Activate the Dream

I believe that life is a dream. Its pretty simple actually. I realize I am dreaming yet am not always self-reflective enough to be able to predict or project in a focused manner, as a magician would, the precise images I would like to step into. Therefore, many times the “dream,” used now in the sense of an idealist goal-oriented wishing, stays stuck as a dream. It remains a daydream that keeps the routine manageable, perhaps even manageable enough to not do anything inspired in order to seize the current doing that is taking place. Taking place and owning (making you that which is possessed) the time in which you could be living out the “dream” aka fantasy in actuality. Yes, in your very real life. Reality in the non day dream, non night dream, real dream magic-ality. Made by you for you (with the help of all the friends we meet along “the way” which is certainly littered with mishaps and unrealized unconscious drives that lead us head long into the many harsh cathartic trails of life).

I tempt to portend the fantasy by beginning the work of dreaming in an active verses passive sense. By switching on the active I threaten fantasies role of keeping me bound to an over-sized fan incessantly being waved to cool the blissed blaze of the would be, could be, should be me actually in ecstasy. Shite, fantasies are tricky, just then they tried to trip me up into their bliss hold, having me assume that what I really wanted was to be in ecstasy, yet if I follow the word, which the etymologist in me cant help but do, coming from the Greek ekstasis, ecstasy implies anything displaced, or out of place, and in a trance. I am trying to wake up here, and find my place in the world, not be an incapacitated bewildered body so my soul can frolic around the universe convulsing in things divine. Tempting, believe me, but I am sure my soul is already getting plenty of tripped out euphoria by being inherently divine, so that train of thought no longer thrills me. Here, I am a body, mind, and soul, and I wish to embody my dream. That is the challenge of all this manifest being-ness matter of fact-ness we’ve become so philosophically duped with.

Not only is it challenging enough to become a self-reliant embodied dream walker, prancing joyfully with the flows of any given circumstance to maintain a pursued vision of fulfillment, we are faced with the truth that we are not the only ones dreaming here! (or the only one dreaming when looked out in the meta view, which can be quite disorienting at first) And some of us (or rather parts of us) have no clue that we are dreaming! Which cant be made into a problem, you see, if the whole joy dance is going to begin anytime soon. So we must work. Actively. At least that is what I came up with today. Because earlier today I had a moment.

A moment where everything seemed impossible. I’ve had many of those lately. They tend to come most frequently right when you’re on the brink of some creative break through or positive life change. Like a test of sorts, the self-doubt creeps in and makes me re-calculate this whole idea of dreaming. Those are the times when I rest my head down on the table (or beat it rather) and say, yeah yeah yeah its all an illusion, this is life kiddo. Wake up and smell the burnt coffee.

Yep I got real, grumpy, and realized that waking up is letting go of the illusion that you can wake up. A tricky balance, this letting go of illusion business. It seems to me that you have to let go of everything, while holding onto trust for your dear life.. holding it manically close until it can absorb completely into you so that you can finally relax that last bit. Some choose to call it faith, belief, trust in the great unknown; call it what you will, I purr to say its like making mad passionate love to the mystery.

Once again i have been wrong in assuming its all only a dream, damning myself for not being awake enough to realize my wholeness and simultaneously wrong in reasoning that it must not be dream, for I am awake and still unable to control, with all the same other-worldly tools available to a lucid dreamer, this life. There seems to be a missed-point bouncing around between these lines. “V”, my very own self-created, yet cooperatively dreamed up lover boy who simultaneously dreamt himself into reality by his own stellar experience of being a genuine genius in the constellated world of ancestral influences and archetypal flows, read me a poem from Nathaniel Mackey’s “splay anthem" yesterday. It opens up with a call and response from Roberson; It called to me:

because to dream is not to dream if waking up is never finished - Ed Roberson, “dreaming has made more strict the terms of dreaming”

And I responded: huh? say that again. So I repeat this now to myself. Because to dream is not to dream if waking up is never finished. Because to dream is not to dream if waking up is never finished. It may say millions of things. Certainly may speak something to you other than it is to me, or even nothing at all which must be mean something, at least to me, meaning nothing is an obsolete. In this call I hear that this life is at once a dream and not a dream, certainly in my dream I don’t want to be finished, because who wants to be finished of a good dream? Only finished with the frightening ones. Unfortunately they come hand in hand, this dreaming non dreaming business, the duties of darkness, of light; the implications of my yin covering yang holding space for the yining and the yanging to do you know what with me and my sacred selves married in the highest holiness of my here now self made be-wondered and used by the muse of muses. This is all probably someone else’s wet dream. And my mystery love making secures my part. I know that much is true.

Getting back to the point. Yeah, point. The arrow that points us in the direction of meaning. The action. The question is, what is your dream? What is it that you really want? For me, right now at least, I really really really want to write fiction, good fiction, really good fiction, (realizing I cant digest the whole pie in the sky at once, I’ll just to take a nibble... a nibble, I say, HA it feels like I am going to choke with the challenge of this bite!). Yes the best way to activate the dreaming is to act. Sit down and write some fiction girl. So once again, I did.

And it was horrible. But I made myself sit down again, and again, and this time not leave until more was out. And it was horrible, the experience that is, the writing, well I am sure that was too, but in the process I realized that you can be certain you're on the right path to fulfilling your dreams when taking the steps needed to fulfill them feels like pulling your own teeth one by one, with a shovel or something. You see its so damn hard to get up enough nerve to do it that you will find any distraction from actually doing it. My friends refer to all this as an “edge phenomenon” (see Dispelling Duality in Dreamland, and/or Tarot Reading for the Field) And i am apparently experiencing one right now because I thought it important enough to write this non-fiction ramble “instead” of practicing what I really want. However, it is not all bad I suppose for one thing that can happen with an edge phenomenon is that the very nature of the distraction can sometimes supply direct synchronistic clues that can be useful to getting to the deeper sense of what is behind the hesitancy, block or resistance to begin with. So even my ramble isn’t a problem... dammit! I can’t seem to find a problem with any of this right now. Probably because I busted through! I wrote something down in the language of the unreal and it activated the dream. The only problem is when I make a problem out of pulling teeth. Then I am damned again into the cycles of doubt. No thanks..

hand me the pliers please, no wait...nevermind. I'll get them myself.