No. 13

My daughter developed a sore throat last week one evening, she complained about it and couldn’t eat. She is 7. At bedtime she was not her usual cheery rambunctious self as I read her a story about a sea dragon and an evil wizard. Finding we were out of cough medicine; I got in the truck and went down to get some at the local market. By the time I returned my wife had managed to ger her settled into a restless sleep. Sometime in the night my daughter woke up and came into our bedroom saying she’d had a dream. She explained that in the dream she was working on a puzzle inside her head, like the various parts of her mind or brain were the pieces and as she fit the last piece together, she said it fixed her sore throat. She laughed as she sat on the bed, and she went to school that next day.

I’ve always hated puzzles. Throughout my life I’ve disdained any activities that appeared to be a waste of time, that took away from my constant, incessant productive and creative inertia. My obsession with achievement and ambition has for nearly my entire incarnation kept me from board games, crosswords, sudoku, puzzles, etc. until now. Somehow the barrier between what is temporally wasteful and what is legit productive has crumbled in part. I started a 500 piece in November, a group of majestic unicorns in a glade with mountains rearing. Once completed there was a moment of bliss, or more like contentment. But I found myself drawn to demolish it quickly, gleefully almost. I called my daughter in; she was impressed mainly by the flowing manes of the unicorns, and we intoned the words ‘All is impermanent. Nothing is forever’ then we destroyed the scene, the tiny pieces collapsing in our hands. In December I started a 1000 piece, a psychedelic scene of underwater creatures flowing from a conch shell being blown by a giant mermaid…

Marty has retired from music, but he still lives a stone’s throw down the holler from me. True Trapper-heads out there will know to whom I refer. A few days ago, I was out walking the dog by the woods and happened upon old Marty Party. He said he’d been wanting to talk to me, he’d had a strange and vivid dream, and I was in it (and no, not a Blitzen Trapper road-dog stress dream as is frequent with all of us I would imagine). In the dream we were hanging out talking and I invited him and his kids to visit what he referred to as my ‘strange rickety mansion pieced together from scraps’ what I can only imagine as a Wonka-esque Mind-palace of sorts. I led them in, and we roamed upwards past weird rooms and confusing staircases until we reached the top floor which was large and open to the sky. The floor he said was covered in all types of puzzles, half completed and of esoteric design. In the dream I told him this is where my daughter and I work on puzzles. He said there were bizarre wooden block puzzles and large jigsaws with copious pieces. His kids were scampering through the puzzles, knocking some apart, one of the more eccentric puzzles they combined incorrectly, and it exploded into pieces. He said he felt bad that his kids were disturbing the puzzles but then he was struck with the knowledge that I would never complete most of them, at least not in this lifetime, that completion was not the goal…

I recently reconnected with one of my older sisters who lives in Tamil Nadu India. She lives in a raised hut that she built over the past several years in the jungle with two dogs and a plethora of other creatures that come and go including wild boar, snakes, squirrels, bandicoots and various birds. She is an entomologist among other things. We were discussing meditation via Zoom one night, and I mentioned that I’d spent about six months practicing Tibetan Dream Yoga but had quit for personal reasons. She asked why and I explained that the practice had become scary and somewhat unnerving.

Elements of Tibetan Dream Yoga present as typical Dharma type stuff, 5 seed-syllable mantra practices while falling asleep and one odd little detail that is of some importance (it also includes some shamanic elements as well…). Throughout the day you stop periodically and look around, aware of what’s happening at that moment, and you ask yourself ‘am I actually dreaming right now? Is this a dream?’ this serves to get one used to questioning all realities so that while dreaming you can become lucid and immediately enter a meditative state within the dream, creating a rift in the dream space of sorts. So, with the practice, my dreams began to get really vivid and disrupt my sleep. I wrote down the dreams including drawings and text but still couldn’t get lucidity to happen. I stepped up the practice and started using my daily sits to intensify the intension to go lucid. Not only did my sleep suffer, but my waking state started to blur and get questionable, always asking if things were real or a dream…

Consulting my dream journal, on April 25th, 2024, I recorded a nearly lucid dream in which my wife and I stood in a vast field in her home state of Iowa watching the skyline. The sky was a hazy gray and the sun was hidden. I remember a giddy feeling of levity as I scanned the horizon. I started to notice shapes, thick rotund gray green blobs, almost like thick buildings, but they moved. I saw seven of them spread along the horizon. The wind began to stir, picking up suddenly and I turned to my wife who gave me a strange look. At once I realized we were looking at distant tornadoes moving cumbersome and gigantic across the plains, so massive they would soon blot out the world. I felt fear and relief in equal measure, oddly. Then I woke up.

Less than a week later the Greenfield Tornado, the largest multi-vortex tornado ever recorded, hit southern Iowa.

Kind of crazy that you can get a book on TDY from Amazon, do some practices and…

After telling my sister this and other stories she said, ‘I can see why you quit the practice, sounds like something you could do if you were alone in a hut with no family, no nine to five. Maybe I’ll give it a try.’

These kinds of experiences might serve to illustrate the porous nature of reality and ‘individual’ consciousness, or maybe the blurring of reality/consciousness. Anecdotally there doesn’t seem to be anything special about my experience. From what I hear, people talk of a tuning-in quality whereby certain frequencies are accessed, and insight is gained, a very materialistic metaphor. But… to what end? I don’t think I have the perspective or whatever to know what to do with experiences like that, yet. I don’t know.

Two days ago, my daughter did several puzzles in quick succession on the living room coffee table, each time she’d look up at me with that mischievous grin of hers and say, ‘all is impermanent, nothing lasts forever’ and then wham.