Recently I pulled out my dream notebooks after several years of neglect. I still get a lot of inspiration from my dreams, but I find that all too often the intrusions of waking life keep me from retrieving the power and wisdom dreams have to offer.
At one point in my life keeping up with my dreams was the most important consideration of my day, and I slowly allowed it to become a chore - recalling and recording my dreams usually lasted an hour or more. The best recall came immediately upon awakening and I trained myself to put pen to paper first thing in the morning. I postponed breakfast to scribble out the muddled tracings of the previous night. There were often dreams of such power and immediacy that I would wake in a start, and bound from my bed at 3 am to write them at my desk. Sometimes there were lucid dreams of flying, or of being so awake and aware in a dreamscape that I had to ask myself, as John Keats wrote, "Do I wake or sleep?"
One dream of the this type still haunts me: I stood in the parking lot of a familiar shopping mall and suddenly looked up in the sky to see Jupiter risen in the late afternoon sky. It was huge, and its thick clouds and great red spot roiled and amazed. I knew I had never seen Jupiter so plainly beautiful and enormous in the sky. People walked by me in the lot, and it was curious to me that they took no notice of this spectacle. I became aware I was probably dreaming, but nothing in my surroundings (except Jupiter) seemed out of the ordinary. I watched the fabric on a woman's dress as she walked by, I studied the cars in the lot, I walked to the mall building and felt the texture of its brick. Every sensation and study of my surroundings convinced me I was in waking life. I thought to myself, 'Well, if this is a dream, I guess I will wake up now.' - and I did!
Over time, I've become convinced that the real life we possess is in consciousness, and that dream-life is no less consequential than waking life. Reality is consciousness, and consciousness is reality. I can knock on wood in a dream world as surely as I can in the material world. Dreams have the power to wake us up to our material lives, and the material world has the power to put us to sleep in our spiritual lives.
The usual response among the hard-boiled is that dreams are tripe, but I would counsel any that have ears to hear of becoming too certain in any matter. In A Farewell to Arms Hemingway fictionalizes his own near-death experience and the effect it had on his consciousness throughout the rest of his life:
"I ate the end of my piece of cheese and took a swallow of wine. Through the other noise I heard a cough, then came the chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh - then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died. Then I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back. I breathed and I was back."
'I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died.'
The release of his consciousness convinced Hemingway that something else was going on here. My belief in something more substantial and meaningful than the ever-changing phenomena of our 'real lives' infuses all my writing. I've found that getting to 'the truth' of a matter is more important than getting to 'the facts', and fiction provides me with the opportunity to discuss truth without becoming overly invested in fact-finding.
In this blog I will be sharing with you, in a more immediate and less formal manner, the underpinnings of my fictional writings. I hope you find my musings worthwhile.
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