I once had a mutual dream with a good friend. We agreed to meet in a dream on the occasion of one of us becoming lucid. When I entered the lucid zone I looked for my friend, Rob, who lives a few blocks from me. I flew into a dark space, much like a dungeon, where my friend was enraged in some theatrical S/M. It had a druggy feeling.
" Rob," I called out," this is a dream, let’s get out of here."
Rob rejected my suggestion and turned back to the activity. He was playing the sadistic role. I looked for an exit from this scene and found a small refrigerator. I opened the door and the bulb inside lit up the dark prison cell. I stuck my dream head into the light bulb, merged, and flew out of that space.
The next day I asked Rob if he had a dream. He said he was in a prison, doing drugs, engaged in an S/M ritual and a little boy tugged on him and said," This is a dream." He told the kid to get lost.
I never told Rob what I remembered from the dream, for I was aware of how fragile our boundaries are and that I was not responsible enough to play at this level. Rob overdosed from heroine a few weeks later. I had not known how deep into drugs he was.
Could I have intervened if I had been a little more self-aware? I’m not sure. At any rate, I found it extremely interesting that he resisted me in the dreams-cape, and perceived me, not as a man but as a child.
This cautionary tale I offer points to the fact that we are very open in our dreams to intrusion and to beneficial influence. Many messages appear and disappear, morph and change form. It was Christ who said I am what you have need for me to be.
So, telepathy among friends or foes is no doubt happening, now, on a grand scale, as there are so many of us on the planet, wrestling with so many agendas, with techno gadgets polarizing our energy centers in weird ways. Hence, my ongoing plea that we train ourselves to give attention to what we are giving our attention to.
Even with the best of intentions and a desire to frame something useful to the group, to gather attention is very difficult especially when working with our collective amnesia. Most of us are not aware of a small fraction of what is happening in the Imaginal Body. I speak to this struggle between day and night, male and female in my own troubled and noisy sensorium and tried to create a map of this. Clean Language is a very flexible tool for exploring the symbolic realms.
Finding ways to share this symbolically in a group is the only way to protect the psyche. Prone as we are to delusion it is necessary to have a community of competent people to work out the kinks in the psychic armor. Concepts without percepts, as Kant once remarked, will leave us sterile and barren.
The bell, which I spontaneously brought into the circle, suggests to me a deep dilemma that mirrors rather precisely the nature of the liminal zones. We are on the border between, like the area that touches the different spaces marked out by a resonating bell, or by a flowing, topsy-turvey lemniscate- is the location of the imagined or the physical on the inside or the outside? Each sensorium is different, just as each blade of grass is a different shade of green.
Thanks for the feedback, Marco. We did not get to meet with Seth on your last visit to New York as I had hoped. We might arrange to do that online as Seth and I are trying to organize from within the lock-down. We are aiming for this Friday if I can get enough of a group attention to tune in.
And what would be the first sign to let me know when I have received my desired outcome?
I would know when I got a report from someone that the relational process had made another relational process happen. There could be a second step and a third step. An action plan might emerge. There is a method to my madness.
Seth and I want to work with how we could co-create necessary conditions for our desired outcomes. To do this we need to balance centrifugal and centripetal forces. This is a level from which we rarely engage collaboratively and I am open to believe that a few good men can become good midwifes. We have barely scratched the surface of the surface structure of this vast, bottomless, deep structure.
And if you can join us, Marco, next time during this turbulent time which reverberates through us, I trust that you will bring your soaring, poetic voice with you!
