The following is an introduction to one of the chapters in Letters to the River. The remainder of each chapter is made up of a selection of the "Letters" themselves:
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, for life is but a dream
"Life is but a dream." How curious, how profound. In our current mythology, dreams are illusions, nonsensical, irrational. They are irrelevant to our daily life, and don't satisfy the standard for 'reality.'
But in the view of many peoples throughout history, we are dreaming all the time, and it is an illusion of the modern world -- one that can make us out of touch and dangerous -- that we are not. Because we are unaware that we are dreaming, we call our dream "reality," and in so doing, we consign other states of awareness -- the "realities" of primal peoples; the ecstatic journeys of shamans; the consciousness of the night -- into the trash heap of the "unreal." A rich cornucopia of perceptual possibilities are seen as threatening or irrelevant, or their existence may be denied altogether, leaving our vision circumscribed and impoverished, and making us destructive and dangerous to all those whose consciousness roams outside our fenced in yard of respectability.
I am a Verb:
It may feel sobering, threatening, or liberating to entertain the idea that our standard of reality and daily life is just one dream, a particular kind of dream. In the daily dream, the elements of the world (the nouns of existence) remain separate. I am myself, a tree is a tree, a stone is a stone. This separation is relatively permanent -- it will be there tomorrow and the next day and the next -- unless there are physical interactions to change it. The tree can be cut, become lumber or firewood, be burned to ash. A stone can be broken, crushed into gravel, ground into sand. I can die, be buried, break down into soil.
But tonight I will lay down and close my eyes, and I may find myself in another world with different rules and possibilities for engagement. The tree may rise above me, but the 'me' may be taller, slim, or younger than the one I‘m used to. I may observe this “me” from above, below, behind.... from a place outside the eyes that are housed in the swiveling head. The tree may stretch, twist, start to move; its branches becoming slithering snakes who turn their eyes upon the man called ‘me’ below them. The man becomes fascinated, frightened, begins to back away, run, grow wings and fly, and the serpents slide across the ground in pursuit....
I have entered a different world, and it is very real. If you insist it is not, try telling it to that man running for his life! To him, you are crazy, and it is you who are trapped in illusion. In the morning we may sit up, rub our eyes, and laugh about it. The ego and assumptions of daylight reassert themselves, blind to the lie as they announce, "I had this strange dream last night." We inflate conscious awareness and attempt to diminish this other dimension, but in the reality of the night, it is the dream that has the "I."
Something has happened, something unusual, something that makes no 'sense' in the light of day. In the rules of our daylight dream, the world is made up of objects. We are nouns. We are separate, and we remain so. But night casts its net and captures us in its spell, and in this new landscape 'self' and 'world' are no longer so sharply divided. They respond; they move together, influence each other, dance. The tree is not solid, nor static. It shelters, stalks, pursues, changes. And the self, the man, the I changes with it in a mutual interaction, a strange and unpredictable call and response.
Dreaming awareness is very different than waking. In the dreamscape we are not separate from the world; it and we are changing constantly. We can transform shape or appearance, have many different points of view; our perception may be local or non-local. Our awareness is not attached to or contained in ‘our body,’ or whatever we’re calling our body. And the world is shifting constantly with us. Things and scenes can mutate, move, and morph, along with every other part of the dream.
A dream, like a river, is far more than a noun. It is an activity, a verb, a process, and in this non-separated, non-dual awareness we are the dreamer, the dreamed, and the dream. To primal peoples, sages, shamans, and mystics, the fluid, mutually defining and interacting relationship found in dreams, with its shape-shifting boundaries of inner and outer, you and me, self and world, is far closer to the way the world actually works than the static and separate ‘dream’ we have come to call reality in daily life. It is a different place, a different dimension, a different way to perceive and assemble the world.
A dream may have no beginning or end, for who‘s to say it‘s over when we awake. It may continue on merrily, independent of the attentions of the daytime dreaming “I.” Its landscapes are more than three-dimensional, its borders and horizons are vaster, deeper, richer than the circumscribed expanses of the day. It is potentially as real -- and in many ways more so -- than the unchanging and soulless flatland of physical reality we moderns have become imprisoned in. Its spaces can be large, small, familiar, outside of time, inside what’s impenetrable, without any landmarks, colorful, blank, nowhere at all. It is a far-larger, not a lesser, universe than the one we are used to.
The Common Nightmare:
The dream we are currently living is a nightmare. Fear, violence, distrust, and despair are spreading like an epidemic. There is a crisis of spirit behind all the other crises -- from war, famine, exploitation, and environmental degradation to the breakdown of manners and community -- swirling all around us. They are not separate and isolated problems treatable by specific programs, legislation, carrots, or sticks. They are a fundamental outgrowth of our core assumptions, our cultural blind spots, the way we see ourselves and the world. They are a result of our mythology, our beliefs, our Dream.
Modern humans live in the smallest psychic space of any people in history. For all our abilities to create wealth, smash an atom, walk on the moon, or fool with the genetic code, we are shockingly unable to live well. We know how to fight, make war on poverty, communism, drugs, or terrorism, but are ignorant when it comes to making peace with anything. We have lost connection to the great cycles of seasons, sun, moon, and stars, find ourselves unable to listen to or value the wisdom of our bodies, feelings, or imagination, and have become strangers to or threatened by alternative reality states and other modes of perception sought by humans throughout the millennia.
