And I Had Two Lightning Bolts
It Swerved and Missed

Donny Duke

By increasing my sadhana concentration, I’m coming lucid in my dreams more. Sadhana is Sanskrit for spiritual practice, and a full sadhana means maintaining a continual unwavering focus on the divine, or ‘the in front of you’ as though it were the divine, though this side of realization a 24/7 concentration can only be a goal always out of reach: losing it, picking it up again, losing it, and on and on. Whatever the case, this naturally has you paying more attention to what you’re doing, a focused attention, and that aids best I’ve found than any other method in awakening within your in dreams, without even specifically trying to, because you’re working directly on the focus and force of your consciousness, becoming conscious of any periods of unconsciousness, sleep and dream being the biggest ones.

Of course it does also help to be working daily on remembering of a good part of the experience you have during sleep, which includes things other than dreams, or at least be in remembrance of the first and last part of sleep, but that should be understood. With awakened dreams it becomes possible to not only remember that experience but to explore it using your awakened will, that in a lucid dream that enables you to transcend not only the laws of the Nature in the dream but also the dreaming mechanism itself, or creative reflex I call it, since the weaving of a dream is an automatic knee-jerk response to your immediate conditions intuitively created under the dim arches of all your infinity.

It is to jump over the universe to go from that mere discovering and exploring what you can do in a lucid dream to using awakened dreams to go into the inner regions overhead, places like Overmind and Supermind (towards them is more like it, since those heights you get to maybe once in a lifetime, maybe) or dive deep down into the well of soul, something almost as rare but more natural for us to do first, find our soul, since it is us.

Doing this kind of inner discovery – going to your innermost, going to your tops – as opposed to the thousand and one things you can do in lucid dreams, you’re using awakened dreams for what they’re really for. Don’t worry. Very seldom will you actually arrive. The attempt, though, does deepen or raise the consciousness, however deep or high you go, and if you’re jumping universes so to speak, you do need that. In other words it’s not the destination but the journey that gets the goal-mileage, as usual. You do, however, keep at that getting there.

I was in an involved dream where I had messed up and was becoming slowly accepted again by the society around me, and I walked outside of a building I had been running around in, looking on my left at a huge inner city lake, the farther shores shifting as I looked at them in the now you see it now you don’t way dreams spin a scene, and that weirdness woke me up, but I just kept walking looking at the scene so as to not lose the dream. After about 10 seconds or so I cleared my mind and heart and asked where my psychic being, the personality of the soul in our yoga (what evolves through our long line of lives), and the Mother, my teacher, wanted me to go and what they wanted me to do. After so many formulas on ‘who you gonna call?’ in such circumstances, my soul and the teacher it has chosen are the referees for me.

A force took me up but not high, and I began to slowly turn and view the whole shore of the lake, which was still shifting, but patches were stabilizing, the first being the sun shining on part of the shore near me. I look up at it, and the light seemed to come into me, or I into it, but for some reason I turned my attention to the very far shore that had turned into something similar to Yosemite. Now, in my yoga the sun is tops; it’s a symbol of Supermind, the direction I want to go. What turned me from there towards what looked like a heavenly Yosemite, complete with glistening waterfalls, was my attention. That subtle-physical beauty caught my eye as I was beginning to focus on the sun, and in inner travel, where you point your attention, there you will go, just like where you point your feet in the outer world.

I went both up and towards that distant shore, and then the dream-field went white, not blank as usual when you’re in travel, which is normally just an open your eyes away from waking up in bed or wherever you’re dreaming. I was in a strain maintaining the flow of force pulling me up, and then it seemed I was no longer going up, and I opened my eyes awake in bed, foiled again.

The next morning I was dreaming I was walking into a building this time, and I just awakened, probably because the life-force and will are gathering, and I again asked my psychic being and the Mother for aid in going where I needed to, seeing what I needed to see, and a force took me down this time, into the floor, and as I went into it, it sort of enveloped me, and on it were little indications, like icons, representing my dad, and I knew that I was to go and stay with him and finish the song I’m working on, or rearrange it really, and the near impossibility of visiting my dad in my present life circumstances did not trigger in my attention. It was as though I were a young man seeing him regularly as I did then.

That meant I wasn’t fully awakened to the dream, was only partially lucid, a common feature of awakened dreams.  I didn’t know myself as my present self dreaming, but as my past self dreaming, an inner element weaving into my identity. It was that I took back with me upon opening my eyes awake in bed, which I did very soon after going through the floor and looking at the symbols it had left on me. In other words, there’s an interpretation there.

What had happened was I went into the physical consciousness, represented by the floor, and went down slowly parallel to the floor until I went through it, going through it and into a swimming pool-like region below. It was as though I were underwater but without water, the space inside being a substance unto itself. Floating, I went up into a standing position, looking on my shoulders and arms at the symbols of dad on the floor that had become the suit I wore, and it was soon after recognizing the meaning of it, that I needed to go and stay with my father and complete the aforementioned song, give it leadership, that I awoke in my bed, not feeling as cheated as in the last one, because this dream was more help on the journey than getting to a destination, though your creativity helps get you there too, if you see art as more than something to merely appreciate, see it as the quickening and catharsis it is. That’s another common feather of awakened dreams, your art instrument or creative passion will inevitably show up in them, and the sky’s the limit on just how detailed and personal that aid to your art can be.

