That Feeling of Dreaming

Ana Sibel’s dreamer dreaming this mural by JC Hundreds Mural Co. west of Monmouth where 12th Street ends, Jersey City, New Jersey.

I went to see Her Majesty / The court had no suspense / She said, “Dream dreams the dreamer.”/ I said, “It’s not my fault.” – Tom Verlaine/The Dream’s Dream

That Feeling of Dreaming

Copyright 2021, Held by Author

I’m not admitting that I’m old, but I can no longer deny old age beckons. I haven’t been kissed by death but those lips are near. Like its finality, the breath is cold.

Life flashing before your eyes – the flashing, the idea that it’s something exterior when it is really about the inner eye, or behind your eyes. A technicality, because as your body morphs and strength diminishes and desire dissipates, your memories flood, many random rivulets but even more often, the puddles forming  are always the same.

More inevitability than regret, at least not only if I just did this instead of that –but the moments have been well visited, long resolved. I’m not unhappy all the time. Yet, they reappear like an itch or twitch or twinge.

What’s weird, what’s new recently, is the constancy, this occupation of mind with the blinking of all too familiar junctures, the people either dead or like the original settings so transformed they only exist in memory. Before or behind, enough already.

Why must I hide these tears in my eyes?

I’ve surrendered. I did the best I could or least what I thought was best. All I have are memories and soon a memory is all I will be.

More morning, more sun. I love summer best.

The longer the waking, the nearer to dreaming you stay.

Nature is the only goddess we worship. When the self was solely sensation. Thus is life, except for the joy and drudgery of the mundane, the orderly process of responsibility, for which we one nation stand.                                   

We focus to work, compensation proving competence. This real life can seem all your thought, pain either looming or getting worse.

That’s why I bask in morning light.  Not because life is the dream, or the place I dreamt of is where really I want to be, but that dreaming is the closest thing to how eternity feels.

The dream dreams the dreamer, that’s nothing special. Until you realize heaven is  immaterial, faith or no… given time you spend more time not here but there – and whatever there may be is without substance, invisible. We can’t know it, even through dreaming or by dreaming, however powerful those visions are. Instant revelation, too incomplete.

Dreams feel like nothing else, that’s how we know it’s a dream and there’s no anxiety stranger than waking – sometimes with regret, sometimes relief – knowing you’re the dreamer. Whatever we know in dreams is not what we want to know, but the way ultimate knowledge – the mind of God – will feel. Experiential eternity.

The closest we can get at the very least. 

Though immaterial as thought, memories document moments of substance. That’s why they often appear in, even dominate so many dreams. ‘But dreams they are not; flashbacks belong in another category entirely.

Dreams have more nature than divinity. Hopeless they can never fully be.

It was like a dream, no cliché more common. That dream vibe is now part of that moment’s every recollection.

Reverse as true – felt so real how can you be sure you’re not awake?

The invisible world is just as actual. Get as supernatural as your life experience dictates, undeniable is that whatever it is, we see it not with our natural eyes, nor know it not like the certainty of soil or sun or skin but it’s as much a fact as any of that even though the here and now determines how long the life we do know lasts.

A dream is immaterial, ergo what better however inconclusive evidence that eternity exists is there?

That feeling of dreaming, that feeling we feel when dreaming and remember feeling after waking – if that dreaming is immaterial then the act is how we as humans interact with the immaterial, thus eternity, that cosmos shall we say – beyond our physical universe, so put the size of your telescope away – how else can anything feel like that but the immaterial?

After we die and in need of something to recognize it will be that feeling of dreaming. That’s what’s familiar about eternity, that feeling.

As reassuring as Déjà vu, you’ve felt this feeling before. Maybe that feeling of dreaming is just the lingering of what the soul was before you started breathing.

Knowing that feeling – and that there is that feeling – we know something else, something new, something always known – that we’re not just the dreamer, we’re the dream – for to know the immaterial is to know the soul, the consciousness alongside your memories.

Every time we dream we’re not only awake within the immaterial, we’re watching ourselves in the dream, seer and seen. The dream I had last night was crazy is another way of saying I was a spectator of my self enduring a series of inexplicable incidents that only felt real because how vivid I appeared.

This duality seems similar to our relationship to biology – sometimes our body and mind are one, mainly when we’re young – than other times our mind chastises our form for succumbing to mortality  – then there’s medical tests documenting specific tolls time takes.

The swirl of emotions and memories and notions – halted with the doubtless and sudden immediacy of ache – and you’re at one with your body again, unable to even wish something other than pain was in your mind, not like fucking or fleeing or dancing when you’re entirely movement and metabolism, unalloyed alertness… no separation between what is thought and what is body.

What physical agonies aren’t pure? But the Lamaze teacher doesn’t use the A-word does she.

Other times, most of the time really there’s the distance between that conscious self, that you and the physical sensations invading what should be thoughts, like the ascended consciousness visualizing the real-time horror of root canal but it’s only a perspective, what you’re imagining is what is happening because you’re absolutely certain of rubber-gloved fingers in your open jaw transmitting trauma through that network of nerves. Even if numb by the best drugs or golden age hypnosis that sedation is still physically apparent.

Instead of all that physiology affecting the brain, dreaming coalesces what isn’t substance, what isn’t between eternities… I can hear you rolling your eyes at my ignorance of the cellular, dreaming just another brain activity at the molecular level – you’re ignorant of the cheapness of your wonder.

That’s just it, you see. No revelation to declare, regardless of what you remember or realize upon waking. Everything’s still in your head, a natural fact like neurotransmitters has to be involved. We’re not becoming; we’re only alive just like yesterday. That feeling though, that one we all know, is nonexistence, but only a taste.

Too universal to even describe. That’s what makes up our collective unconsciousness, that feeling of dreaming, the infinite translucency of self. Even the images shared like skulls or rainbows, or the frequency of nudity and the constant appearance of people you dislike, that’s just social context, personal content.

No frame or screen or wall, all dreaming’s uncontained… we’re only sky.