In the very early hours of Easter Sunday, I woke with delight from a dream in which I was lecturing and demonstrating a simple ritual centered on millet seed. It seemed like I was giving a sermon in a light-filled space with honey-colored wood, standing at a very simple pulpit. I spoke of this tiny seed as a symbol of creation, of death and rebirth, and of the growth of the very big from the very small.
Later that day, at our Easter dinner, I told my Millet Sermon dreamlet to a dear friend who, as a Dominican sister, is quite accustomed to giving as well as hearing sermons.
When I said. "I dreamed I gave a sermon on millet seed" she thought I meant that in the dream I gave a sermon while standing on top of a millet seed. Laughing, she described the vivid mental image of me as a tiny figure in a micro-world using a millet seed as my pulpit.
I loved this mental painting, which transported us into one of my favorite themes involving the multiverse: how we may be living in one of many nested worlds, and that the universe we think is so large may be one in which the furnishings of our lives are the size of millet seeds (or vastly smaller) in proportion to universes that contain ours.
This Easter, I looked over my records of dreams on this special day, and found this report from 2009.
5 comments:
What a fun dream. I was just pondering the very small and large. I shared this dream on a FB site:
1. Oh The Places I can Fly
I am with an air force group. We are given a scouting mission. The planes are small and patterned like WW2 but they don't have propellers. I am chosen with four others to go back into the bunker to scout for the planes. We all lay down and sleep. Now we are flying in different positions around the planes. The engines are quiet and soothing sounding. Then a man down and I am flying with him as he runs this pattern. He is clearing paths and needs to do it swiftly without touching this delicate formation.
Feeling: happy to be flying again
RC: I spent yesterday walking at the national park, my neighborhood park, ya!. I found the Ospreys nest. A few days ago I was talking with my son about how I had lost my flying dreams. Before bed I unpacked a bag of books and found this little one called LI, Dynamic Form In Nature by David Wade.
The pattern the pilot dropped into looked like lichen patterning. There's a live oak at the park with lichen all along it's branches that I was climbing with the kids yesterday. The book says this about lichen: ancient colonizers of rocks,trees,and old walls... Its formative habits are appropriately simple, but the general, cumulative effect of successive layers of growth can be delightfully complex.
This has me wondering about the ability of the dreamer's ways to gather information from and assist all sorts of life in ones environment. Who and when are the others with me in this dream?
Happy Easter to you Robert.
PS: From a ITWMD comment, I am reminded that my Dad worked in the Air Force deciphering photo patterns from spy planes. What If, my Dad?
Not incidentally or accidentally, millet properly cooked makes a creamy, nutritious, tasty base for any meal or dessert. It's eaten a lot in Africa but has also been popular amongst natural foodies like me for many decades. IIWMD, I'd feel that the sermon on the seeds symbolized a gift of spiritual sustenance for my Dreaming Tribe, my flock.
Happy Easter, Robert, and to all of you!
Rachel S.
It´s beautiful for both a community and an individual to start the growth from the tiny millet seed. Millet belongs to the earth element and in that way stands for being well grounded, centered and connected. On a very practical level, millet is alcaline food and can naturally balance acid diet. In the Chinese medicine spleen and pancreas are expressed by the earth element. Apart from the primary function of the spleen to transform food into nutrition, the spleen is vital for our regeneration after traumas. People who see auras report that patients after sudden accidents may have a "hole" around the spleen.
If it were my dream, I would probably start noticing and appreciating "small" earthly, ordinary things a bit more in my life and I would read again my favourite AndersenĖs story Five Peas from a Pod:-). And I would happily give students the task to write their own sermon on the praise of an overlooked millet seed, which would satisfy the collective message of the dream.
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