A secular and social reality that seeks nothing of the numinous or non-ordinary to give it value is ultimately shallow and meaningless. To identify with the separate self and be bereft of perceptual tools and processes that provide a sense of mutuality, reciprocity, and response-ability leaves us anxious, alienated, depressed, out of touch with ourselves, the Earth, and each other. To be stuck in a lifeless, mechanical, materialistic universe is deadening to the soul and leads to a cultural standard of success that borders on the banal -- getting more money to buy more stuff.
Imagination Running Wild:
By and large our culture gives little or no attention to dreaming. This is in sharp contrast to other cultures where shamanism, primal awareness, mystical, and non-ordinary states are highly valued and sought for the wisdom, healing, and inspiration available there. And methods for inducing dreaming, through plant medicines, fasting, ordeals, religious trance, etc. are highly developed.
For us, even when an individual becomes interested in dreams, with or without the aid of a therapist, the focus can remain tied to the mundane. One examines dreams for their symbols or meaning, which is to say we engage them with our heads. We dream of a mountain lion and wonder if it is a symbol of power or has something to do with cats or the constellation Leo.
Our concerns remain wedded to the ordinary as we ask, “What does this lion have to teach me…. What message does he have that will improve my life?” And it is this life -- this ordinary life -- that has our allegiance.
But it could be otherwise. Imagine daily life as a room we live in, filled with all the familiar faces, activities, and things to which we attend. This room has a wall we cannot pass through, and on the other side magical things happen. At night we lie down in our ordinary room and somehow find ourselves on the other side where we cavort with angels, dragons, and mountain lions, only to awaken in the morning back where we started.
The common approach asks, “How can the lion help me? What is the message?” We attend to our dreams with hope to enrich daily life. But there are far greater possibilities than this. We might ask, as many have before, “What does the lion want and require of me? How can I make this life, ordinary life, serve the greater?” Or “Can I enter the Dreamtime? How can I live in the other room?”
Can we withdraw our attention and energy from the ordinary consensus and social values that ultimately are so dreary and soulless? Can we pledge allegiance to something else? Are we willing to remake ordinary life in service of the Great Mystery, and not try to squash or subjugate our potential for dreaming to serve our self-importance? The pursuit of the extraordinary asks how we can knock down the wall so that this world will be washed away, cleansed, and, like the Nile in the spring, renewed in the flood of the numinous.
To paraphrase Jung, we humans have four modes of perception, four windows that let in the universe, four ways to know the world. These avenues are named Sensing, Feeling, Thinking, and Imagination. In our current myth and system of education, we are trained in one capacity only -- thinking, thinking, thinking -- and this capacity has come to be regarded as the definition and paradigm of knowledge. This constriction of focus is like owning a stool with one leg. Something’s out of balance here.
In Dreaming, the window of the imagination is flung open. Images, associations, and possibilities refuse to stay in line. They proliferate, run wild, overlap. In the halls of science you study water in a beaker. In dreaming, you are the ocean, and you must learn how to stream, flow, dissolve, swim, and surrender, for if you stay in your head you will drown.
Dancing with the World:
The world is more than a collection of nouns, an aggregation of inanimate "things," and my purpose is far grander than amassing, using, or owning them. Modern life suffers in spiritual poverty from having lost any living connection to “the Other World,” variously described as the home of the ancestors, the soul realm, the sacred world, the spiritual reality, or the Dreamtime.
Dreams are not opposed to reality. Only in the definitions of our modern dream is this so. It is our myths, our stories, our dreams -- and the possibilities and relationships allowed and excluded within them -- that determine what our ‘reality’ is. The question we should be asking is not whether our dreams are true -- since the reality and truth we experience is a result of our Dream -- but whether they are worthy. Are they good enough, broad and deep enough? Does my dream place me within the grand dramas and cycles of life? Does it create a sense of wonder and gratitude, connect me with past, future, ancestors, and children? Is our dream inspiring, enlivening, guiding, and sustaining, or is it draining? Does it deserve our allegiance; is it a dream worth living?
In the world of dreaming, relationships are all-important. The separate self doesn’t exist, and it is an oxymoron to know ourselves as separate entities. I’m a field of possibilities, potentials, with many undiscovered and unexplored, and I will not "find myself" in isolation, for it is the 'world' which may change, catalyze, or evoke in me that which has yet come forth. Inner and outer are shifting, mutually defining, and permeable. Everything is related., and we are no longer alone. All aspects of a dream are relative -- they exist in relationship to each other -- and we, the many forms of being, are all relatives. If we reclaim our capacity for dreaming, we can belong and be part of the family of life again.
To enter the Dreamtime is to have access to the numinous where great forces hold sway. The following Letters step back or beyond the borders into an older, richer, deeper dream and into the act of dreaming itself. They roam outside the fences of reason and consensus reality, and in this fluid and fascinating landscape, the world is not a fact. Reality is alive, sentient, reacting, and responding. Creation is palpable and present, and not a historical event. I am multidimensional, a verb more than a noun, an act more than an it. There the possibilities are endless; the world and landscape are alive; magic and mystery surround us. And curiosity and wonder are far-better guides than facts.
