I originally 'published' this one the other morning on theirspace, anxious just after awakening to streamline the swirling chaos of the dreaming into something someone could help me understand.
I just woke up a bit ago from one of the best sleep's I've had in I don't know how long. Woke up once at 9:53AM, still so full of the dream I was having I almost killed myself trying to stand and run down the stairs to make a dentist appointment I was subsequently A) pleased, B) relieved, C) grateful Sara had canclled for me (thank You Sara!!!) Went back to sleep and resumed the dream, or more appropriately returned to the location of the previous dream, as, You see, I believe I have located a niteclub in the vast land of dreams.
Let me explain.
I have long thought, due to various reading I have done and things I have experienced, that the place we go when we dream is a sort of vast uber-world all of us have access to. You know Jung's Collective Unconscious? Same kinda thing. It's a world made out of bits and pieces of this world, as translated there by the impressions and meanings of the dreamer bringing them over, plus imagination, various frequencies of thought and maybe even action (remember EVERYTHING is energy, and energy has a wavelength, even if we can't detect it, and of course, everybody now, Energy Cannot Be Destroyed. Things we do say and think travel in invisible patterns all over the place, and since they're invisible, it would make sense that they would have access to the invisible realms) and a bunch of stuff we don't (or I don't at this point) know about. So, based on that assessment of dreams and the 'dreamland' it makes sense that you would be able to, if you could continue rational presence of mind while there, map the place, or at least parts of it, through experience.
Part of the problem with this mapping idea of course is because it is such an endless place, and because there are none of the dimensions man has made to map (and ruin) this world I'm writing from, how does one apply any degree of quantification to its terrain, if you will? Also, its not like a state or a house or a backyard where you enter it from a certain fixed point, or points, everytime. In your dreams you might be in bangladesh one night, Palos Park the next and venus the following two. We enter based on something we don't understand. Mind frame at the time of sleep onset? REM frequency pattern at the point of access? That bean and cheese burrito you ate before bed? Point is, we do not know.
Okay, I'm going somewhere I swear.
Reading Daniel Pinchbeck's 2012 The Return of Quetzacoatl last night I came into a lot of dissertation on the Mayan scholar Jose Arguelles' theories of Harmonic Resonance - basically when the energy vibrations that comprise 'us' synch with other, cosmic frequencies and something bigger than ourselves occur. This could be a moment of insight, ecstasy or, perhaps, entering the land of dreams.
So we harmonize with whatever ineffable property gains us entrance to whatever particular 'area' of the dreamscape. Now, if we could do that again, learn how to 'tune' ourselves before sleep to hit that same invisible pitch, well, theoretically we could re-access that same 'area'.
Okay, with all that in mind, here's my tale.
First dream I awoke from was one that combined a sense of the hotel I used to bartend at, people I worked with or waited on there, and, amusingly, the Sopranos cast. I was bartending, I can still picture the lavish layout of the bar as juxtaposed with the staqe for the entertainment, the foyer, the stockroom, kitchen and lobby complete with grand open wooden staircase curving up to the first floor. It was all dated, as if it had been built in the 1950's. My activities are pointless to the plot of this, suffice it to say as tending bar for the myriad of guests (Sopranos included. Lotta manhattans where I'd have thought it'd be cognac) my duties took me all over this place. Then something happened to upset me in the dream and suddenly, and I remember this plain as day, my dream self became somewhat lucid and actually thought, 'why continue to be upset. Just wake up and leave it lay'.
I did.
And I after the aforementioned running around I returned sleepily to bed and began to think about what had just happened. I realized that for someone who can remember lucid dreaming all of two times in his life, this sense of being able to 'just wake up' had been present in my dream self often - like a fail safe.
I also realized I had been in that same nite club before, working. The same place.
Before I had gone to bed in the first place my mind had been sparkling with ideas of that harmonic resonance - perhaps tuning me to a certain frequency. As I thought of these things I drifted back to sleep, apparently still in tune, and re-entered that nite club again. Not really a continuation of the last dream, but a re-visit to what sure as shit seems to me to be an actual 'place' in the vast and amorphous land of dreams. Far from a map, or even the tiniest segment of a map, but a point. And that's how all maps begin, at one place or another, and the rest is discovered relative to that starting point.
Guess where I'm going tonight when I sleep? I'll be thinking, literally, along the same lines, or lengths (wave) and if I get back to my nite club, I guess I'll try to walk out the front door and see who the neighbors are.