Black=What?

When strange things happen to me in broad daylight– like noticing an exploded bracelet on the ground and (just like a fairy tale) I eagerly stoop to gather seed pearls scattered on the parking lot pavement, I can sense the wobbly dream world is close. And when later on the same walk, I find a small black notebook next to the abandoned tennis court on the way to the woods, there is again, this swelling of peculiar presence. Mind and body suddenly function as metaphor – I am a two-way mirror bridge. The outer world aligns so surprisingly and precisely with my internal narrative that it feels like the pleasure of rhyme followed all the way back to silence. Or the voice of a bell pulsing into inaudible vibration: here is a brief chance to notice the flavor of the void – vast, sparkling possibility! My own tongue is the permission slip, and it seems completely obvious my whole life has been a giant game of hide and seek. This is how I feel when I flip it open.

The first page has one phrase: Black = what?

A thrill of visceral Yes! is revived from the usual place it waits behind or beneath dry adult logic. If there was any vestige of a shut door feeling, it has morphed into an envelope, and inside that, an invitation to a party and a blank check to get there. This phrase feels like my own urgency to understand mystery, to sincerely feel into and inhabit the what if? of the imaginal realm rather than killing it quickly with indecision and doubt. I fan the pages like a deck of cards and open it at random.

“I find myself in a temple and we are trying to retrieve treasure at its core. But the temple has a curse so that when you enter there will be undead attacking you. So a group of fighters made a (illegible). If you can kill 4, you go lower. On one side it was dark and there were huge screens. I told some kids not to touch them, then I saw a Mac Pro and started using it.”

So, on the way to the woods during a dream draught of my own, the very day I am wondering if I should splurge on a workshop with a famous Dream Shaman, I find a trail of pearl breadcrumbs and a dream diary!? Truther than strange, I say to no one but the notebook and the breeze. I contemplate leaving it, in case the dreamer re-traces his steps, but notice the ink on the first pages already faded by rain. I put it in my pocket and step further into a parallel world where primordial longing is whispering imperceptible but resilient mysteries from a glinty edge - this time reflected in an object - lost and found.

The next day I wake up in a Somnambulance - the sirens do not shriek and blare their way through the traffic of honking thoughts swerving for attention or flipping me off while my psyche is on the way to or from the Sleep Hospital to de-frag ego detritus or dream up another day. If there are sirens, they don’t warn – they are more like luring mermaids - like rain falling on my sky light, or something equally gentle in tempo: the vent sighing heat into the room, and even quieter – my own blood circling like birds waiting their turn. Most of the time, I don’t remember this ride - only the moments prior: the blurring words on TV sometimes make a nonsense scene out of exclaimed products, the sounds in my house, and my drifting, bendy attention. But then there is usually a black -out and maybe I remember or maybe I don’t.

Today, I remember something that couldn’t have happened, but I cannot convince myself that it didn’t. It’s a dream I say to myself – people do not die and revive and then die again. Not really –not actually. I am forgetting everything I know about dreams – why am I wrestling my alligator brain into submission? Why is it so vital to extinguish the still speaking dream even now, twenty minutes later? This is the opposite of a lucid dream, as I know I am awake in bed - I know I am not dreaming, yet this impossible fiction persists like the dream classes missed, the dream degree never completed. Then there is the dream debt that feels so potent it is capable of reinforcing a pressing sense of obligation of uncertain origin that I cannot overrule, like the perpetual cosmic dial tone in my ears, indicating a receiver permanently off the hook. Except I am not off the hook - I just do not want to answer the call.

Though wary of out-of-body techniques to track visions, I enroll in the course with the Dream Shaman. I have been vigilant and startle-full most of my life – the idea of being able to relax enough in a group of strangers to access power animals and energy cures is improbable, but didn’t I just get a real invitation? A prompt concerning a small black notebook holding the dreams of a young man? Even though sober Saturn, with its dour and sometimes dire proclamations, sits in my birth chart in a position that feels like it’s ringing my neck due to my mystical concerns taking precedent over the practical, I say to myself, it is an investment in eternity! What is more important than soul retrieval? I can imagine this conversation with the lenders of my student loans; No, I cannot afford that monthly payment, I have to go to the Dream Shaman’s workshop.

