Tag: dreams

The Dream Company episode 5

On By Donny Lee DukeIn Dreams, podcastingLeave a comment
photo by Donny

Episode 5

First, Nithish had a dream that symbolically showed aggression displayed by our Rottweiler Luna in waking life. Then, Lydia shares a dream about the status of Sophie, a Shih Tzu that was given to her to take care of nurse back to health before the owner reclaimed the dog. After that Douglas recounts a dream where a friend of his appeared as a ‘personal’ symbol representing equanimity. Next, Donny presents a dream that he feels showed some viewers reactions to a recent video he made and posted on Nithish’s Youtube channel.

photo by Jana

A podcast of practical demonstrations of dream interpretation given by a four-member dream group in India that has been together for many years. We show how to interpret dreams, using the same method mother nature uses in giving us our dreams: wider than the world, as flexible as a snake, as irrational as the path of the wind, as unorthodox as God on Earth, and as natural as the soul of things. Join us.

(Every Friday or thereabouts we post a new episode, whether we announce it here on our blog or not.)

Honey Do You Sweep Under the Rug?

On By Donny Lee DukeIn Dreams, Inner Voice and Vision, overhead poetry, Poetry, scientific materialism, video artLeave a comment

 

Video: ‘Lucy’s Cosmic Dream’ by Douglas M.

Honey do you Sweep Under the Rug?

by Donny Duke

Hey John Coward,
me too coming.
Standing on the train.
Look at
where is she:
is this a science
or is this evidence?
You look for invigorating theories
brought on by the catchphrase word.
Delve deeper and you might find life.

What’s this habit here?
Only outward tuned.
Tell me you don’t know anything:
it’s all conjecture, guess, and patchwork answer.
Evangelize this uncertainty.
All that can be known is in your little book.
Gimmie that a second;
right here
it says you’re at
a larger historia
than right here taking an inventory of what I’m saying.

Behind closed doors
a muscle romance with dawn
tells your inner life with dream.
Behind walls of thought
you are rounding
2000
go somewheres.
Open your inner life,
spend time there.

Where is the key?
In the realm of your bed,
around the neck of dream
and other things during sleep.
Pour over the books there like a university.

No way –
a phantom
I see it.
Superstition idn’t it?
Science’s armchair here?
Science can’t reckon there.

Ambulance
we got here.
Trade anonymous
perfume
for the smell of God at your door.
It’s expensive.

Oh you laugh and say smile?
Don’t try to shut up the bottom mile
Richard.
Alight lookin’ good Brenda.
Still study your cat.
Bank it on the lips of dream
the rest of it.

Originally posted with the title “See Beyond the Peon” and without the last verse as a comment to the BBC Magazine article Point of View: "Ghosts and the Material World", May 5, 2013. It came via the inner voice.

 

Blah Blah Blah Blockchain.

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, DreamsLeave a comment

Recently as a favor for a friend I gave a talk on blockchain technology at a conference he was holding at a resort near Mamallapuram here in Tamil Nadu. He and a business partner are trying to get their own cryptocurrency off the ground and need to get people not just using, but also mining the currency.  So one of the purposes of the conference was to get people interested in buying the hardware and software needed to mine this type of cryptocurrency. I didn’t really know anything about cryptocurrencies (other than the fact that they existed) before preparing for this presentation, but what my friend was interested in was to have a native English speaker give the talk. There were actually three of us giving the presentations. Two were native English speakers and the third was not, but she was quite fluent.

The last dream I had that morning before I got up to get ready to go to the conference, I was watching a music video of this alternative rock band. They were singing normal sorts of lyrics up until the end where they literally starting singing, “Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah.” When I told Donny about the dream he laughed and said he thought that was indicative of what I would be doing that day at the conference, and it was true. Though I tried to speak clearly and slowly while giving the presentation to my all Indian audience, I was giving a lot of technical information and I’m sure for a lot of the attendees it was like me going, “Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah” or like the way adults sound in Peanuts cartoons if you’ve ever watched those. I kind of felt like a rock star too afterwards when myself and the other two speakers were besieged by people wanting to take group photos and selfies with us. When I decided to leave I actually had a big muscular security guard escort me out through the crowd in case anyone tried to accost me further.

No real lesson here. This is just another example of how dreams present things, which is often in a humorous or ironic way. I think you could also call this dream an example of prevision. Blah Blah Blah Bye!

I Volunteer A Dream

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams2 Comments

This article will be a continuation from my last blog where I argued that major news regarding the G.I. Joe and James Bond movie franchises manifested in my dreams without my waking mind knowing about these events. Recently I had another dream I feel is an example of this, though this time the dream had to do with a sports team I have a connection with. Here is the dream:

I’m in what’s supposed to be Mr. Godfrey’s1 classroom at RHS, but it’s a sort of amalgam of his classroom and the eating and family room area of my mom and dad’s house in Florida. There are a number of other people there including Peyton Manning and Eli Manning. They are at the front of the room, and Peyton is standing wearing a University of Tennessee football jersey. Eli is sitting, and has a jersey on for some other university. They’re arguing about an upcoming game between the Volunteers and the school Eli’s jersey is from, arguing about who’s going to win. Peyton starts to get angry and tells Eli ‘Let’s step outside!”, and Eli is sitting there looking kind of sheepish and intimidated by his big brother, who is acting uncharacteristically aggressive. The argument does seem feigned though to some degree, and that they’re just egging each other on. They still go outside though through a sliding glass door, and Mr. Godfrey says “Let’s leave them out there for a while.” I figure they ought to stay outside, because Mr. Godfrey has just passed out a test. The test has something to do with these pieces of cookie dough we’re all given on plates.

