tranquility

The first journal I pulled out of my first drawer-stack of journals is a dream journal from 2004-2005.

Hopefully I didn’t lose my vast audience with the words “dream journal”. I have a couple of them… 2ish to be exact… in addition to dream descriptions splattered throughout most of my journals. We’re all guilty of this, right?

Things Fall Apart.

Journaling my dreams was a necessary phase.  They were a practice of transcribing ethereal images before they disappeared.  They also represent me scrambling to, aptly enough, archive my brain.

In 2004 I didn’t yet have the balls to embrace the term atheism.  I often described myself as an agnostic atheist… something I clung to all the way to the first 2007 entry of my Hot-For-Jesus blog.  Perhaps my preferred descriptor now is post-theist, but through it all I wanted to believe that my, Our, subconscious held the keys to Everything.

“I think too much of psychic overload, reincarnation, parallel lives.” (from first dream journal entry)

What did I find in the coffee-stained dream journal?

• Performing, rehearsing, singing, seeing myself in a reflection – ‘blond’ (which I’m not), ‘dusty pink dress, cream pearls’, (both of which I made for a H.S. performance in the early ‘90s) and ‘sexy legs’ (whatever that means)… and I said to myself, “Damn. After all this time, Christine you still look fucking sexy and sound great and you’d make your family proud.”

• Dying… as a foreign child in a disaster situation and not feeling pain… and needing to let someone know that I/she/he was dying pain-free. The dream convinced me I was channeling the suffering of others, in particular the 2004 Tsunami days before it happened.

You get the picture.  It is full of nonsense.  Absolutely necessary nonsense for the time… full of apocalyptic Armageddons… apocalypses galore camouflaged as war, disease, floods, tornadoes, solving mysteries that uncovered new Mysteries.

As I re-read it now I still look for signs, proof that I knew things before they happened, or parallel to their happening… proof that the dreams were significant if I just could properly interpret them… a holdover from the fundagelical glamorization of Daniel and other Biblical dream-interpreters.  But all I found were themes of houses, lovers, trains, siblings, music, mothers, frustration and apocalyptic intrigue.  No proof of anything but a woman trying to untangle knots of spiritual abuse and normal human life.

Anything worth sharing?

A Helper shared this koan with me.  I wrote it down in red ink:

                                          The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient.

Take it. It is yours to keep as long as you need it.

Better for the wear.

The triptych of dream journal coffee pics can also be found on my Tumblr blog, User. (Triptych’s subtitle: put a fucking bird on it.)