“I was at this school and I worked undercover as a (illegible) to collect stars. This teacher was after me. Also, I could play the piano very well…” “I was at the museum that I keep dreaming of. I was carrying a very thin long piece of plastic that served as a temporary bow…”

I feel a bit like a peeping intruder when I read his entries, but it is also like looking into one of those panoramic sugar eggs – whole scenes are hidden inside and just like any dream narrative – anything can happen, so you don’t know what’s coming next. The night before the workshop, my own dream shouts at me with unusually stern authority from the mouth of the young man whose dreams found their way into my hands. He is waving a blown out pussy willow branch: “You must realize the Roses!” He repeated this phrase, and I was made to understand that it was deep as a multi-dimensional Buddhist mantra. The usual Lotuses translated into Roses because this is my dilemma as well - I must find a way to describe this wisdom so that it doesn’t seem like it always belongs to someone else.

After the excruciating circle of introductions, I am primed for not being able to relax. The first exercise has us all doing a group journey to the steady drumbeat of the Dream Shaman. I try to sink into the floor, let my mind start to daydream, but my spine feels impaled with tension and my mind is striving to “see” something so when the drumbeats speed up to indicate “time to come back” – I’m mad at myself that nothing happened. During the group sharing, instead of thinking I just need more practice, I let my fear habit tell me I must be illegitimate. We break for lunch with an assignment to find three things that the world behind the world is trying to communicate to us. Almost immediately I step on chewed gum, and my left sole (soul?) becomes stretchy-connected to the ground. For me, it is a message of embodiment, contradicting the mind journey that I just tried to do. Next, as I wait for my Shish Tawook sandwich, I notice that the hostess sat me in a booth right next to Isis! Her giant wingspan offers solace though I am still feeling like I “can’t” journey like the others.

I leave the restaurant, wondering what the third and final message will be. It’s a beautiful day and there is fifteen minutes left. I wander around for a bit, but then give up. Clearly, I won’t find a third thing and I sit in a park, waiting for the time to go back to the workshop.

Finally relaxing on the grass, a teenage girl wanders by and suddenly notices me. Then, just like a dream, she offers me the rose in her hand – it is like the one behind her left ear (she has a yellow lily on the right side) and asks if she can sit with me for a while. Obviously astonished, I say yes. She immediately starts to tell me about an argument she just had about splitting the pack of American Spirit with someone she doesn’t trust. She says her name is Cat and I asked if she gave herself that name and she says yes. “I am an artist and I had to name myself. My real name is Devon Ocean Bear Mulrooney.” What kind of an artist are you? A painter, musician, singer -song-writer - she rambled on about high school, and drugs, that she will be 17 on the 17th and she sang me a song of longing for her mother who is in rehab in Florida. She sounded like a 30’s lounge singer. Pretty soon another girl wanders over and Cat introduces me as her new friend, and then hugs me good-bye.

I walk back to the gathering, trailing the uncanny atmosphere with me and decide that perhaps the way things work for me is different, and maybe I can just trust that? I didn’t speak about what happened – because just like a character in a dream narrative, this girl reflected a missing soothe and I was still relishing. The next experiment was a heart journey for another person. This time, I was okay with not “going” anywhere, but was able to steep the question of my workshop partner enough to be able to give helpful advice. Then it was my turn, and I decided to ask about something baffling yet practical: How am I going to take care of my debt? It is a fault of mine, perhaps others as well, that when I ask a question like this in a dreamy, spiritualized context, I still want the information to include clear instructions on how to accomplish the task: a goal, a deadline, the precise form that it takes.

Returning from the windhorse riding on drumbeats, my journey partner was frank, though still oblique. “There is an old lady in spirit with you – she said to tell you that you should write it all down.” I want to ask: write what though!? But I know what it means. I know what to do. So I find a goal (win twenty thousand dollars!) a form (short story) a deadline (March 2). And I write it all down, trusting the world behind the world is vocal, and might just offer a victorious response.