In the interest of finding further evidence for my hypothesis from my last blog that our dreams can pick up on such mundane things as what’s going on with a movie franchise, I decided to google first Eli Manning and then Peyton Manning. Eli I discovered has been in the news the last couple of weeks because of some new email evidence for a lawsuit against him where he’s accused of selling helmets to collectors that supposedly had been worn in a game, but really weren’t. I found that interesting, but didn’t see how it might relate to the dream, other than the sheepishness of Eli. When I googled Peyton Manning though I found something much more interesting. Two hours before I had woken up and recorded this dream on my voice recorder, the official twitter account of the University of Tennessee football program posted a short promotional video which was designed to generate interest in potential recruits for the quarterback position. The video featured an interview with Peyton Manning woven amongst highlights of some of Tennessee’s most famous quarterbacks (including Manning) with some energizing music as the backdrop. It’s an exciting video to watch, and even more so if you’re a Tennessee fan. At the time of this writing, that tweet has gotten 867 retweets and 1,767 favorites which isn’t a lot compared to what a lot is on twitter, but it had much higher numbers than most of the recent tweets from that twitter page. The tweet I found that came the closest had 407 retweets and 1,200 favorites, but most of them had much lower statistics than that.

The reason I find this interesting is because things go out fast on twitter. And this tweet, because of the exciting nature of the video, and also because it features Peyton Manning, seems to have generated a little bit of a buzz, a little incident in the collective consciousness or whatever you want to call it. So it was in the midst of that buzz that I happened to have this dream of Peyton Manning in a Tennessee Volunteers football jersey, which, if you consider also the fact that this is the only dream I’ve had with Peyton Manning since at least February 15, 20162, seems hard to chalk up to coincidence. The dream parallels the video as well in the sense that in both instances Manning was promoting his alma mater’s team. Given this, I think any open-minded person can see why I’d be willing to postulate that I picked up on this buzz in the collective consciousness, and it worked its way into my dream. It makes sense that if you’re a strong dreamer you would pick up on things of interest to your vital on personal, local and global levels. Donny likes to call this being an ‘area dreamer.’ Perhaps in future article I can show other examples of this, but closer to home, such as a dream I have showing me something going on with Donny or with one of the young people living here.

It seems to me that dreams could potentially pick up on any event, but what’s interesting about this case, as well as the case with the G.I Joe and James Bond dreams in my last blog, is that they correlated with major developments, things that created a buzz, albeit a small one compared to the population of the earth, but regardless ones that involved thousands of people or more. The other thing noteworthy is that in all three cases the subject matter was something I had an emotional connection to. In my last blog, I pointed out how I loved both G.I. Joe and James Bond as a kid, and I also have an emotional interest in the Tennessee Volunteers from the three years I lived near Knoxville when I was a kid. I wasn’t totally bonkers for them in the way I was for the Pittsburg Steelers, but, as an adult, if I happen to turn on a football game the Volunteers are playing in, they’re the team I’ll be rooting for. Unless of course it was against my alma mater Penn State.

When Donny and I were discussing this latest dream and its apparent connection to the tweet, he pointed out that this line of inquiry into dreams is something that could potentially be tested experimentally, and he’s right. You could conceivably take a group of strong dreamers, isolate them from media, and over the course of weeks or months collect their dreams, and on the days they have dreams about things like celebrities or movies or sports teams you could look to see if they correlate to anything recently creating a buzz in the news. Then upon completion of collecting the data you would take the dreams from each dreamer that seemed to have this kind of connection to an outer event, and ask them if that particular movie or sports team or whatever is something they have an emotional connection with. This is just an idea, and there might be a better way to conduct an experiment like this, but I think you get what I’m driving at here, which is that you might be able to find convincing evidence for a collective consciousness, results that defy statistical probability. And anything that contributes more evidence for the existence of a collective consciousness or inner connection between people, that we live together in a field of consciousness as opposed to each living in our own separate bubble of consciousness, would be a good thing. The understanding of this amongst a more general element in the human population seems indispensible for man’s evolution. You’d need a well thought out and conducted experiment though for the data to stand up to the onslaught of materialist skeptics and debunkers that something like this would bring down on your head.

But getting back to the matter at hand, what might the dream mean for me personally if anything? The symbol of the Volunteers could refer to altruism or service, and that does fit since I’m trying to take more of that attitude toward the people in my immediate environment, most of whom are selfish and lazy to an extreme degree. Then there’s the element of a trial or test, and the cookie dough would maybe have something to do with a vital indulgence of some sort. It’s hard to say since many dreams are just kind of a mishmash of things that may be symbolic along with things that may just be impressions of mental activity, as well as other things that may be rising from the inner, but never manifest in the outer. Any experiment like the one I proposed above would have to take that into account and look for very loose connections between the dreams and outer events.

The fact that many dreams are such a mishmash is one reason why in my articles I usually only write about dreams that I can connect directly to something in my waking life. With this latest line of inquiry though I’ve had to get a bit less concrete and more speculative. Like I said in my last blog though I think it’s well worth exploring these avenues even if in the process you make mistakes or find out later you were wrong about things. An experiment like the one I proposed above would be valuable, but what might be even more valuable about what I’ve been discussing in these last two blogs is that it’s something that, with a little effort and with the right capacity, people can confirm for themselves, and through the lens of their own dream life see the collective consciousness and inner connection we all share.

Notes and References

  1. Mr Godfrey was my high school biology teacher.
  2. This is the date I started my latest dream journal. I didn’t look back any further than that.

