Sometimes my dreams are a multi-dimensional roller coaster. I mean this literally. There’s an incredible moment where the tiniest crack emerges in whatever dream-scape I happen to be mindlessly playing in - a moment of lucidity that, if I can soften and stay with it widens panorama-style and I am viscerally sucked into portal after portal of space/time folding in on itself. A zero point of thinking I maybe had a form or body, but whatever that form or body was is now only velocity and stardust.
Without fail, I always arrive at the same destination - there are stars, but not really, maybe just the suggestion or possibility of stars. And endless space. It’s as familiar and foreign as the back of my own hand. A kiss from a stranger who only answers to ‘Beloved’. Or like that one time I was hiking alone in the rainforest up in Washington and, resting under a large Cedar, felt the shiver of something moving in the trees, just in the edge of my peripheral vision, and out of reach to any of my senses except the feeling that something was there.
Each time I visit this place, I like to ask a question. Things I’m curious about, mostly, or something that’s sitting on my heart. This particular encounter occurred back in April of this year, while I was visiting Portland, OR, and enjoying my second night at a quirky airbnb just outside the city. Protections, plant friends and other allies around and on call, the taste of tobacco still lingering in my cheeks from prayers and communion after dinner, I dropped into the liminal space.
Second Dream
‘Awareness behind the dream, Soul of the World: Please help me understand the nature of your love.’
I am in and one with the in-between state of void/creation space. I blink. Now I am in a pitch-dark windowless room (it seems to be a variation of my airbnb room). I am laying in a bathtub that’s just big enough to hold me, submerged completely underwater. I have had this dream many times before and usually I force myself to wake up as quickly as possible, the fear of drowning overruling any other response.
This time, I choose to stay with the vision. I sit up, and the water clings to me, peeling back off my body in slow motion, still filling my nose and mouth and lungs as it recedes. I draw a shaky, hesitant breath, then another, again and again, and with each watery intake I feel more - what is this feeling?
Overwhelming agony and ecstasy, and I am aware that I am somehow not drowning. So I begin to scream, both in fear and profound, joyful, release. A door opens to the room, letting in a jarring and yet comforting swath of light, and I recognize what is the humanized form of Pachamama, Mother Earth, as well as other plant allies close behind, rushing toward me, to help me the rest of the way. Doulas in this re-birthing process.
Air finally rushes into my lungs.
‘Do you understand?’ Pachamama whispers, ‘This is my love, my nature. My gift. Your gift. WE birth it together.’
I blink, and open my eyes to the midnight-hazy air bnb bedroom.
Awakening?
Wouldn’t it be nice to say that laying there, chest heaving, and cold-shivering despite the heater and warm quilt, I got it?
It would be nice - and also, it’s much more fun that I didn’t get it.
Besides, this blog post would be way too short if I just ‘got it.’ Instant, profound spiritual insights do not make for adequate word counts.
And my goodness we all love a good story.
What I remember feeling first, before the shivers took over, was an almost eerie stillness saturating my limbs. I could have moved, but I have spent quite a bit of time training myself to not immediately move right after I come out of a dream - I often don’t even open my eyes right away as I wake up, as staying present in those first seconds/minutes after coming back to waking consciousness is crucial for dream recall.
But this quality of stillness, I really only get after a particular type of occurrence in the dream space. Most people know it as Sleep paralysis, and even if you haven’t ever experienced this phenomenon, you probably know someone who has (or does) and are familiar, at least peripherally, with the unsettling nature of it.
For those unfamiliar, Sleep paralysis is defined as ‘as state, during waking up or falling asleep, in which a person is aware but unable to move or speak.’ It’s common to experience hallucinations, auditory scrambling, and perceived difficulty breathing. Sometimes the hallucinations (most often shadowy figures, or demon/monster-like creatures) that arise during an episode lurk in the corners of the room, climb on top of the dreamer (which gets related to the difficulty breathing, lots of stories and artwork portraying this), or in my case just start tossing my mattress or my catatonic body around.
Weeee?!
I’ve experienced this phenomenon as long as I can remember, and lucid dreaming just as long, though it hasn’t been until the past few years that I’ve put in the practice to have more volition within the sleeping dream. In fact, as a kid and teenager, these transitions from lucidity to paralysis, back into the unconscious slumber were pretty jarring and scary. In that gray area where it was hard to tell what was real and what was dream, and not able to hold onto either, I learned one coping mechanism to manage things.
Wake myself (the fuck) up.
Waking up
‘Yeah, we’re all wonderful, wonderful people/so when did we all get so fearful/now we’re finally finding our voices/so take a chance, come help me sing this
‘I wanna sing/I wanna shout/I wanna scream ’til the words dry out/so put it in all of the papers/I’m not afraid/they can read all about it’ - From Read All About It, Pt. III by Emili Sandé
Fear is quite the motivator.
Years of fear. Years of learning how to cope. Years of unlearning the coping and embracing the fear as a friend.
Waking up, little by little. Or so I thought. Out of a dream and into another, over and over again. I have been blessed to have so many wonderful friends and teachers, both human and non-human, to help me learn, or rather to remember how, to navigate the confusion of these many expressions of the Bardo we call living, dreaming (unconsciously and consciously) to be dreamed, to recognizing the dreamer: the Awareness behind the dream.
And fear has been one of those friends all along, guiding me as gently as I would allow through each cycle of life, death, bardo, and rebirth. I have evolved in ways I never thought possible for me, yet somehow knew was in the realm of possibility.
After all, anything is possible, so why not me?
In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it is said that the Lord of Death meets the soul in the Third Bardo.
