| Date: |
2005-11-21 13:20 |
| Subject: |
Dreams of White Light and deep peace. |
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| Mood: |
Deeply Peaceful |
| Music: |
A Love Supreme |
Before Halloween, Bonnie went to North Carolina to help with the harvest of Jennifer's second son, by Cesarean section. Bonnie was delighted to be there for Jennifer and our 4 year-old grandson, Zachary.
By phone, Bonnie regaled me with stories of the day-old baby and how she and Zac went on their annual Halloween trek around the neighborhood in the dark. Zac could not see anything clever about giving people the choice of "Trick or Treat" -- so in exchange for their offered sweets, he would look up and sing out in his four year-old voice, "have a happy halloween".
The night of November 1, I slept alone in our bed in Cambridge. In the morning - I think it was at dawn - I was visited by the following dream.
In the dream, I am talking with a fighter pilot and "Boss" of the Blue Angels.
This pilot regularly landed his jet fighter on the deck of aircraft carriers pitching in 30 foot seas on moonless nights with no landing lights. If he did not catch the arresting wire with his tail-hook on every single landing, he would die in a fiery explosion and sink into the coldest depths.
In my dream I am talking with this retired fighter pilot and he is telling me about Jesus. I feel a familiar awkwardness around the conversation; I was raised as a Jew and have always felt like the foreigner, and sensed some nameless forbidding around discussions of Jesus. Further, the pilot is a very private man; conversations about Jesus are just NOT part of his normal speech. Yet, there we are and the former Blue Angel is telling me some THING about Jesus.
As I listen, I sense light coming over me, as if rising within me. It is an indescribable light, and feeling of lightness. As the light rises and expands, I lose orientation to the world. The world disappears. I disappear. Whiteness and light that obliterates everything. There is only white light.
After some long time in this state of statelessness, I begin to observe the light again, and then get that I am a self, a self observing light.
As I come back to self/consciousness I say something aloud; maybe "I believe", but whatever words I uttered, the words do not mean 'I take a leap of faith'. Just the opposite; the clear sense of my utterance is "I have experienced: I can not say anything, but I have experienced."
I am then going along in the dream. The scene is just everyday life, but I no longer feel the dullness of everyday-ness. I see a woman. I sense that there is something missing or incomplete about the woman. Spontaneously she is enveloped in light. I did not DO anything, or will anything. The light spontaneously flows to where it needs to be. The woman moves on. She is no longer incomplete.
I begin to awaken. I replay the dream for myself. I am aware that I have both had a dream ... AND that I have had an experience that is NOT a dream. I have a pronounced sensation in my body, distinctly around my heart and throughout my body that I have been filled with light - at once emptied and filled.
I find myself thinking, how perfect; If I were ever to have a religous experience about Jesus, it would HAVE TO come to me as a dream, for I would reject any such event in a church, with the rationale that I had been overwhelmed by some rhetoric. Likewise if I had the experience using drugs as a sacrament, I would attribute the experience to the drugs themselves.
I find myself deconstructing the dream. I see that the fighter pilot is not actually the man I know in my everyday life, but rather a warrior archetype portraying a kind of consciousness. In the dream, the fighter pilot manifests 'zero-state consciousness' that allows one to fly a gossmar line in the teeth of a gale, through the blackest night and land on a tiny steel deck with an economy of motion and emotion: He neither forgets nor focuses on what happens if he bounces or misses the arresting wire.
As I unpack the dream, in my mind's eye I see the Tarot card of the ancient man with his lantern raised to light the path at his feet. I see that God/Reality HAS been a lamp unto our feet so far. All we have done is observe where the path is illuminated and follow where our feet carry us.
As I unfold and replay the dream, alone in our warm bed, I sense that the woman is both Bonnie, and not Bonnie. The woman is Bonnie in that I feel assured (not guaranteed) that all will be fine with Bonnie's health. And the woman in the dream is not Bonnie, as she does not have a distinct face, but rather she is simply the Other.
I think again how we have been following that path of caring for the Other, and the synchronicity of being given a residence at 15 St. Johns to live when we came to the Episcopal Divinity School. I looked up John 15: where Jesus sums up his teaching; "Love each other" He says. This is our address now, and our path forward.
So I am now awake in our bed. I am alone. I am different. I am not alone.
Over the next day or two I think I must go tell the Bishop about my dream, as if there is something more the Bishop should do to somehow confirm me or my dream.
As I hold this thought, I see, on the very face of it, just how silly the notion is. There is no thing any man or priest can say or do that alters the dream. The experience is the experience. There is no sprinkling of holy water or incantations that can add to the experience, nor authority who can nullify it.
I find myself settled; I see I need no outside confirmation to seal the dream; Only now do I have the sense I can share the dream.
I love to josh Bonnie by saying I can not understand why she would want to work in a Church for a Bishop; Our God makes house calls. /D