 

My Name is Joe. G.I. Joe.

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams2 Comments

blowtorch

Most people who pay some attention to their dreams have no doubt noticed how they will draw upon things from our modern mythos like TV shows and movies for symbols. I’ve also found that dreams seem to mainly use things you like, especially things you liked as a kid. So my dreams will frequently use characters and scenarios from things like Star Wars, Star Trek, X-Men, G.I. Joe, Transformers and James Bond as opposed to Care Bears and My Little Pony. So given this, it wasn’t unusual for me to have a dream like this one I had recently:

As the observer I can see a room where some of the characters from G.I. Joe are lying on bunks. I don’t recall which characters were there, except I’m pretty sure one of them was Blowtorch. An officer comes into the room and rouses the Joes, telling them he has a mission for them. The Joes get up out of their bunks and start to file out of the room.

I took this dream to mean some kind of positive movement in the sadhana. Later though, as I was typing this dream up in my dream journal, the vital had a desire to look and see what was going on with the G.I. Joe live action movie franchise, since it had been a while since the last movie was released. I hadn’t seen the second one, G.I. Joe Retaliation, and probably won’t see any future G.I. Joe movies, but I gave in to the vital’s desire and did some googling, and found it quite interesting to see that, starting a little less than two weeks before, articles had been hitting the internet announcing plans to reboot the G.I. Joe movie franchise. Then I remembered that two days before I’d had this dream about James Bond:

I can see a submarine moving through a manmade passageway that is underneath a city. The sub is beneath a warehouse or something and is looking for a way up into it. The warehouse seems to be falling apart, because stone blocks are sinking down all around that are falling from above. The submarine stops at a place where you can go up into the warehouse, and James Bond (Daniel Craig) comes out of the submarine in a wet suit along with someone else. Two other frogmen show up who are bad guys. Bond and the other good guy point their harpoon guns at the baddies, but neither one of them has had a chance to get completely ready and don’t have their regulators in their mouths.

Curious, I googled James Bond and found that, starting a few days before the dream, articles had been published announcing that Daniel Craig had been more or less convinced to reprise his role as Bond one last time. Now I found this all very interesting because the dreams, especially the G.I Joe dream, seemed to be showing what was going on with these movie franchises. Like the Joes in my dream, the G.I. Joe movie franchise had been lying idle, but now had a mission, i.e. a reboot. The Bond dream is less clear-cut, but maybe the element of danger has to do with some obstacles still standing in the way of one more Daniel Craig movie. After all, an article saying Craig has been more or less convinced to reprise the role one last time, and his signature on a contract are two different things. In addition, as I write this article a couple of weeks after these dreams, the latest Bond news is that five studios are in a bidding war for the rights to the franchise, and people are speculating that a new home for Bond might spell a complete reboot, and sayonara to Daniel Craig, regardless of whether he wants to do one more Bond flick or not.

Now I think probably most of the time if you googled G.I. Joe or James Bond there would be something in the news about it. Maybe an actress who played a Bond girl had died, or there’d be an article somebody wrote ranking the top 20 issues of the G.I. Joe comic book series. Perhaps dreams could pick up on things like that too, but these were major developments for these franchises, which are beings or entities in their own way. Sri Aurobindo points out that our inner or subliminal consciousness has a knowledge of many things of which the external being is ignorant, so it makes sense to me that if you had a strong childhood affinity in the vital for something like James Bond, or G.I. Joe, you could pick up on major developments like this. It’s quite possible things like this are common, but I didn’t pick up on it since I didn’t look online to see what was going on with the X-Men or Star Trek or whatever when I dreamed about them. I wouldn’t think though that a dream about G.I Joe for example would always correspond to some outer event like announcing the movie franchise reboot, and it would often just be something personal, using that as a symbol. Donny said he thought the fact that the two dreams corresponded with outer events puts emphasis on the personal meaning, and he may be right.

Needless to say, I’ll be doing more googling in the future when I have dreams like this to see if it I can find these kinds of connections again with significant outer events. This is still a hypothesis even for me, let alone for a skeptic. As it turns out though I had a short dream about Spider-Man a few nights ago, and while I was sleeping it hit the internet that Spider-Man will be appearing in both the fourth Avengers movie, and also a second stand alone movie with the new lead actor, Tom Holland. All I remember from the dream was Spider-Man sort of dancing around with this dorky kind of music in the background. Is this how the Tom Holland version of Spider-Man will be perceived? We shall see.

One thing I should point out as possible support for this hypothesis is that since I began my latest dream journal on February 15, 2016 I have recorded no other dreams with James Bond, only one other dream that featured a G.I. Joe character, and only one other dream with Spider-Man. I don’t record all my dreams, just the ones that seem more significant, but usually I’ll record a dream featuring characters like these since I know dreams will use them as symbols. So that makes it easier to argue for a connection here. I will say the over the course of studying my dreams for nearly 20 years now James Bond, G.I. Joe and Spider-Man have all made frequent appearances, especially in the past. In some of my older dream journals the appearance of characters from comic books and movies were much more frequent, but that is something that has dropped off over the years. Why that is, I’m not sure though it may have something to do with the fact that over time I’ve become more interested in and one pointed in the sadhana and less interested in these vital interests.

As I said earlier however my first thought about the G.I. Joe dream, and also the James Bond dream, was that they were showing a positive movement in the sadhana, though not one without some difficulty as shown by the Bond dream. I don’t remember anything really noteworthy going on at that time, but I was fairly focused until a few days after the G.I. Joe dream when I was hit with an illness, one that I feel was a hostile attack, and perhaps the Bond dream was showing how I wasn’t prepared for that. The question is though, were the dreams showing both the significant events with these movie franchises as well as a personal movement in me, or was I just picking up on what was going on with the movies? Or as a third possibility, were the dreams just showing my individual movement with no connection to the developments with the franchises?

