This morning I was buffeted by mysterious dreams, and a creepy hypnagogic experience that lasted quite some time. I recall at one point witnessing my own funeral, and then I was watching my wife play bass in a band with It's Australian For Beer!, who played drums and sang. After, half-awake, I decided sleepily to re-dream the dream because it was unsatisfying and incomplete. This resulted in a dream wherein in my dream self watched the original dream about my funeral and halted the action from time-to-time, asking others in the dream how they felt about my passing. In fact, my dream self seemed more interested in burnishing his (our?) own ego(s) than in re-creating the original dream. Then my dream self was confronted by the conundrum of what I (we?) was (were) dreaming, and my dream self in the re-visited dream confronted my dream self in the replay, at which point I surprised them both by appearing and announcing that I was not in fact dead, but had faked my own death to have an ego-satisfying dream about how many people would show up at my funeral. The three of me (us) had a good laugh. Then I was playing guitar in the band with my wife and my other dream selves and all the funeral attendees were watching. We rocked the house. Strangely, in the dream, I was amazed that It's Australian for Beer! was able to sing a complex melody in a completely different time-signature from the drumming she was doing, and I was able to marvel at this fact while playing a guitar part taking advantage of both time signatures and adding counterpart to the melody, while Cha in my dream was hammering out a bass line worthy of Geddy Lee. When I woke up it struck me that I was responsible for all of these characters, all of their actions, all of their musical performances, the song, the singing (in another person's voice), the audience and their reactions, my own dream emotions, the perception of all of this, and the entire setting.
This is all silly, but deadly serious, and I have no desire for the world to be anything but both. Nothing in my dreams differentiates the dream world from the 'real.' If I can create such lavish casts of characters, such lush realities, and inhabit so many different facets of my self and others at once whilst sleeping, how can I possibly know I am not doing so all the time, when awake? How can you know I am not merely a figment of your imagination?
We can't.
2 comments:
Ah yes - the old comeback, "I'm not listening to you - you're only a figment of my imagination anyway ..."
A fascinating dream, and your description echoes the standard, self-empowering mantra, "if you can dream it, you can do it." And likewise, "nothing can be done unless first imagined."
These sayings, while cliché, do hold a great deal of truth. In several periods of my life, I have imagined how I would like my life to be, made some sort of a plan, and then set about transforming things.
Of course, it never completely works out. And here is where "life is but a dream" theory unravels (I think).
If life were a dream, specificallly, MY dream, then all would go (and would have gone) as planned. I would, by this time, have become an international, billionnaire rock star, supported cures for several major diseases, found a solution for world peace, surpassed Mozart's output as a composer, bedded several of the world's most beautiful women (OK, this one I've done), and ended up with Xiyi Xiang.
The reality is she doesn't know who I am - can you believe that?
I speculate that other people's dreams are in conflict with my own; therefore, this negative energy intrudes upon my plans.
Or, I am only a figment of someone else's imagination.
Roar.
One must become an Adept to realize one's full potential...
Do What Thou Wilt Shall be the Whole of the Law
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