A Dream: Awake

14 June 2007

Last night I dreamed of leaving this world for the next.
Something about helping to re-join the long-separated shards of Man & moving on to the next evolution in consciousness. Hindu? More likely a lost memory of The Dark Crystal. I was excited about this. I was ready. I wanted to help.

With some sense of imminent doom to this world, now seemed the time to go. I made my good-byes, walked across a field to a little white annex room with a door, & shut it behind me.
The world was gone.

Inside I found a small office with a slightly alien woman behind the desk. What was it, her mouth? Its cut across her face unnaturally large? She was a bureaucrat but friendly enough. A little frumpy. She pulled out a series of forms & began an interview to see if in fact I was serious & willing to make this transition.

For awhile, I believed that I was. I started to sign things.

Then it became clear that what was going to happen was that I would literally be reincarnated as a newborn infant on a new world, a journey that seemed less & less like a true evolution of spirit, than simply starting over in a different, more alien society. Yet this society had some wholly familiar & mundane appetites. The secretary couldn't promise who my parents would be, she explained, but all the candidates had applied for a baby & had been vetted as truly wanting one.

For the first time I began to think about what my interviewer's motives really were.

There was a current fashion, she felt it fair to warn me, all the rage, really, but nothing to fear, of some (but not all!) parents using hormone technology to keep their children's bodies around 18 to 24 months of age until they were ready to leave home, at which point they'd be rapidly grown, straight through puberty & to adulthood, which sometimes had its complications.

She handed me a set of worn, soft-bound notebooks. They were unfamiliar. I flipped through them. They contained pasted-in photos, drawings & handwritten journal entries that were my own, as well as many pages of photos & journals interleaved by someone else. Someone who liked to keep rather anal lists of unimportant things. The blending begins. I was going to be the different-than-we-expected part of someone's made-to-order baby.

I lost my conviction—a dropped rag. Thin rationalizations sprouted up in its place. Well, I can't see the whole picture from here, I reasoned, best not to judge it yet. Well, this is all just to test my resolve. Well, who's to say the soul's greatest work isn't there, & achieved through that very suffering? Which made me wonder why that wasn't just as easily achieved here.

Turning the pages, I found myself looking at old photos from my childhood, photos I've never seen. Candid, wonderful snapshots of family, of Yosemite gatherings, of Girl Scouts, of good friends, of Evan—I began to feel a powerful, visceral love lift off the pages from my life in this world.

I saw my family in intricate detail from above, watched families I'd grown up with laughing together, overhearing years of verbatim conversations, which passed in split seconds like birds past a window. I saw E and E and E again, & felt this great love grow like a tree through my body & limbs & through my head. I glimpsed the true form of my love, more whole & real than anything else I knew. The gift of it was so patent, so beautiful & rare, that all at once I could not bear to leave it. I doubted I would ever find this much again by rolling the dice like this. To give up on any of it, on any person or part of this world, or on this great, lucky true love before my life had run its full course was utterly unbearable.

Without realizing it, I'd begun to talk. I was telling the secretary anecdotes of the people I was seeing in the journals & in my mind's wide-open eye. I was telling her in that urgent way I have, when I really want someone to understand exactly as I understand it. But these were not good stories of the sort I'd tell to engage a group for fun. These were details that only meant things to me, not stories at all but human instants, emotional touchstones, & I had literally bored the secretary to sleep.

She was slumped in her chair, blouse rumpled & glasses crooked, her froggy mouth open & drooling a little. I didn't know how much time had passed. I had my doubts still. I wasn't convinced how useful I'd been with my life. Or whether these feelings were simply self-indulgent, delaying greater works. But I didn't care so much about that anymore. I knew truth when I saw it & I knew what I believed in. Whether she was faking the sleep for my benefit or if she was really out, I took my chance & slipped back out through the door.

It opened to a different place than where I'd left.

So I began to make my way back Home—to the people & grounds that had seeded that love—through an Odyssey of new dreams & chains of events, hundreds of new people, wild sexual encounters, of battles that passed in instants, & one expansive moment comforting a lost childhood friend, removing her shoes & stroking her back, herself curled on a bench at some lonely train station, sad for reasons beyond my understanding. Of long voyages.

When I woke at last, surfacing to that still pond of the morning mind, it was with the pleasure of a choice rightly made. Maybe I did it after all, I thought. Maybe I did leave this world for the next: the same world but awake. The same world more clearly seen & better chosen, steadily seeking my way back to you.