The G.I. Joe dream in particular so parallels the outer event that I think I can dismiss the third option, so my feeling is the dreams are showing both, but whether that’s always the case or not I don’t know. For example, that snippet I dreamed about Spider-Man strikes me as possibly just referring to the outer developments of Spider-Man with Avengers 4, though it also seems quite possible to me that it refers to something personal with me. I’m not sure what though since the day after that Spider-Man dream my vital was feeling pretty unenthused and deflated. It could very well have had to do with someone else since Donny and I have both seen that we can dream about what’s going on with each other.

There’s another question though I have regarding all this. As I said earlier, I think the fact that I have a vital affinity with G.I. Joe and James Bond is a sufficient explanation for why I picked up inwardly on what was going on with the movies, but was there some kind of deeper connection between what was going on with me personally and these events? Sri Aurobindo has convinced me that the relationship between the inner and the outer is like the proverbial iceberg with the overwhelming bulk of our life taking place on the inner worlds and planes, and with the inner actually giving rise to the outer. So is it possible that the dreams are expressing some kind of shared inner cause, or did my dreams just take what was going on with those franchises and weave that into my dreams as a way to show me what was going on with me, and also to show me how inwardly I was picking up on these developments? I think to really answer that question you have to be a lot more conscious than I am, be able to actually concretely perceive the hidden forces at work, as opposed to glimpsing them indirectly as I am, in the same way you know the wind is there because the flag is moving. As to what my mind thinks about it, part of me admittedly has difficulty with the idea of a shared inner cause simply because it seems to me that the forces trying to bring us more Bond and G.I. Joe movies are mainly lower vital, and not working for the benefit of humanity, whereas the personal interpretation of those dreams as a positive movement in my sadhana would seem to me to indicate the action of forces that would be working for the benefit of humanity. But since things often don’t work according to how our ignorant minds conceive of things, I certainly can’t rule out some kind of inner connection. As I said, I just don’t have the knowledge to say one way or the other.

Getting back to things a little more concrete, I think I should say a few words about some of the symbols in the two dreams. In the Bond dream, being underwater in the sub would seem to me to indicate some action in the subconscient or subliminal parts of myself, or maybe just my deeper emotions, since the sub wasn’t very deep. Also in the Bond dream, the enemy divers would represent hostile forces, and if I’m correctly remembering the presence of Blowtorch in the G.I. Joe dream, I would guess that has something to do with aspiration, since Blowtorch’s weapon is a flamethrower.

Anyway I’ve gone out on a limb here more than I usually would in this article with these ideas, but if you’re going to delve into dream interpretation I think you have to be willing to take some risks and put out some tentative hypotheses for the sake of eventually getting at the truth. It’s not easy though because there don’t seem to be any hard and fast rules about dreams, just themes, trends and tendencies that are very wide and plastic. If in general, though perhaps not in all the details, I’m onto something here, it would be more evidence for the inner connection and larger consciousness we all share beneath the surface.

Yo Joe!

 

The Emperor Has A Scheme

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams1 Comment

Back in 2004 I was living at the Sri Aurobindo Sadhana Peetham Ashram in Lodi California. While I was there we had a weekly dream group, and I remember one meeting very well because both myself, and another resident, Dakshina, had a cold. The dream I shared was one in which a zombie had touched me, and then I woke up ill the next morning. If I remember right Dakshina also had a dream that showed her being attacked and then she came down with the cold, but I don’t recall that for sure. Regardless, all of us there saw the connection between my cold and my dream, viewed it as an attack of a hostile force against me.

Roughly a month ago I had this dream:

It’s the scene from Return of the Jedi when the Emperor shows up in his shuttle at the Death Star. He is talking to Darth Vader telling him some scheme he’s cooked up and wants to show him something that has to do with it. They both board the shuttle and the Emperor shows Vader these two aliens that are basically just heads with tentacles coming off of them. They’re very ugly. I guess they are babies of an alien species, and were kidnapped by the Emperor. Vader thinks this is really cool that they’re going to be watching over these babies.

Now if I remember correctly the day before the dream (Friday) Jana got sick in the afternoon. Then on Saturday, the day of the dream, Dhina caught it too, and Lydia went down a day or two later. Jana and Dhina had it really bad with a fever and body aches, and were spending most of their time in bed. Lydia stayed sick the longest, and had a relapse after initially feeling better. Mugu got it too, and was mildly ill for a couple of days. Donny and I managed to keep it out for days, but then we also came down with symptoms, Donny with chest congestion and myself with a bad runny nose. We were both however only sick for a day. I drank two cups of the Indian version of chicken soup, called rasam, before going to bed and woke up feeling fine the next morning.

Now this dream isn’t as clear cut as the zombie one I had at Lodi, since I myself got sick the very next day, but this illness really lowered the energy of the house and made things difficult since some of the kids weren’t able to give even the grudging help we can normally get out of them. The Mother does say in Questions and Answers that a hostile attack “takes often the form of illness”1, and given the impact it had it seems to me a reasonable hypothesis that this illness, represented by the ugly aliens, was the scheme the hostile forces represented by Vader and the Emperor were hatching. As to why the attack was launched at the particular moment, I would guess it was because it was a few days before a darshan day at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and I suspect the attack was trying to spoil the darshan for us not just on the level of the individuals, but also on the level of the house itself, since it also is an entity in its own way. Unless you already believe in these sorts of things, there’s no way I can convince you the darshan days observed at the ashram are power days like a solstice or an equinox is, a day where there’s a force available to help you make a progress or have a powerful dream or some other kind of inner experience, but if you can at least accept that idea in theory, then I think you could see why forces hostile to spiritual progress would try to sabotage people in the yoga on those sorts of days.

