Underlying Reality Beneath It All

As I have gotten older and had a chance to catalog my dreams, I've noticed that each dream, though bizarre and individual in the narrative, is beginning to self-assemble. It's as if I am given only brief, random glimpses into another life - a life that keeps on moving even when I'm not around. This is not a normal life and perhaps the oddity of it all comes from our conscious attempt to make sense of the nonsensical. However, over time, recurring geography, architecture, people, machines, and themes all overlap into something more cohesive than random.

I doubt all of the pieces will ever completely fall into place, but I do wonder what it all means. I guess it is easy to dismiss as meaningless and silly the thought of meditating and focusing on these dreams. But at one time it also seemed silly and meaningless to focus a telescope on a dark section of sky. If there is something to be seen, surely we can see it. Of course, we could not see it and the film on these night-long, telescopic exposures revealed the most amazing and wonderful things. Distant galaxies, quasars, pulsars, supernovae - these would all be hidden from sight without astronomy's patient meditation on the heavens. And, taken apart, these cosmological phenomenons all seemed utterly mysterious and random - it's only when we realized that there was an underlying reality beneath it all, did it begin to make some sense.

I'm sure we are still many millions of years away from really understanding it, but perhaps there is a psychological parallel to our cosmological discoveries. Many great thinkers have already said that the greatest frontier left to conquer is the mind. Who knows what amazing and wonderful things await us there. Here is the latest glimpse from that bizarre world, my dream from last night…

I was in someone's backyard, somewhere in some suburb somewhere in the United States. We sat at a picnic table discussing the demon. I had requested a mandala tattoo from the tattoo artist that had a studio there in the backyard. He asked his assistant to begin. Before I knew it, the tattoo covered my entire left arm including the palm of my hand. I had to explain that my career would not allow such things. The artist seemed disappointed, like she had done me some favor that I was not happy about. She searched for a way to strip off the first few layers of skin to remove the tattoo. I asked her to complete the mandala anyway. I was weak. The mandala had to be complete before I could fight the demon.

I had a piece of raw chicken with an embedded switch that vibrated when the demon was close. I clicked the switch to the highest level of sensitivity. I was sitting next to the tattoo artist. He seemed worried and he watched the chicken to check the vibrations. We noticed that the chicken stopped vibrating - I think the batteries ran out. Then we ran into the house and saw the flying demon approaching in a flying limousine. My weapon was a samurai sword. He was too fast and I could not hit him - no matter how hard I tried. He bounced around like Nightcrawler from X-Men.

I did go to sleep reading Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse, so perhaps this dream makes perfect sense.