Dream of November 15, 2013
For the third time, I dream of getting up in the middle of the night in order to move to the Den, where my lucid dreaming bed is. The house looks just as it actually does, and I’m convinced I’m awake. I collect my two pillows along with my iPod, but then pause on my way down the hall to turn the light off in that other (not real) bedroom where I dreamed about my two earlier Wake Back To Bed attempts. However, the light in this room will not turn off completely; the circular lamp on the ceiling keeps glowing faintly, like a tiny electrical moon.
With a mental shrug, I continue to the Den. One of the glass doors is open, and I become aware of a strong wind blowing outside. The room is lit as if by bright moonlight, and I feel intensely alive, incredibly excited to be here. There is a white blanket bunched up at the foot of the mattress I don’t recognize, but it feels intricately woven and of very soft, fine quality. The invigorating wind is blowing directly over the bed, across which are strewn some light-brown seeds, the kind that twirl through the air like tiny propellers. Everything feels absolutely real, yet also magical…
I wake abruptly, and am amazed I haven’t really gotten up yet. This time I actually do so, and move to the bed in the Den, where I soon fall asleep again…
Proceeding straight to the dark Den, I sit down in the place where my lucid dreaming bed is in reality and gaze out the Bay Windows. In the darkness outside, I can just make out snow falling, with the flakes blowing east to west in a strong wind. I think—Oh nice, the first snowfall of the year!
Suddenly, I distinctly hear my mother’s voice talking. Mami is definitely in the house. I get up, open the Den doors, and my mother walks right in. The room is suddenly well lit in a soft, realistic way, as though she brought the light with her. She’s wearing a pretty, ankle-length blue-green nightgown, and she has that ageless young look about her she usually does in my dreams. Still talking, she sits down close to the Bay Windows.
Looking at her intently, I realize out loud, “Mami, you know you’re actually asleep and dreaming. You’re not really here. This is a dream. We’re in a dream.” I can tell from her expression that she understands what I’m telling her, but after a moment of considering the possibility, she says, “No, it can’t be. I don’t remember going to bed.”
I know what she means—she doesn’t have a realistic sense of continuity, of having been doing something before finding herself here. I reply, “That happens to all of us. We don’t have a sense of a break in the linear flow of our life, which is why so few people ever wake up in their dreams and realize they’re dreaming. You actually did go to sleep, and this is a dream. Come on, Mami, remember when you wake up that it was 3:30 in the morning, and you were just at Maria’s house in a dream…”
As I speak, I’m becoming increasingly aware of the wind blowing even more strongly outside. Glancing out the Bay Windows, I see a pair of black tree branches lying across the driveway. In waking reality this might be cause for concern, but in a dream the powerful wind is purely exhilarating. Watching the snow blowing past the windows like an endless white veil, I open my arms wide and let out a cry of sheer exultation that harmonizes with the keening of the wind outside. I am the storm! I am this magical wind! It is an absolutely marvelous experience to be fully awake and alive in a dream!
Suddenly, I see my maternal grandfather quickly walking out of the Den into the living room. Dressed all in black, he is as thin and elegant as he was in reality. I declare, “And Abuelo is dreaming with us too!” as I follow him into the living room. “Abuelito?” I call, and although he seems to hear me, I perceive he is not as lucid as Mami. Then I notice the front door is half open, and that a tall Christmas tree is growing just outside it. Decorated with shining red and gold balls, the tree looks as though it is actually part of the door. It is a perfectly lovely Christmas tree, but I feel I should close the door to prevent snow from blowing into the room, and perhaps a bear from wandering inside…
I am sitting in the dark Den across from the glass doors against which my lucid dreaming bed should be, but instead there is a sort of couch directly across from me, occupied by the unclothed figure of a man I can just barely see. He bends his head and, in a flash, I perceive his skull, which resembles a speckled egg. Seeing it is indistinguishable from knowing, viscerally feeling/ grasping/understanding that his skull is also my skull, because we are One! I remember what I read somewhere “It will come to you as a revelation” because it just has! The figure raises his head, and I glimpse my husband’s features, but at the same time, I know it could be anyone’s face. The “egg” of his head is also my head, we are the same thing split in two, split into endless trillions, yet there is no difference between us. This single “egg” can wear countless faces, but there is only one Life, one miraculously sentient Being…
The dream scene changes. I now seem to be watching a film of myself. My perspective is akin to having my face pressed right up against the bottom of the glass doors directly facing the white border of a circular moonlit pool shimmering just outside the Den.
