Under the Blue White Rainbow

 

I have heard Aboriginal elders say that spirits that are getting ready to come into a body lie in wait in certain waters, waiting for the right opportunity. I think stories can be like that. Even when you think you have left a certain story behind, it may be waiting for you, seeking an opportunity to enter you and come alive in you again.

 A certain story has been after me since my first visit to Hawaii, back in 1998, and I'll be glad if it comes after me again.

 During my first days in Hawaii, I found myself in a waking dream. The whole landscape was so vividly alive. Early on the morning of my birthday, I swam at Waimea Beach, on the wild north shore of Oahu, under gentle rain. Leaning towers of cloud and mist rose from the gorge behind the beach. A woman in a wetsuit was going down to the water; her hair was golden seaweed. From the water’s edge, the ocean floor slanted down sudden and deep. I slid into warm, gentle surf.

 I was delighted by a rainbow that appeared to be anchored half a mile away, to my left, by a rocky headland. The rainbow curved over the sea, opening a gateway – bluegreen to begin with, brightening as the sun burst through into the full, vivid spectrum.

 I wanted to swim under the rainbow. It looked like a gate to another dimension. I struck out strongly, beating my legs, towards the rainbow gate. When I raised my chin above the water to check on my progress, I found the rainbow was steadily receding into the distance. Everyone knows you can’t ever catch up with a rainbow, right?

 But now the sea turtles came. First a baby, then a whole pod. I swam among them, kicking hard to keep up. Sea turtles can be fast. 

We swam together to the place of the rainbow. Its brightness had gone, yet something of it seemed to hang in the air. I saw a beautiful soft bluegreen arch above me.

I wrote sloppy haiku on the beach. The woman with seaweed hair approached me.

"I saw you swimming with the sea turtles."

"Yes."

"I am a caller of sea turtles," she announced, quite matter-of-factly. I did not doubt her. "Are you a poet?" she asked me.

 "Sometimes."

She asked me to read what I had written. How do you refuse a caller of sea turtles with golden seaweed for hair?

I want to go under
The rainbow’s ocean gate
Sea turtle takes me through

I returned to Hawaii the following year, and on another early morning, when I was alone on a white beach in early sunlight farther along the coast, a shark came out of the gentle surf and became a woman.

Life rhymes. When I first started teaching public workshops in Active Dreaming, the venue was often a store called Blue White Rainbow. 

 Years passed, and I began to write a novel-length story involving a man whose idea of paradise is a lot like Hawaii; not surprising, since the word Hawaii, I am told, is a contraction of Hawaiiki, a Polynesian term for paradise. So when he dies, my character finds himself traveling to a place like one of the Hawaiian islands where life after life is good until things start to fall apart because it's time for him to move on. I did not complete this book. It lies in a great pile of other unfinished manuscripts.

I am thinking of how stories may lie in wait in certain waters, like those spirits waiting to be born. I'll be happy if my Hawaiian story chooses to find me again.

Digital art by RM

Change is valuable: The case of the buffalo nickel

When people tell me they can't remember dreams, I sometimes tell them to go out into the world and dream with their eyes wide open, by paying attention to signs and symbols and synchronicity around them. This often produces interesting results right away. Quite frequently, paying attention to synchronicity reopens the connection to dreams. 

There is a mirror relationship between dreams and meaningful coincidence. Dreaming, we get out there: we travel beyond body and brain into other realities, sometimes to a personal movie production studio where dreams are made to bring us awake. Through the play of synchronicity, powers of the deeper world poke through the curtains of our everyday perception with the same design: to bring us awake to a deeper order or events and life possibilities.

Looking through my journals just now, I found this pleasant little incident involving a woman who didn't remember dreams but found a waking dream just round the corner after I suggested she might look for one. 

I gave an evening talk to a large and highly enthusiastic crowd at a store in Mountain View, California.

When I moved to a table to sign books a woman told me, when she reached the head of the line, "I find what you say fascinating but I never remember my dreams."

I reassured her that she was not alone. Dream drought is endemic in our society.

"What can I do?"

I gave her a few simple suggestions. "Give yourself a juicy intention for the night. Make time to linger in bed and see what comes back. Be kind to wisps and fragments. Keep a journal. Write down something every day, even if there are no dreams. "That way you are saying to your dream producers, I'm, here. I'm ready to listen."

I scrawled an inscription in her book. May your best dreams come true - and may you remember them.

I said, "There is something you can do right now, tonight. You can let the world speak to you in the manner of a dream. When you leave the store, tell yourself that the first unusual or striking thing that enters your field of perception will be a message to you from the world, a kind of in-your-face dream symbol."

She looked a bit skeptical as she went out.

She rushed back into the store while I was still signing books. 

"Look what I got!" She held out her palm to show me a Buffalo nickel (one of the old "Indian Head" nickels retired from circulation in 1938). "I got it in the change at a Chinese take-out place. Do you know how rare this is?"

I said, "My one liner-would be, change is valuable."

 She clapped her hands, delighted. "Yes! Change is worth a lot. I guess I am going to dream now."

 

The Bardo of Air Travel

I lead group shamanic journeys to an airport that won't be found on any ordinary map. They leave their bags, check in, go through security and board a plane that will take them to a destination where the dead are alive. Instructions for this crossing to the Other Side are in my book The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. During my air travels over the weekend, I sometimes felt that I had stepped into my own dream scenario, or that it had spilled into my world - or that, at least, I had been cast in a new episode of The Twilight Zone.