It bears mentioning that the day before the darshan another thing happened that really lowered the energy of the house, which was getting the house sprayed for ants. Now in the USA when we get that done the exterminator will spray a little poison in the corners of your house and maybe put down some poison bait, and that was what I was expecting to happen. Here in India however they went all through the house spraying poison heavily along all the walls, so there were literally puddles of it all along the inner perimeter of the entire house. The stench was horrible and after the first round had dried they came along a few hours later and did it a second time. That second round took a couple of hours to dry, and then we were finally able to mop the floor, but the smell lingered for days. If I had known what they were going to do I would have never had them come and treat the house except for the ground floor, which had to be treated for termites. I’m sure it was even more grueling to endure for the people who were really sick, so it seems to me that the forces attacking us had a hand in seeing to it that the exterminator showed up on that day.

Now as it turns out I myself still had an okay darshan day, felt some calm that day, but nothing really interesting happened, nor did I have any powerful or lucid dreams. I did have a little inner opening and got a short formation of lines from my muse and then another longer formation two days later before things went back to the way they usually are which is a line or two here and there. Neither Donny or I had much luck interpreting those formations though, since it wasn’t clear who or what they were relating to, but it was nice to get that little opening. So what was accomplished by this hostile attack is hard for me to say, but I know that even though I wasn’t sick, when I was sitting in my room in the stifling stench of ant poison, the energy of the house felt very, very low, and that even the house itself as an entity was affected. None of our young people here are trying to follow the yoga of Sri Aurobindo or any other yoga for that matter, but we still have a collective process here. So maybe it was that collective process that lost the chance to make a progress. That’s just speculation however.

A question though this dream brings up in my mind is how do you know when a symbol in dream or vision actually relates to an illness? In the dream I had years ago in Lodi, illness was represented by a zombie, and in this dream, if I’m interpreting it correctly, the illness was represented by the ugly aliens. In addition, I wrote a blog post a while back in which a zombie seemed to represent a vital movement I was trying to throw out, so there doesn’t seem to be one universal symbol that can be pinned down as always being the symbol for an illness. If there is some way to know though when a dream is forecasting an illness, and that dream comes before the illness actually hits you, you could prepare, but like it is so often in dreams you usually don’t know what a dream means until afterwards.

This post is mainly just food for thought, but the knowledge, however, that there really are hostile forces and beings trying to keep us from progressing is important to see, and it’s something that at some point we’re going to wake up to as a species. The fact that it isn’t known or being talked about presently except on a very small scale is aiding the cause of these hostile forces. So if an article like this has helped someone to see that or opened their mind to that possibility or even just validated their beliefs about such things, then it’s served a purpose.

References

  1. The Mother, Questions and Answers 1929-1931, pg 55

Harm’s End or Boyz II Men?

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, DreamsLeave a comment

Dreams, in addition to showing things going on with you as an individual, can also give you a look at a bigger process such as a household or an organization. I had a dream recently that I felt was of this nature that was showing the process of our house Harm’s End. Here is the dream:

 I’m with two of the members of Boyz II Men. Myself and another black guy have been hired to fill in for the other two members who have quit the group. It’s just for one show, and we’re practicing a song for the performance. Later I’m with one of the regulars from the group at a restaurant, and I’m laughing and telling him how funny it will look for a white guy like me to come out with the three of them who are black. Joking I tell him that I should tell people I have the disease that turned Michael Jackson white.

 For readers who don’t know, my friend Donny and I are living in a large multi-apartment house in India with five Tamil youths (four male, 1 female) all in their late teens or early twenties, and the main focus of our house currently is the maturation process of these youths into adults, a process aptly and somewhat humorously mirrored by the symbol of Boyz II Men in the dream. The waking reality, like the situation in the dream, is also unusual since it’s two white Americans guiding five Tamils into adulthood with all seven of us sharing the same house in India as a family unit. Definitely not something you see everyday.

The fact that in the dream the arrangement is only for one show is interesting since both Donny and I feel that this type of work is only a temporary situation, and not our true calling nor what we feel the divine ultimately wants Harm’s End to be about. We feel that the purpose of Harm’s End is to be what, for lack of a better idea, you could call an ashram in the midst of life, a place where people can work on going beyond ego consciousness, and ending the harm they are doing both to themselves and their environment.

As it stands now, the youths in our charge are preparing themselves for a normal human life with no aspiration for anything higher. There is one though that we feel has the potential to reach for something higher, but it may be a long time before he’s ready to make that kind of change. So our house really is more Boyz II Men than Harm’s End at the moment, but at some point it appears that will change. When and how that happens is impossible to say, though Donny and I are both looking forward to moving beyond this phase of things. People in this age group are tough customers, and it gets even more wearisome when they’re actively resisting growing up and maturing the way our kids are doing to varying degrees. Donny and I are well aware that even if Harm’s End does evolve into an ashram in the midst of life, it doesn’t mean that the other people involved won’t be hard to deal with, but it will make a difference if those people have or are nursing a divine aspiration, and are actively trying to be sincere and honest with themselves. For that reason, though we do care about our charges, I think Donny and I probably won’t grieve when this Boyz II Men phase of things comes to the ‘End of The Road.’1

 Notes
1. This is the title of a well known Boyz II Men song and their first international hit.

