THE HOUSE OF DREAMING
(excerpt from Voicings from Underground)
I am at a pool party when a tear opens up in the fabric of the world. All around me I sense and feel
the tall, luminous shapes of beings whose tendrilly extentions radiate outward
like moonlight on restless water. I am drawn to them and their attention is trained on me as
I walk through the tear in the world and fnd myself in an enchanting, high-ceilinged victorian-era room.
The room is softly aglow, yet its generous windows are boarded up or filled with concrete blocks.
Scrawled in red across the boards and cement are the words
NO. NO. NO.
The presences evaporate and I am alone. I am vexed.
Who vandalized this place?
The dream arrived as I worked to complete this portfolio in April of 2018. It is of a different quality than the frequent and familiar dreams that echo and elaborate upon the experiences of my waking life. I have a sense of having been visited– and of having received a message.
I re-enter the dream through a technique known as Active Imagination. I stand in the NO room again in a lucid waking-state, and articulate my wish to clarify the symbolic import of it, and suddenly know that it was I who scrawled the red NOs. I bricked and boarded the windows. I begin to understand that the room had been a place of meeting and exchange between myself and the luminous beings, but that as time passed, I said no more and more frequently to their communications. Finally, I ignored them altogether, denying the many small evidences of their invitations. I wrote NO. NO. NO. across the windows of that sanctuary, because I thought it was making me late for the world: too slow and too soft and too uncertain.
I invite the luminous beings to return. I tell them I would like to open up the windows and repaint the walls, but that I need their assistance. This is a spirit house, a room of collaboration. At frst I hear nothing. The room remains empty. So, I decide to clear away some of the debris. I use a sledge hammer to break the cement in one frame. When I have made an opening, I lean though into a vast blue sky and fresh, sharp air. If this is my tower, I have found its view.
I go to the second window and break through its NO. Here is a dirt wall. I start to chip away at it. Stone and clay and rocks–it is very dense–but behind this is softness like a living body. I touch it, this great, soft, abstract animal, and it is my own body that I feel.
There is a third window: bricked over. I break my way through and there is a sunny meadow. The room around me begins to soften, its edges curving and expanding outward. Pillars rise up from the floor....