1

The Shakespeare Seat in the Twilight Zone

There is a woman in front of me at the airline desk where I am waiting to check in for my flight to Atlanta on Friday morning. The airline agent who is checking her in says to me, “You two are traveling together, right?”

    I tell her No but she doesn’t believe me. “He’s kidding,” she says to the woman passenger. “You two are together, yes?”
    “Sorry," I amplify. "This lady seems very nice but we don’t know each other.”
    “I was sure you were together.”
     “Are you looking for a career as a matchmaker? My wife won’t like it.”
     “Neither will my husband,” smiles the woman passenger.
     A male airline agent intervenes to take my bag and issue my boarding pass. "You got the Shakespeare seat," he congratulates me. I don’t get it until he says my seat number out loud. "2B."  
     I catch up to the stranger the other agent wanted to make my wife. She has a broad, open face and sensible shoes. She looks ready for a genteel country walk, or to give a tutorial.
    "I need to know who you are," I tell her. "The airline agent was so keen to play matchmaker that there must be some connection."
     "I'm a vertebrate paleontologist," the stranger tells me brightly. She helps me out by adding, "I study dinosaurs."
   "So we have something in common. I tell my psychology friends that I am a Paleolithic psychologist."
    I check my cellphone and a cartoon pops up on my Facebook news feed. It shows two dinosaurs in bed. One of them is saying, “I had a nightmare that I was small, frail, covered in feathers and fluttering through the air.”
    I show this to the Vertebrate Paleontologist and we exchange our website information. I distantly recall an episode of the old TV series "The Twilight Zone" in which the people on an airplane are thrown back across time. As I recall, the episode ends with a glimpse of a grazing sauropod dinosaur, and no resolution. You never know when you might need expert advice on a dinosaur situation.

In the line for the security check, I notice a key on the floor, just the one key. I wave it at a TSA agent, “Someone dropped a key.”
    The young man in front of me whips around and gapes. “That’s mine.” When I hand it to him he says, “That’s the key to my girlfriend’s apartment. You just saved my life, man.”
     The airport public address system is busy this morning, with announcements about other things left at the security check. In ascending order of strangeness: a jacket, a belt, a cell phone, a driver's license, a passport, a purple cane and one shoe. How do you leave behind one shoe? This only records the visible things missing from people in my airport Bardo today.

After I take my Shakespeare seat on the plane, the airline agent who tried to marry me to the Vertebrate Paleontologist rushes down the aisle and spills two pens in my lap. Certainly I can write two things at once.

   While they de-ice the plane, I ponder what it means to me today to be in what the airline guy called the Shakespeare seat. These lines from Polonius in Hamlet return to me:

This above all - to thine own self be true:

And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

2B or not 2B, sure. How about 2C? When I look across the aisle from my Shakespeare seat, the fellow in 2C is doing amazing things with a salad in a clear round plastic container he has brought on board. He spins it between his palms like a wheel, he shakes it, he spins it a different way. I get that he's trying to get the dressing nicely mixed with the leaves but this goes on for ten minutes. It seems this is his version of spinning a Tibetan prayer wheel or doing asanas.
    I wait until we are landing before asking him what was in the salad dressing. "I've never seen Salad Yoga before." He tells me it's a Thai dressing from Panera, an "intense" experience. Evidently.

Settled into my seat, I am rereading the Bhagavad Gita while sipping a gin and tonic. I am distracted by what is going on in the row in front of me. Sarah Sanders is sitting in the window seat. A hyena-like younger man is chatting her up. Their conversation gets louder as they toss back free drinks. Now they're talking about online dating and what lies it's okay to tell intimate partners before and after dumping said partners.
   Am I dreaming? No. But I realize this is not the Sarah of the briefing room but a lookalike of her possible future self, ten years older and thirty pounds heavier.
    As we get ready to disembark, I say to her, "Thanks for the entertainment."
    She blushes to the roots of her hair. "You mean you could hear us?"
   "Every word. But I decided not to record you this time."
  

2

Night Flight from Atlanta

I look behind me and there she is again, the mountainous woman in the Zulu hat, coming down the ramp. I step on board the plane and the flight attendant takes my coat, as he did before.

    "Sorry to bother you again," says the man who needs me to stand up so he can sit in the window seat. He fires up his computer and starts watching the same old movie he was watching before.

    The man who is going to sit behind me fumbles with stuff in the overhead compartment and I brace myself in case he lets something fall on my shoulder as he did before. But he catches it this time, pats my shoulder and says, "Good thing I knew what was going to happen."

    "We've met before," the man across the aisle says to the woman next to him. She says, "In your dreams."

    These are vignettes from the Bardo of my air travel during my trip home from Atlanta on Monday night. The first plane broke. They found us another plane, unbroken but otherwise identical, where we took the same seats we had before. It was deja vu all over again. People were blurry, taking off after midnight, 2 1/2 hours late. Hard not to feel we were in a Twilight Zone episode in which things go on repeating until you wake up to the fact that you are dreaming, or dead, or both.

Photo: William Shattner in the 1963 Twilight Zone episode, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"