Rising up out of the water, I move gracefully and swiftly counter clockwise along the pool’s white border. It is definitely me, yet I don’t perceive any of the signs of aging I expected, and dreaded. In one seamless motion, I rise from the pool’s dark water, walk a complete circle around the white stone border, and bend down to kiss myself on the lips! Wow! As she/me keeps her mouth on mine, I study her breasts and figure, appreciating the fact that she/me is slender and flawless in an ageless way. She/me looks like my dream body merged with my physical body, her/my skin a healthy, living color beneath her/my flowing moon-white hair. The experience of being kissed by myself is incredible. Even though I am observing her, I am her, and she is me. She/me straightens up, smiling down at me…
I believe I wake up lying in my lucid dreaming bed. Mami is sitting on a green couch at the foot of the bed, and I sense she has been here for a long time, observing me. She says, “I’m so tired” and I realize she’s been watching over me as I dreamed. I’m glad she’s here, but feel bad that I kept her up. “Go to sleep now,” I urge, and as she begins trying to get comfortable on the couch, I say, “Come and sleep on the bed with me.” I move over to the left, and as she puts her book and pen down on a nightstand, preparing to slip under the covers with me, I wake for real. ★ End of Dream ★
The next day, I emailed Mami my dream, and she responded:
“A few days ago, in the Raven bookstore, I bought for less than $3 dollars, a volume of all the paintings of the Sienese school that are in the Metropolitan Museum of New York. And that iconic image of Segna di Buonaventura, who lived during the first part of the XIV Century, Christ Blessing, struck me as a good semblance of your husband. Then, when I got to this part of your dream: “I remember what I read somewhere “It will come to you as a revelation” because it just has! The figure raises his head, and I see my husband’s features, but at the same time I know it could be anyone’s face” I also remembered a line from the Gospel of John: “For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.”i He is the One you saw behind the mirage.”
The image of Christ Mami emailed me really does resemble my husband, but it looks even more like the face I saw in my dream. I feel my mother was a messenger of Christ; she entered my dream space, bringing the light with her, and remained with me all night.
I knew, in my dream, that I was experiencing a revelation. I know now that the wind blowing around the house of my self was the Holy Spirit. I saw a Christmas tree just outside the front door, a dream image I see as expressing how I had put my Christian upbringing outside of my present way of thinking, but it was still there in my heart, still part of me, just as the tree was part of the house. It was my mother’s father who led me into the living room, and this vision of a Christmas tree. I often recall how at his wife’s funeral, Abuelito looked earnestly into my eyes and said to me in English, which he rarely spoke, “You just have to faith, Mari. You just have to have faith.”
At the time I had this dream, I was flirting with the idea that the bear was my spirit animal. It seemed everywhere I turned, lucid dreamers were talking about their experiences in shamanic terms, and I was, albeit very reluctantly, considering learning more about this perspective myself. But in my dream, I didn’t want to let the bear in, and it was the Christmas tree which was part of my home, part of my soul. After this incredible night, I began detaching myself from pagan systems of thought. It was becoming increasingly apparent that Christian mysticism was my soul’s true path.
“In one seamless motion, I rise from the pool’s dark water, walk a complete circle around the white stone border, and bend down to kiss myself on the lips… Even though I am observing her, I am her, and she is me.”
It was an incredible experience to watch what I felt to be my soul rising up out of the Water of Life, and literally coming full circle to kiss my self. I feel now that this was the moment I finally let go of the futile vanity of self reliance as, through the power of the Holy Spirit, I was born again from above.
Jesus replied, “I assure you, no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit.* Humans can reproduce only human life, but the Holy Spirit gives birth to spiritual life. So do not be surprised when I say, ‘You must be born again.’
John 3:5-7ii *The Greek Spirit can also be translated Wind.
i John 3:16 New Living Translation
ii John 3:6-8 New Living Translation