I’ve been dreaming a lot lately.
Most of the time, these days, I’m in the company of few people, and they tend to be the same people who I know pretty well. When I am in large groups, it tends to be either outside, or in pretty disconnected environments, not a lot of emotional processing or psychic enmeshing (somewhere people are having big feelings that are affecting each other), but I spent the last week assisting on the Care Team at a Sacred Sexuality festival; lots of intense feeling, lots of people, LOTS of enmeshing. I was at a distance from it, in my supporting roll, but I was there and interacting. And showing up.
A couple of days in, someone visited me in my dreams. Just a shadow of a person, really. like looking up at someone on a balcony above you. Like you’re laying on a sunbed, and they pop their head and torso over the balcony to take a look at you. Indistinct and diffuse, but definitely there, and definitely looking.
I could feel them on the edges, moving through the spaces. An unexplained and out of place rage here; a raw hurt, exposed to the harsh environment there. Not too dark, but not too light either.
Last night, we went to sleep on some unsaid tensions, a difficult conversation deliberately avoided. Seeds of doubt sown, the fertile soil of fear ready and waiting. So it picked it’s moment and came.
There were a few of us in the group, just hanging around, being. Some laughter, some closeness. I started to realise that my clothes were a little dirty and creased, my face unshaven. It meant little but the unease started to rise. We needed to form up for morning parade.
We were solidiers? no, not quite, but we were subject to something, some standard of looking and being that we were not going to meet. The unease spread through us. I started to try to smooth my jacket, straighten my collar and pick some fluff off where I could. It was pointless. I was in trouble, we all were. And we knew it. The hope that the Sergeant Major would move on to another platoon was short lived. He raged over to us and barked our orders to form up in open order for inspection. We were to be punished, that was for sure. We struggled to organise ourselves, we couldn’t form ranks, or stand next to each other in any way that wasn’t hap-hazard, we were all different, with different reflexes and reactions. We were not a unit, not unified or uniform. We were diverse.
The Sergeant’s rage became incandescant, I grew angry with my compatriots for their inability to comply to escape the worst of his ire, but it was done, and he spat his spiteful derision toward us.
It was then that I started to get cross. Who was he to tell us how to be? we hadn’t signed up for this? where was his authority? Did he think that just because he was loud and aggressive that he held some kind of King-ship over us? bestowed by simple, rude intimidation? No. You can’t treat people like that. Beings like that. And that’s what we were; Being. Just being ourselves. Flawed, messy and a little uncontrollable. Autonomous and integral.
He changed then, too. Gone was the green uniform and human face, contorted in anger; now he was larger, muscles bulging beneath a grey, cracked skin, head huge and swollen like a bull drawn by bad AI. It wanted me to be afraid. It told me that I could never hurt it, I could push knives into it’s face and it would never feel anything but amusement. I believe that to be true; I think the only joy it could feel was in pain and anger and fear. But I was afraid, and I ran. We all did. Into the block (an army term for our accommodation, a dull, featureless apartment building with shared toilets and showers and rooms for 5, or more), we ran into the bathroom and tried to bar the door, but there was nothing to use, and we could hear it coming. Breath heaving and footsteps heavy. I braced the door handle to stop it coming in while the others tried to flee out the window. We were animals then. Small, furry things united in our role as Prey. The thing pounded and thrashed at the door, the hinges started to pull from the door frame, but where I held it, it remained fast. It could only break through where I wasn’t holding it back.
The others got out, and when the door gave way, it did so pressing me into the wall, shielding me from the thing. I moved the door to open the doorway to me whilst still obscuring me from the view of the thing, and I ran. Down the corridor, through a side-door and down some stairs, out of a fire escape. My friend was with me, one of us was a small white bear, I’m not sure which. We had all changed form, too. I found a small tracker in my pocket; He must have put it there when shouting in my face on the parade square. I discarded it and made a commitment to check for others when time allowed. We were in a garden, then; Ground soft with brown, fallen leaves and slowly decaying wooden furniture and make shift sheds. A chain link fence surrounded us, but not high. Easily passed over. We ran, but my legs were heavy with that leaden feeling I can get in Dream-space, every step heavier than the last, the more I tried, the harder movement became, until I was fixed in place, at the edge of the garden, clawing at the fence, on the edge of escape. He was coming, the thing, I could feel him, and I woke.
My heart was racing with the tension of it, but the fear was gone. We had all changed form, too. Transformed by our fear into things that needed to be afraid, just as the thing had transformed itself into something that needed to be feared. We had done the same thing, differing only in our reaction to the narrative it had created. Because it knew something we didn’t; that the form was a fiction. A slight-of-hand trick to support it’s need to be feared. And because we were ignorant of the rules of the game, we played along, not knowing we had a choice.
The thing and I, we were made of the same stuff; A soul, encased and expressed through a form in dreamspace reality. It’s soul, or it’s conscious expression, somehow distorted and corrupted into a state where it could only feel love of pain and suffering. But it still loved. Over the course of it’s existence it has somehow fallen from the light, and only darkness remains for it. And that’s okay; for one thing to exist, it must be in the presence of it’s polarity; For there to be light, there must be darkness for it to be in any way consciously discernible. The key is balance.
Ultimately, space and time are merely a fabric; a canvas upon which our corporeal expression is projected. We are not the canvas, though; we are the projection.
The thing, on the other hand, has no physical expression, so it must present itself psychically. In dreams, in emotional stimulus, and it’s language of manifestation is hate, and anger, and fear; the corruption of our divinely gifted emotional selves. In order to exist, and to express, it must influence. To spread from one corporeal being to another through their pain and fears. This was how it found me, in that festival of intense feelings. It wanted to rob me of my hard earned groundedness, of my faith in the goodness of people. In their divinity.
But I see it. More clearly now than ever before. I see it for the wounded, distorted thing it is. And I see in my own light, the equal of it. It has me on experience, and it has me on faith. As a frail and fallible human, my doubt is my undoing. It has no doubt. It knows.
Knowing must be the practice.