I am someone who almost never remembers my dreams, and this has been true all my life. I wake with the knowledge that I have been dreaming, and for a split-second it remains - then it's gone. Although I often know that I have been dreaming, I can't remember what it was about. I do know that very often it was something utterly mundane and ordinary, like a conversation with a co-worker or a cockroach on a wall. Sometimes I am not sure whether some trivial thing happened in a dream or in real life - or both. That only happens now and then, and rarely causes me to question my sanity. There are better reasons for that anyway - just ask either of my ex-wives.
I have kept a journal and pen by my bed for years in order to jot down the memories while they are fresh. Alas, it is in vain. Its pages remain blank. In all my life I have only remembered maybe a dozen dreams.
Each of those dreams, however, has seemed extraordinary, and each has remained etched in my memory. Just a few have been repeaters, like a strange black-and-white nightmare I remember having as a baby. Some have brought insights that I have carried with me, and others remain mysterious. Once, I had a sequence of dreams, each one beginning where the previous one left off. In these, I wrote the libretto for an opera called "The Terrorist." It was about the relationship between Jesus and Judas. I persuaded Philip Glass to write the score, and in the third and final dream I watched the performance from start to finish. The insights I got from that changed my perception of Jesus and his disciples forever.
A year or so ago, just about when synchronicities, perceptions and even outside events were beginning to cause me to feel as if something very strange was happening to me, I had a singular dream. In it, I was a student at a large university. The campus was one of those traditional, ivy-walled brick affairs, with areas of lawns and trees between the various buildings that filled up with young people between classes. In fact it was so crowded that simply getting from class to class was exhausting. I had to fight my way through throngs of students, all carrying their armloads of books and rushing to class.
Suddenly, out of nowhere I realized I could use the trees to travel above the heads of the crowd. With my backpack of books, I reached out and grabbed a branch, and swung myself up into the leafy canopy. I found that I could scamper and leap like a squirrel, and even leap effortlessly from tree to tree. I entered my next class through its window on the third floor, amazing everyone. And afterwards left the same way, soaring over the hordes of shouldering, shoving people. I saw students looking up and pointing: "Hey! Look at that guy!" I didn't spend all my time in the trees of course, and in the library or hallways people would stop me and say how neat that was, and wonder how I learned it. And it was at about that point that I woke.
In the year or so that's gone by, that dream has come true in certain ways. Not only was I beginning to experience startling events, manifestations and new levels of awareness, but I became aware of how some of the young folks at work looked to me as a sort of friend and mentor. And I found I had easy access - through the trees instead of fighting the crowd - to my classes. Look at the synchronicitous way the TC and all of you came into my life! There are lots of classes left to attend, and some of them are above treetop level. So I still have a long way to go.
Three years ago, in my waking life, I came to a day when for the first time in years, I needed to find a job, and fairly quickly. A local natural-food grocery store needed a maintenance man and janitor, and I took the job. I never intended to stay so long. It was a dead-end position, but I made the most of it and did my best. In time, I discovered I had become a star in ways I never anticipated nor were particularly appreciated by management. I knew hundreds of customers by name. They went out of their way to talk with me, and told me of their babies, their gallstones, their grandmother's ghost and their brother in prison. They made it hard for me to do my job. And of the many, many wonderful young people who passed in and out of the place, some of them began coming by the apartment and sitting up with my wife and me talking about all kinds of things. Us - this old couple in a small apartment in a seniors complex - having young people over, talking about ascension and paradigm shift, playing our guitars, even smelling a little wacky weed, I'm afraid. Amazing! This is the meaning of my dream and how it has been coming to pass. My wife and I now encouraging this little group to come together regularly for meditation and conversation, and I have been urging them all to embark on the TC.
Although I envy those who find it easy to remember dreams, the way I experience them has been a powerful force in my life. There are still the ones I don't fully understand, and I remember some of them less and less clearly as the years have passed. It may be that their purpose was fulfilled without me even noticing, and they belong properly to the past.
I don't lose sleep over that.
8-D