Realizing that about completing the song, where to do so, which had some ‘how’ in it, even though I was ‘fooled’ by the dream into identifying myself as years younger, was more than a mere mental grokking. A slight deepening of my consciousness had occurred, connected like a pathway of electricity to the song I’m working on, which literally my soul wrote, and I was both given more creative force to complete it and a clue about from where I should gather that force – the dad and all the discipline and authority the father stands for, what will give me the rhythm to keep it going.

I would interpret that to mean that the song takes the leadership position in my life at the moment. I should mention that the entire song came bit by bit from experience during sleep, played and sung to me line by line no less, though not in the same voice or instrumentation, but in the whole range of what musicians I like or have made an impression on me, they singing the line or lines, which I record on a voice recorder I sleep with and then try to reproduce with my voice and guitar, never able to get but a shadow of what I originally hear. Now I’m in the final stage of the song, and all the lines repeating inside me are in my voice and with my guitar, and so it seems the song’s come home, and I’m given the force and go ahead to complete it, if I don’t spill it as usual, another common feature of awakened dreams, spilling what force – be that a deepening, widening, or heightening – that came with one.

But there’s my infinity going on here too, and the dream isn’t some isolated experience like I’ve interpreted it (no dream is) but a continual working out of all of me. All my life I’ve had a character reappear in my dreams, a Black man that has some genius about him. When I was a child he was a child, and when I became a man he did too. Once he was a scientist working on what would change the world for the better, another time a professor teaching students to do that, another an artist capturing world-fate. Always he was man with some greatness about him, and always he was relatively unknown but just on the cusp of fame.

Sometime after going down into the well of soul, 4 or 5 years maybe, via lucid dreams (which only gets you to the chute; the soul is beyond dreaming), I had one of those dreams that index your life. You’ll find several life-defining dreams do that. I was that man, only I was also lucid and knew myself as me the dreamer, and I knew he was me in a past life. It’s happened a couple of times with me and dreaming: I’m inside someone with all my thoughts and feelings but able to feel and think all ‘they’ are feeling and thinking, like an inner observer. So many things clicked in that dream, but it was the guitar that rode the crest of the wave.

It was just before the turn of the century, of last century that is, 1890 or so, and he was a guitar picker in the Old South. He could play the guitar like it was his soul, but because he was Black, and because of the Jed Crow laws, he had been warned by the KKK that if he continued to play in White beer joints, he would be killed. He ignored the threat, thinking that because of his ability and rising community fame, he had nothing to fear. It happened that they came at night and burned his house down, burning him and his wife and kids alive. When the fire reached him, as he was trying to save his family, hearing their screams, a dream shift occurred, and I was no longer ‘inside’ him but observing from the outside. Though it’s not vital to my narrative here, the firemen who came to put out the fire were the same men who started it.

It didn’t dawn on me until years later, but the guitar is the instrument of my soul, and my soul wanted me to learn to play it, and I did more or less, even writing and recording songs, but they were by no means good, just barely tolerable to listen to, because I was by no means a natural, and you’d think I would be. The problem was it wasn’t in my hands in this life; it was from a past life and was housed in my soul and had to be surfaced, which has occurred as I’ve slowly worked on surfacing my psychic being.

The aforementioned song, “The Freedom”, I’d written and recorded, thinking I was done with it, and, not happy with my inability, I put the guitar down for some months, but when I picked it up again, guitar picking had moved into my hands, was dancing on my fingertips, something that has coincided with more ease of psychic contact, naturally. So I went back to the song, one worth working with, and it was obvious something had happened with my ability, as though a great leap had occurred, the guitar becoming an extension of my body, my rough singing voice confidant enough in my hands to sing with conviction, with my soul.

So in a deeper interpretation the dream signifies the guitar moving not only into my physical consciousness, into my hands, but into that part of it that has authority and keeps things moving, the father. Wouldn’t you know it though, right after the dream it seemed I lost that soul conviction in my hands and voice, but that’s probably because I’ve had some days with a buried psychic, buried under the 100 things that bog down discombobulated days. That seems to be a common feature of dreams that bring some movement to a completion; there’s a small gap between that happening in dream and in waking life.

Now I’d imagine that when it is in my hands and voice again you might not hear my soul all that clearly when I play and sing, might not even hear a good song, but I will, and to the degree I do hear one has I would imagine a lot to do with determining if you do. That’s a secret that guitar picking soul singer told me I hope I can tell you.

Every once in awhile, the soul takes control, and I’m capital. I listen to the music, and I sing a song. So the Spirit’s informing matter, and the Spirit stays. Beauty’s not the uncompromising question. There is in there a spirit. That’s the only business. Well, as it hits the trade room –

God only knows what I’d be without you. [sung into my inner ear in the voice and instrumentation of The Beach Boys]