers around the house we live in (a bleedover from waking life).


The house's sub-basement was was incredibly creepy though I couldn’t explain why. A couple of the prospective buyers were counterculture to the extreme; one tattooed, eyelinered guy in black had what looked like wooden beads pierced all over his face.  He was saying, “And then, in that room,” (he pointed to the creepy sub-basement) “they decided to put Deborah and her baby.  Can you believe it?  You put a girl like that in there, AND the baby? You can imagine how that turned out.”


Then someone grabbed my hand and said, “Here, I need to show you this.”  He ran inside the door of the creepy room and shut it, leaving me standing outside, wondering what was going on.  Suddenly I heard voices, oily whispers, multiple beings speaking and their voices weaving in and out of each other’s.  I don’t remember now what they were saying, but something about “the girl.” It was disturbing–genuinely distressing– to hear.


Then I heard the man inside say, in a very harsh, firm voice that rose above the whispers, “I know, right? This is when you pull yourself together, and you walk right past it like you don’t even hear it.  Walk away and you’ll be just fine.” 


I got a quick flash of insight on what had happened to Deborah.  She hadn’t walked away, possibly because she was innocent and naive and no one had warned her.  She let the voices in.  As if I were her, I felt the entities rush into her body and her eyes rolled back in her head.  She had an almost orgasmic rush of energy, but it was so heavy and dark.  I woke up then.


And then this quick little fragment, which offered another solution to ugly energy:


I dreamed of beautiful blue crystal-like pinwheels in the sky, and received a message to invoke them when doing unpleasant things like paying bills.  The idea was to negate some of the unpleasantness with something beautiful.


Interestingly, paying bills isn't a particularly heinous task for me, but it was the example in the dream.  I've dreamed of gorgeous crystal-like lights in the sky before, and they had a similar effect.

(Photo "Kazaguruma Pinwheels" by Edmund Garman; this was "A display made for Child Abuse Awareness")

Seafaring cats are saving your ass

Here's a quick, amusing dream:


I dreamed that D and I were in a layer of reality that wasn’t exactly false, but it was very limited.  We somehow realized that a larger layer was available and managed to get into it, but were immediately sent back by …. cats?  The cats were fighting a war in the larger layer to protect the sub-layer that we were in.  The cats were surprised that we’d crossed over and wanted us to stay out of the larger layer.  It was not safe.  I associate these cats with ships, like seafaring ships.

I have three cats.  None of them appear to be fighting a war; they're awfully lazy for that.  

I think this dream may have been inspired by some of Palyne's writing.

(Photo by Electric Nerve)

Problems with protecting physical energy

As someone with a few chronic illnesses, I learned to be protective of my time and energy, choosing carefully where to expend my energy because once my meager supply was used up, there was nothing left for anything else.  This was and is a practical strategy but the problem is that  now that I'm slowly getting better, I still have years' worth of "don't expend too much effort!" conditioning to overcome.


I am climbing a tapestry wall with a dream friend, just as though we are rock-climbing on a mountain.  We’re chatting as we go when I noticed that I’m coming up on  a bare area of the tapestry.  There will be no fingerholds.  I ask my friend what happens if I can’t go further.  I mean, it’s a long way down, how do I get down?  I don’t want to take the chance of continuing to try climbing up and falling. She rolls her eyes and laughs, as though that’s a silly question. “You’ll be fine,” she says.  I remain unconvinced and with sudden dream power, I levitate/scoot myself to a newer, brightly-colored tapestry next to us.  It’s a “beginner’s” I understand, meant to be easier and non-threatening, but see no reason to crawl along on that other one that’s threadbare, dangerous, and not as interesting.  The weave is big and easy to hold on to, and I quickly reach a plateau where the threads become a shelf you can sit on and watch the world below go by.  I feel content and look around from my perch.  I don’t know if the tapestry continued–I woke up.


Should I have stayed on the difficult, worn tapestry that was more advanced?  If I had persevered, would I have seen great wonders like a climber on Mount Everest?  Or was I smart in hopping to the easier, prettier tapestry, deciding there was no reason to trudge up some boring old thing simply because many people before me had done so.  I feel this way about life sometimes--people often do things the hard way just because "that's how it's done" when there's a far easier, pleasanter way of going about things.  Then again, sometimes you have to do shit you don't want to do and waste tons of time practicing boring things if you want to get to the good stuff.  Ask any musician about practicing scales.


Here's another one that clearly pointed out the value of "showing up" to work on a goal. It was a variation on the old “didn’t study for my finals” anxiety dream.


I was showing up to the last class of what might have been an art history class, knowing that I’d been to about three classes this semester.  I thought I'd still have a chance at passing, but I was embarrassed about the four other classes I'd ditched.  Really, there was no way I’d pass.  I didn’t even bother to take the finals and try my luck.


But strangely, this art history professor allowed us to see her written assessment of us, something that would go in our class file and contribute to her final grade.  I think I did pass, barely, but that was almost unimportant when I saw what she wrote.  She said that I was fun and had “a quaint sense of humor” but her hands were tied because I wouldn’t show up for class.  There was nothing she could really do or say, regardless of her personal opinion of me, if I did not attend.  Furthermore, she seemed irritated at this.  Her words emanated a feeling of “Why is this person throwing away this opportunity?”  I felt extremely embarrassed.


I couldn't say what this is about exactly; there are so many things I start and stop given my "must protect my energy" thing.  So I have to think.  I asked for clarification in further dreams, but didn't have any luck.