Walking a dream

 

I am going to share my report of an ordinary day, without huge events or revelations, just a soft rhyming pattern. When at home, I start the day by lingering in bed for a little while after waking to harvest my dreams from the night. On the day I describe, I woke with a big dream in my mind. There are big dreams and little dreams. You know when a dream rates as big because you feel it, just as you know that coincidence is more than “mere” coincidence because you feel that.

In my dream, I was in London in the time of the Blitz. I returned from this excursion feeling excited and moved and deeply stirred. My dream had taken me, it seemed, into the life of a Royal Air Force pilot in a time of danger and love and romance. He loved women, and women loved him. One of the women he adored was a wartime nurse. They did not get to spend much time together.

It seemed I was in his body, in his situation, sharing his moments of passion and his fierce willingness to put his life on the line for what he believed in. As I slowly came back from this dream adventure, I felt his presence, as if for a moment both of us were in bed. I felt grateful for this deep and renewed connection with someone I believe to be a member of my spiritual family in another time, and outside time. .

When I was satisfied I was holding the essence of my dream of the pilot, I got out of bed, showered, threw on clothes. I had one swallow of coffee – literally, because my little dog was waiting for his walk. Dogs walk you no matter what. So very soon I was out on the street with my dog, heading for the park.

I was now taking the second step in my daily practice. The first step is to hold the essence of the dream, not necessarily all the details, but the essence. I had that. Out on the street, I was walking my dream as well as my dog. I was not puzzling over the dream, and certainly not trying to analyze it. The dream was simply in my mind, and perhaps in my energy field. I was open to the world showing me something that might reflect the dream, as the dream cast its reflection on the world.

As I walked the dream, I was ready to do another daily practice, which is to pay attention to three things that enter my field of perception, through any or all of my senses. These three things do not have to be extraordinary, weird or even surprising. They may be things you might never notice at all, let alone look at twice, unless you were playing this kind of game. A license plate might catch your eye, because it is a novelty plate or has a combination of letters and numbers that intrigues you. You attention might be drawn by the cry of a bird, or the words of a stranger talking on his cell phone or doing karaoke with his headphones. Maybe something dropped on the sidewalk or left on the curb for trash collection will catch your eye. Maybe you’ll smell cooking, or diesel fumes, or a perfume that takes you back to Paris in the spring of a certain year.

Paying attention to things like this, on any street on any day, is a way of consulting sidewalk oracles. When the takeaway is a set of mostly visual images I think of this as playing Sidewalk Tarot. Whatever pops up might be a card from a divination deck. It might be your card of the day, or part of a three-card spread, or a larger spread.     

That morning, while the dog sniffed a hydrant, I noticed a license plate I had never seen on my street before. The plate was distinguished by the red letters RN. It belonged to a registered nurse. Nothing unusual here, but it was very special to me, that morning, because I was walking with the bittersweet memories of a wartime romance with a nurse. I have the soft, cozy sense of confirmation. It feels a little as if an unseen hand has patted me on the shoulder.

I walked on with my dog into the big park. We took the longest path, around the lake. I paused to admire the beautiful weeping willow across water and thin ice. She was green last week. Now winter had yellowed and thinned her gorgeous hair. There was a story in this tree. I resolved to get to know her better.

When I return to my house, I grab a full mug of coffee and went to my study to do my next daily practice. I wrote my dream report, starting with the date and the title I had chosen for my dream. I might have been missing certain details by now, but I had the essence, and key incidents returned to me, vivid and strong, as I wrote. I noted my feelings, and wrote a few lines about the connection between this dream and other dreams and “far memories” of a British pilot in the Second World War. I added a further note on synchronicity, my sighting of the RN’s license plate.

I was now ready to play another game that is part of my everyday practice. I did a bit of bibliomancy. The word means divination by the book. By the book, that's what it literally means, divination by the book. People have done it with sacred and special books, like the Bible the Koran or the poetry of Rumi or Dante or Homer, for as long as humans have had books.

I generally do my book-dipping with whatever book falls to hand. On the day I walked with the dream of the pilot, I decided to go back to Heraclitus. The work of this often enigmatic Greek philosopher survives only in fragments. Because of their brevity, they are good to consult if you would rather play with a sentence than a longer passage.

I opened Charles Kahn’s edition of Heraclitus casually, with my non-dominant hand. My eye fell on a one-liner. The translation read: Gods and men honor those who have fallen in battle. In part of myself, I wanted to ignore that message and try again. The line spoke of war and violence and we have quite enough of those in my world.

But my dream was still with me, the dream that took me into the life of a brave man who was killed in a necessary war, a war for humanity against the unspeakable evil that had taken possession of Germany under Hitler. Once again, I felt a deep sense of confirmation, a firmer hand on my shoulder. Gods and men honor those who are fallen in battle.  I thought of another line in Heraclius, about the dead and the living are constantly engaged, how the fortunes o mortals and immortals interweave, how we may live in the dead and they may live in us.

I felt the deep, deep sense of recognition and gratitude and blessing.  I wrote a one-liner from this: "I am in communion with the dead. They are alive in me, and I am alive in them." I wrote those words in my journal, then wrote them again on an index card, in the neatest hand I could manage. I put the card in a box, with many others composed in the same way. This, too, is daily practice for me. I compose a one-liner of the kind Mark Twain called a “snapper”. It may rise to the level of an aphorism. When I have made a collection, written out on cards, I have a rather interesting deck I can use any time to get a message for the day.

Walking a dream. I recommend it as daily practice, whenever you recall a dream. You carry your dream with you as you go about the day. You notice how the world illuminates the dream and how maybe the dream illuminates the world. You may find that a dream image is playing in the world around you. Maybe the world gives you a second opinion. Maybe something that comes up is a commentary on the dream in a way that you can receive.  Maybe a sequence of incidents and observations extends the dream narrative. Sometimes you may feel that a dream is spilling into the world. When you simply wander with a dream, more of the dream may come back to you. You may be excited to discover, as your memory grows, that your first recollections were a tide pool, not the ocean that feeds it.

Text partly adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library

AI-assisted street photo