Avoiding Trouble With The KKK

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams, Inner Voice and VisionLeave a comment
KKK by Arete13, on Flickr
“KKK” (CC BY-ND 2.0) by Arete13

Two nights ago I had this dream about my guitar teacher Tom:

I’m at Tom’s guitar studio and outside in the parking lot there’s a KKK rally happening. Tom is putting on a KKK robe because he wants them to think he’s one of them in order to avoid any trouble.  Then Tom and I  go and sit outside to practice guitar, and a black man comes up and asks Tom if he can go in the studio to use the bathroom. Tom tells the guy no and points out the klanners and says “Can’t you see who’s here?” Tom’s worried the klanners will give him problems if he lets the guy use the bathroom.  The black man just walks in anyway though, uses the bathroom and leaves without incident.

When I told Tom about the dream he laughed and said that was really funny because just the other day he’d told a friend of his he was going to get a Bass Pro1 sticker and put it on his car to give people the message “Hey everyone! I’m a white working class Republican!”  He then proceeded to tell me that in the past when he was going to a lot of concerts and music festivals and the like he put an american flag in his car and saw that he avoided a lot of trouble with police and security that way.

Now I think Tom may have been half kidding with his friend, but we can see via the dream that I picked up Tom’s apprehension and how he was thinking about how he could avoid attracting the wrong kind of attention in what he feels will become a more openly divided and intolerant America after Trump takes office. As Donny pointed out though the dream is probably also picking up on fears of coming intolerance on the level of the nation itself, fear in people that if they don’t go along with the hating herd they’ll suffer because of it. I can also see something of myself in this dream, how I also can put on a false appearance in order to avoid trouble. As an example of this I actually voted for a third party candidate in the election to avoid having to tell my parents (who I live with and are quite conservative) that I voted for Hillary should they ask who I voted for.  I now regret that because I live in Florida where Trump edged Hillary out by a small margin and to be honest in hindsight I feel like I basically cast a vote for Trump by going that route. Now it’s true that I was in fact put off by both candidates and also that I expected Hillary to win the election handily, but I took the easy way out to avoid any possible discomfort at home and didn’t cast my vote for the person who I felt was clearly the lesser of two evils. Now to be fair I think I should point out here that my parents aren’t neo nazis or the sort of people who would show up at KKK rally.  As I’ve pointed out before, dreams often show things in an exaggerated manner to get their point across.

Now the black man at the end of the dream would seem to represent things that myself, Tom and others feeling this collective fear wouldn’t want the intolerant or rigidly moral to see. Donny suggested the idea that the fact that the black man uses the bathroom anyway without incident shows that the future may not play out as badly as people are fearing. Let’s hope that turns out to be the case.

Now it’s already implied in what I’ve written but I wanted to explicitly state how this dream shows how we can dream not only about a collective process, but also about what’s going on with people we’re closely involved with such as friends, family, co-workers etc. I’ve been taking lessons from Tom for over two years and we’re of a like mind regarding many things, so we’ve delved a little deeper in conversation than who won the football game last night. Our relationship is to some extent a friendship, and since there’s a connection there I can receive inner communication from him. To see this inner communication is useful if for no other reason than showing our inner connectedness, which Donny discussed at length in a recent blog.

This type of dream or vision can also enable you to see what’s going on with someone in order to try and take some helpful action. That happened recently with me in regards to a friend who’s a recovering alcoholic. I had a vision of her making some objects like large coins out of clay and there was a muse line with the vision that said: Mine was destroyed. At the time I had the vision I was wondering if this person had had a stumble and I was looking online for advice on how to approach someone if you think that’s happened. In my research I came to know of something Alcoholics Anonymous uses called sobriety coins which are tokens showing the amount of time someone has remained sober. After learning that I figured my friend’s sobriety coin had been destroyed figuratively speaking, but the fact that she was making new ones in the vision probably indicated that she was trying to get back on her feet. Having the vision helped me to bring the subject up with my friend and to encourage her not to get down on herself about the stumble, but to just pick herself up and carry on.

This is a pretty vast subject and I’ll probably write more about it in future on this blog, but I think this is a good stopping point. It would be great though to hear other people’s experiences in the comments.

Notes and References

  1. For those who don’t know Bass Pro is a Hunting/Fishing/Camping superstore chain here in the USA.

Can’t Get Rid Of The Zombie

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams, Uncategorized2 Comments

When I was living in India, myself and two friends, David and Donny, started a kids program for urban village children. That program later evolved into a home for five of those children with us as the primary caretakers. As it turned out I left India when those kids we’re on the cusp of adolescence, but I’ve still stayed involved by funding the project. For most of the time I was in India as well I was funding The Lighthouse, as we called it then (now Harm’s End like the blog), with money that I had.

In addition to the five residents (now three) we also had and still have what you might call an ‘extended family’ of Lighthouse kids that we’re involved with. Because nearly all the kids we were dealing with were from severely impoverished families we were getting asked constantly for money for all kinds of things and not just for the children’s needs. The situation has continued with me in America and I sometimes get emails from Donny voicing someone’s request for this or that. The whole situation hits a trigger in my vital and was a struggle for me then as well as now.  Part of it is selfishness as well as a conflict with the conservative values I was raised with.  As a result I’m pretty tight fisted by nature. Donny is the opposite though and we often found ourselves at odds on the giving issue which created resentment in me towards him and towards the giving in general which was something I sometimes felt was forced on me. This was made worse by the fact that the people we were dealing with would try to play Donny against me in order to get what they wanted. There was also a lot of lying where we’d be asked for money for something, but find out later the money had actually been used for something else. That also created resentment.

