Fall, 1996

The following is an edit of a piece I wrote for my writing 121 class in fall of 1996, I may be posting a few of these in the weeks to come.


I finally close my eyes and let sleep overtake me. As I count numbers off in my head and regulate my breathing pattern and heartbeat so that they get slower and I start to think about them less and less. I have replaced this system with active visualization, focusing on the that point in the center of my forehead, laying flat usually with my hands on my chest, taking slow deep breathes. This seems to induce visualization which allows me to fall easily into sleep. Slowly my subconscious takes over and a myriad of images play in my mind. These images shift rapidly some more vivid, some discernable, some more a blur of visual data. For awhile I have some control over these images, although this control is easily lost as the images shift and reform. I see this and the doorway to the world of sleep the dream place, and find myself more rested when allow myself to visually drift into dreaming. This is the play we all go to unravel the ancient mystery of self, that in played out in dreaming. This is a place more powerful and mysterious then the waking mind of the day can fathom, and in turn the language of the dream world with is formulas, formations with subjective and objecting contextually blurred when trying to translate the information into waking consciousness. There is a sense of loss, signal degradation, an inability to translate all the information, sometimes the information seems to slowly fade from my awareness. Others there is just a ghost recognition of something that was there and is now gone. In deep sleep and dreaming we have more access to the secrets we keep from ourselves, allowing us to function within the minimal requirements of the waking world. Of the small fraction of dreamtime data I’ve manage to bring back with me into the waking mind, some of it has been inspiring, some confusing, some very insightful. Some dreams seem to be reminders of past failures, other motivating, and some even seem to be filled with the awe of a mystery of self that is just too much to put into worlds.