How many traditions speak of our souls, our hearts, being judged before we can pass into the afterlife (aka whatever’s next after we die)? In some traditions, if your heart recognizes itself, you go to heaven. In others, you accept the Clear Light. And in others, on to the bliss of the Field of Reeds. Or, perhaps just eternal rest.
Rest. All this searching and purifying and struggling, learning, remembering, enlightening. All for a little rest.
It feels good to think about. And I have to ask myself, as you may be asking yourself now, really just rest? Who or what is resting? Where do I have to go to get a bit of this rest stuff?
First Dream
It’s been a while since I’ve woken to full paralysis. My body is frozen, except for my eyes. I slow my breathing to get as much air as possible, though I feel the constriction tightening around me. Trying not to tense as the shadow-beings draw closer, to stay present in the way I’ve practiced in my meditation and as the plants have taught me.
Again. Must I go through this again?
And I get an idea, a small suggestion that arises like a prayer from some forgotten corner of my heart. I don’t have to stay here.
I look to the left and notice a wiggle in my field of awareness, a holographic ripple akin to the portals I see in my lucid dreams - portals that take me home. I soften my gaze and lean my intention to the left and feel myself pulled into the gravity of the portal, air rushing back to my lungs (do I even need to breathe now?) as I twist and tunnel at unknowable speeds. But this time there’s no expanse of nothingness awaiting me. Instead, the portal melts around me, and I am melting with it, into a rainbow of brilliant color and lights, exactly like light through a prism. And I recognize that this is me, relief flooding my system (or whatever is left of my system) - it’s all me, the lights, the colors, the portal, the shadow-beings - I made all of them in my dream-mind.
Yet, some pocket of my survival-brain recognizes this too, and begins to howl with fear. A bottomless scream that fractures the colors and I wake up in tears.
I think one of the most beautiful things about my partnership with the plants is their willingness to help me explore the edges of my resistance to myself. I know from our conversations, in dieta, in dreams, in the day to day happenings, that as I explore my edges they too are exploring theirs. We learn so much from each other.
A few weeks ago I completed a dieta with two plants, Bobinsana and Cottonwood. I like to call them the Queen of Light and the King of the Underworld (Drop me a DM, and ask me if you want to learn more). So many incredible teachings from these maestros, which I will happily share in a future blog. However, for the purposes of this article, I want to talk about one of their commonalities - they are both water plants. They each grow by the river, Bobinsana along the Amazon and other tributaries, and Cottonwood, well I challenge you to find a river in North America where he doesn’t grow.
What I have learned from them, particularly about edges, resistance, and the nature of water, is that water will follow, and flow with, the limitations, the edges that it’s constrained to. By that I mean, observe a river. The edges, the banks of the river, serve a purpose to guide the river. The plants, rocks, and even animals (hello, beaver) all participate in creating a road for the river to follow.
And if the river meets resistance, in the form of lets say a dam, well, it’s only a matter of time before it finds a way through. A river might even resist itself for a time, say at the junction of a delta, or other tributary where different bodies of water collide and have to find balance before it can flow on.
I’ve always associated the river with going home; a river knows how to find its way home - sort of like our so-called spiritual journeys, we know we’re heading there, we just don’t always know where we’re headed. And that can be scary as hell. So we learn to accept what arises in our journey, we learn to surrender, to flow with life. Always going home. Tasting for that lick of salt that lets us know we’re getting closer to the ocean.
What a gift, to rest in that flow.
Funny though, the river might pull some cottonwoods or bobinsanas downstream with it and maybe they’ll make it to the ocean. But, as these two lovely plants have pointed out, that’s just the river’s journey, not theirs. So then, how do they get home? Are they home when they finally decompose and return to the earth?
They thought this train of thought was very silly.
Come to think of it, just where do I think I’m going? And what exactly am I asking when I want to know the nature of love, and life and death, and home? Or the past lives? Karma? The meaning of it all. Or any other of the thousands of questions I seem to come up with daily? What AM I looking for?
Final Dream
Lucidity. I smile inwardly and plunge into the portal. Honestly, I was expecting just to drop into a regular dream, as I had throughout the entire dieta - another exercise in dream recall and being diligent about my dream journal. It works, journaling - who’d have thought?
My mind is wiped blank as I fly, and I bring my awareness to the task at hand - calling in my plant and animal allies, praying for protection, guidance, and clarity - feeling gratitude and curiosity. My intention was strong that night - I wanted to understand the nature of my connection to a friend; how the energetic fabric was woven, so to speak.
And once again, like the first dream, I am expecting the vastness of space and am instead plunged into a new and also familiar nothingness, full and empty at the same time. Void of void. And I feel the collection of my mental body that I identify as me begin to shake and unravel at the seams.
A voice. Rose, beloved plant, I would know her anywhere. She asks me, ‘What is it exactly that you think you’re asking?’ Another voice. Whose? ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
I recognize myself, even as I tear the very fabric of my soul apart, and feel all sense of who I am slipping away. A mouth opens to scream and I recognize it as my mouth, and every mouth. And even as I’m screaming I begin to laugh, cry, dissolve into nothing but feeling - bliss. I know I will wake up soon. And I do.
But something is different this time, I notice, as I consider the back of my eyelids (it’s not even midnight, I’ve only been asleep for an hour). I feel no fear, only my heart beating, and the breath moving evenly in and out of my body. I feel rested. And in feeling all of the everything, the nothing, while in repose, a knowing arises I won’t even be able to define until many days later during a call with another dear friend of mine. Love. Home.
‘Do you understand?’ whispers Pachamama.
I do.
It true, as they say, home is where the heart is. And where is the heart? Where is your heart?
Home.
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