Both now and in the past I either decide to give or am convinced to give more often than not it seems, so that really hasn’t changed.  I have mellowed out some though in regards to the giving, see the need for it in some cases, and I’ve gotten a lot better at not getting taken over as much by the feelings of annoyance etc. that come up nor letting the decision about a certain request take over my thoughts.

I still have reactions though to the requests, sometimes big reactions where this unintegrated resentment from the past comes surging up. I had one of those reactions recently when Donny relayed a request to pay for drum lessons from Samuel who is part of the extended family.  I said no since Mugu, a resident, had been asking for the same thing, and would probably have gotten irate at us giving lessons to someone else.  That in itself was a valid point, but as I said the resentment towards the giving came up as well as another source of resentment. Let me explain. Over the years I’ve given a lot of money to Lighthouse kids for this or that class (usually something with getting a job in mind), and I know the way these urban village children will quit things at the drop of a hat if they decide they don’t like it or find it to be too much effort.  And even in the instances where a class was finished, in every case they’ve either not used the education at all or gotten a job with it and quit within a matter of weeks. The hours are long and the pay is crap in India unless you have a lot of education so I can’t not empathize a little, but as you might understand, there’s a part of me that’s really tired of watching money go to waste in the attempts to help these people better themselves.  I figured if history was any indication there was a good chance Samuel wouldn’t stick with the drum class, and it would just be more money down the drain.

So getting back to the story, even after I told Donny my answer, the vital was still miffed about the whole thing, and the mind kept mulling over things such as what I’d say if Donny didn’t drop it etc.  Then that night I had this dream:

I’m in a town and Eli Manning is there as well as a guy who’s running amok.  A car almost runs the crazy guy over, but then some people manage to capture him and put him in an old car like a Model T that has no roof.  I get in the car too as a passenger.  We’re interrogating the crazy guy, and it’s apparent he’s completely nuts.  I finally just get sick of him and throw him out of the car.  I’m glad to be rid of the guy and he’s gone for a while.  Then he’s suddenly back crawling up the outside of the car, but he’s a zombie now. We manage to dislodge him again, but then he comes creeping again up the side of the car.  Somebody suggests we go play a video game about zombies, that doing so might give us a clue as to how to get rid of him.

Shortly after waking up the next day I decided I’d had enough of all this ruling my mind and vital so I made a firm resolution to throw it out.  It wasn’t so easy to get rid of though.  It took quite a bit of work and even though I wanted it gone the thoughts and antagonistic feelings kept coming back as the thing expended its emotional charge. The dream shows this process very well, first with the crazy guy, who represented these irrational thoughts and emotions, and how I threw him out of the car, which shows my decision to throw out the vital reaction I was having. Then we see how even after I’d ‘killed’ the guy, i.e. the vital movement, it kept coming back and this is shown by the guy becoming a zombie that I can’t get rid of.

Regarding some of the other symbols in the dream I have to admit I don’t know what to make of the part at the end about playing the video game, but Eli Manning is an interesting symbol. As any football fan knows, Manning and his team the New York Giants have toppled arrogant quarterback Tom Brady and the New England Patriots twice in the Superbowl, the first time giving New England their only loss of the season. In addition to their reputation for being arrogant, the Patriots are also known for the two times they’ve been caught cheating in recent years. So if you look at the Patriots as cheating jerks with big egos, as many non-Patriots fans do, then you could see how maybe Manning represented some force or movement helping me to throw out the nasty vital reaction that had taken me over.

Another interpretation though is that Eli Manning might represent the nice guy in me since Manning, a two time Superbowl MVP quarterback, always comes across as a humble, well meaning fellow as well as a good sportsman except, of course, for when he was drafted1. The truth is there was part of me that wanted to give Samuel what he wanted because I feel sorry for him. He never stood a chance in the cutthroat Indian public school system and ended up dropping out. The future looks pretty bleak for Samuel, and the Eli Manning part of me wanted to give him something that he might take pleasure in.

So after I’d cleared out the vital reaction the Eli Manning part of me was still pleading Samuel’s case, but in the end I decided that since Donny didn’t voice any objection to my decision I would let it stand and see if Samuel pressed the issue. If he did I figured that might mean it was more than just a fleeting fancy or just arising out of a desire to make noise. Another reason, however, that I decided to let the thing drop at the time was because that I knew after I saw the meaning of the zombie dream that I’d eventually be writing this article, and that would be a chance to take another look at things.2

So in closing, while I think it’s been valuable to go into the nuts and bolts of my vital reaction, I want to reemphasize a really important lesson in this article, which is how these vital movements won’t go without a fight once you’ve let them get in and really take over. The best thing of course is to not let it get to that point, to detach yourself from them immediately if you can and don’t let yourself get fully pulled into the vital vortex. That can be hard to avoid though with things that really get your goat the way this situation did with me.  Once it’s really gotten to you though, the best thing to do, once you’re able to, is make a firm resolution to throw the vital movement out and then be more stubborn than it until it’s gone.

Notes and References

  1. Manning stated publicly that he would refuse to play for the San Diego Chargers should they draft him.  
  2. After proofing the article Donny revealed to me that Samuel had in fact been persistently asking for the class for a while before he finally relayed the request to me. Donny also said that Samuel kept asking for a while after I’d said no, but that he kept telling Samuel the answer was no. When I asked Donny recently if he thought we should give Samuel the class he said he thought we shouldn’t at the moment, because Samuel didn’t seem to be interested anymore, but that somewhere down the road it might be appropriate if he asked again.

