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Two Questions. Two Footnotes. (And a half-sheepish postscript.)

 2:58 a.m.

What am I reading from, or whose is the voice I hear, when I wake in the darkness and, in the super-lucid moments before so-called full consciousness (so dim is it, so ponderous after the clarity of leaving-sleep), but still vividly in my racing memory, I hear an over-voice reciting1yes, and there was music to it, multimedia aspects, like an ultra-magazine from some attention-deficit future – and the voice and the repeating crescendo of the music2 spoke of things the movies have taught us, such as how we cherish the idea of retraining ourselves, remaking ourselves, perhaps learned from the example of American army training videos, or the joy of (what was it?) making curving paraffin candles dripping with arcing light, yes, like the ones in that Tom Cruise movie where his daughter (Kelly McGillis, in an uncredited role) [waking mind: waitaminute!  Whothehell has heard of Kelly McGillis in alltheseyears? but in the dream this fact is wonder full] is, blue-eyed, something, there was dripping light, SOMETHING, the connection is breaking up, the voice stutters and sparks but I can still (almost) recall it: I ask again, what is this text? Whose is this voice?

Does anyone read to you like this in your half-light moments, words spooling out as if revealed?

1 In my waking-up dreams, let it be said,  the writing is luminous, full of whimsy and portent (yet effortlessly grasped by the grateful receiver/auditor/me), loose, relaxed, yet vibrating with curvaceous tension, like the steely looping cables of a great suspension bridge joining land to sea and sleep to thinking. (When I look at my notes later, it looks like the chickens are loose.)

2 And still, even when I had gotten up to scribble, I could hear the music from the end-dream. I scribbled, though I can’t write music, trying to capture the ominous-yet-triumphant, expectantly orchestral melody. God! I can hear music? I write dunh DUNH dunh and  and diagram the rises and falls of similar, three-part blasts that give way to four- and five-note, fearfully rapid da da da da (da)s that descend the scale. Okay. Think I’ve got it. If this still makes sense in the morning, then we’ll see what I have.

P.S.  12 hours later, my dream of an occult ability as a musical composer ended abruptly, like a needle scratching across a vinyl album at high volume. What I was hearing, I suddenly realized, was Chinese television’s introductory theme for its NBA game telecasts. Well, then. I’m not composing deathless melodies in my sleep. I can deal with that.

But earlier that day, I was reading The Seven Valleys, a mystical text by Baha’u’llah about the journey of the spirit. He speaks of the dream, in “the valley of wonderment”, as a phenomenon that contains “a myriad perfect wisdoms”. I found myself, only a few hours after the semi-coherent mid-night scribbling above (to be sure, a little better polished here!), reading this:

First, what is this world, where without eye and ear and hand and tongue, a man puts all of these to use? Second, how is it that in the outer world thou seest today the effect of a dream, when thou didst vision it in the world of sleepsome ten years past?

A little dangerous to write of one’s dreams, and mine rarely rise above banal – or downright oppressive – recapitulations of past events, or inscrutable wanderings down narrowing paths. But it sure was fun to have a spiritual Master echo my questions, though in a slightly more lofty context.

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