11.20.2010

WAKING DREAM

There is a dreamlife that is taking place all around us, at every moment. I am mostly closed off to it, though on occasion I have fallen prey to the visions that move back and forth across dimensions. The other night I awoke in a near fit of screaming, a paroxysm brought about by an oncoming nightmare. In the dream, a woman was encircling me in a small dimly lit room. I couldn’t make out her face and I couldn't tell if she was trying to kill me or seduce me, though I was equally fearful of both manifestations, as death and sex are one in the same in my mind. I was looking for a way to escape from her. I opened a cabinet to crawl inside and hide and came face-to-face with myself, as a baby, staring lifelessly back at me. The shock of recognizing those two glistening black irises was enough to break the plane. I awoke and lay fragmented in the twilight until my body came back into one. The sinister feeling did not leave me until later that morning when I started to write and re-entered the dream. Songs have always been the medium for revelation. The images within my dreams, along with most of my memories, are obscured. I am convinced, now more than ever, that I am living in a waking dream, and that my experience of reality comes from the delayed imaging of that dream, a flickering afterworld burned into a present conscious realm. Dreams have no true life until they are viewed in the context of our lives. The dream is conceived in a trance, but not perceived, shaped or colored until we believe that we are awake. We create the dream at the moment of our remembrance. And the dream in turn guides us, albeit mysteriously. There is no separation and no real understanding, only a clear way to stay suspended in the beauty of illusions.