 

Experience on the Summer Solstice

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams, spiritualityLeave a comment

 

I feel there’s a reason why ancient cultures gave such importance to astrological events like equinoxes, solstices, full moons and such things as planetary alignments. Basically they’re days of power, a day you can get a boost for your sadhana or your dream life if you’re receptive. Usually for me, if there’s any effect at all during these times (and a lot of times there isn’t), it’s on the level of dreams. I’ll have a powerful dream or a lucid dream. However during the last summer solstice, which was paired with a full moon, I had a little spiritual uplift that I think was shown in a dream I’d had the night before. The part I’m going to share however is just the end of a much longer dream since it’s only the end that’s really relevant as far as the spiritual uplift that day was concerned.

I put my backpack on and walk down the street and eventually find myself in some woods.  There’s a stream there and in the water I can see these birds, about twenty of them, that have the heads of peacocks but bodies more like an ostrich’s. They’re about as tall as a man and in the dream I regard them as peacocks.  One of them comes up and peers at me curiously though a gap in the trees.  I can see that we’re at a delta where this stream meets the ocean.  I go down into the water which is only about a foot deep and a very beautiful bluish green.  The whole scene is very beautiful as well. The peacock/ostrich birds are moving out into the ocean, and I’m walking with them.  Though the birds are big they don’t seem aggressive nor do they seem to be bothered by me.  If I remember correctly their ostrich-like bodies are black or greyish black.  It’s getting close to sunset and I want to watch the sunset with the peacock/ostrich birds.

One thing I’ve started to notice recently and have shown in a couple of recent blog posts is how a beautiful natural scene in a dream seems to be showing a nice ‘scene’ trying to manifest inside you in your waking life that day or a day or so afterwards. I believe that was the case here. So let me tell you what happened. On the day of the solstice, in the late morning, I went for a ride in my kayak. While I was out, I encountered one of my favorite water birds around here, a roseate spoonbill, roosting in a mangrove tree. I don’t often see them when I’m kayaking so I just sat there for a while admiring the bird and its beautiful pink plumage. When I returned home I noticed I felt cleared out as I often do after a spin in the kayak, since I can get fully immersed in nature. I noticed also that my thinking was elevated, and I found myself naturally pondering some things I’d recently read by Medhananda and Nolini Kanta Gupta and was looking at the world through the lens of those ideas. It didn’t require any hard mental effort or tapasya though. It was just happening naturally and spontaneously. For the most part I can’t remember exactly what I was reading at the time, but I do recall one little aphorism by Medhananda that was on my mind:

Spirit is tremendously solid.
It is like diamond.
In comparison
matter is only a cloud
of probabilities.1  

A little later I took our dog Rosie for a walk. As we walked I was really feeling the stillness in the plants, and while that’s not a common experience for me it wasn’t the first time that’s happened, and I’m sure a lot of people have felt the stillness in plants. This time though, I could also feel the joy that was in the plants, and I caught it a bit by contagion and was feeling joy inside me as well as I walked. I was also appreciating how beautiful and unique the plants were, seeing them the way you might when tripping on psychedelics but to a much much lesser extent. There was one group of plants I encountered that were nothing but huge leaves on stalks which had been planted to hide a fire hydrant. When I looked at those plants, there was something so delightful about those big leaves that I couldn’t resist the urge to go over and touch one, giving a little laugh as I did so and feeling delight similar to what I think a small child does when they do something like that. That delight continued on the walk, and the uplift continued after that. It might have still been there a little bit when I went to bed. I honestly don’t remember now. It wasn’t there the next day when I woke up though.

So what I think happened here was I was able to open to the amplified energy that was available that day and benefit from it in this altered state of consciousness, which was foreshadowed by the beautiful sunset scene in my dream. This idea that a beautiful dream scene is symbolic of a beautiful uplift in waking life is still a working hypothesis for me, but one I’m getting more and more evidence to support. Recently, I had another dream where I was looking at a beautiful blue lake ringed by breathtaking mountains on the far side, and two days later there was a definite shift in consciousness in the evening, a state of peace and quiet. It wasn’t as strong as other experiences like that I’ve had, but it was definitely there.

One thing that I feel is important to point out is the beauty of these dream scenes is beyond the greatest beauty you can see in the physical world or even in normal dreams. I can’t really explain it any better than that, but if you start to have dreams like this I think you’ll see what I mean, see that it’s a certain class of dream or has a certain type of dream substance that can embody that beauty. It might be a glimpse of what Sri Aurobindo calls the subtle physical, but I can’t say for sure.

Regarding the peacock/ostrich birds in the dream I should point out that Sri Aurobindo has said that a peacock is a symbol of spiritual victory and that fits with the fact that I had a little spiritual opening. The fact that the rest of the body was like an ostrich is interesting since the thing that most quickly comes to mind when I think of the symbolic meaning of an ostrich is sticking your head in the ground. If I’m remembering correctly that the color was black that would indicate a hostile force. So I’d guess the element of spiritual victory is still marred by an element of sticking my head in the ground and maybe also a hostile influence. I think the birds in the dream were also connected to the encounter I had with the roseate spoonbill even though the dream birds were completely different. I always enjoy the sight of a roseate spoonbill because pink is the color that symbolizes the psychic being or soul in the integral yoga.

So in closing I think it’s important to try and keep yourself clear every day and not just on days like full moons and solstices. Knowing, however, that you can get a little boost on days like that is a good motivator for keeping yourself clear especially on those occasions.

References

  1. On the threshold of a new age with Medhananda, pg 165 by Medhananda