The Taste of a Dream: Coffee with Centaurs

 

Wake up and smell the coffee? Dream on! The coffee was so good in that mysterious museum in the desert. I can still taste it. The full report fell out of my journal from a year ago.

March 9, 2021

dream

Coffee at the Museum

I am at a remarkable private museum, an elegant structure of stone and glass, standing in the desert. The name "Abba T.Izawi" stays with me; it may be on a sign by the entrance. Every piece here is extraordinary, reflecting exquisite and unusual taste.

I study a wooden high relief sculpture that rises from the floor to the skylight several stories up. It's hard for me at first to understand what is in front of me. Are those two apes with long bodies hanging their heads down from trees? Then I get it.

I am looking at two centaurs dipping their heads like horses to drink from a river. Their human heads are primal and look from another perspective like horses' muzzles. The human torsos are shaped like the horses' heads and long necks. So these are centaurs, but not like the ones I have seen in classical art. Horse and man are interfused, not separated at the waist.

I am leading a workshop in a spacious room in the museum. There are just three men in a group of 30, but they are cast in leading roles in performance and are helpful in healing work.

Now it is early morning. I don't expect that the coffee in a pot on a beautiful wooden cart will be hot. It's not only hot but amazingly good. I pour some more and find only hot water is left. But that tastes good too.

I am in no hurry to get out of bed and smell the coffee. I can still taste the coffee from my dream. My usual French roast is no match.

Feelings: Top of the world!

Reality: I am teaching at least one workshop every night in my dreams. We usually have far more women than men, as in ordinary reality in the United States (in Europe men are bolder about sharing their inner lives in mixed groups).. I don't know this museum, which seems to be in the Middle East. I like coffee in the morning but don't drink much.

I am often eating or drinking in my dreams and the taste can be wonderfully intense and often lingers on my palate as I wake. The meals are often simple. One of my favorites was a sandwich of thinly sliced Italian roast beef on ciabatta, with mesclun and dijon mustard. The dream drove me to get the ingredients on waking and make the sandwich for lunch. It remains one of my favorites.

In a recent dream, I was at an upscale pub where the bartender let me sample several locally brewed beers. I came back with the hoppy, slightly grapefruit-y taste of an IPA on my palate.

In one of the most romantic dreams of my life, which felt like a visit to a life in another time, I kissed a beautiful woman at the Gare du Nord in Paris under the shadow of the coming war. We had been eating raspberries and I woke with the taste of the juice in my mouth. When I looked in the bathroom mirror, I expected to see it still dribbling down my chin.

The ancients thought that dreams in which senses beyond sight and hearing come richly alive have special importance. They remind us, for one thing, that in dreams we don't just get around as disembodied thought forms. We travel in a subtle body of varying density, with a sensorium capable of experiencing pleasure and pain quite as intensely - sometimes even more so - than the physical body. In Indian philosophy, they speak of the kama body, the body of desire, that travels in dreams and survives physical death,

In other dreams, I have eaten books - typically parchment or papyrus scrolls - and returned with the sense that I have absorbed hidden knowledge. The ancients recognized this kind of dream too. What have you been eating or drinking in your dreams?

Research: Back to my dream of coffee at the museum. I enjoy doing the research assignments that dreams give me. Often these require me to play word detective. "Abba" means "father" in Aramaic and is the name by which Jesus addresses God in the Book of Mark. I could not find any relevant "Izawi" in a quick search, but "Sidawi" is an Arabic name associated with Sidon.

I remember the centaurs in the Lycian sarcophagus from Sidon that I viewed in the archaeological museum in Istanbul some years ago. The centaurs in my dream were more original and almost alive, pulsing through the grain of the wood.

Journal drawing by RM: "Coffee with Centaurs"