I had a dream last night.
When I woke, it stayed behind.
I lay with it, sang with it,
rocked it,
ruminated on its truth,
netted in the hammock
of its subtle implication.
It snared me in a knot of gnosis,
knitted stitch by stitch
cast about my eye of mind,
an irony of blinding sight
wanting just to hide from light.
Dream is surely a cousin to other styles of perception, both sensory and extra-sensory. Night-time dreams are more an every-man experience, not easy to deny, while perception beyond what is sensed is more likely to face questions of veracity. ESP was once a big deal, but seems to have run its course as a popular phoneme. Culture with its millennial sophistication is quick to off-load concept that smacks of superstition. Claiming to just know doesn’t carry a great deal of weight. How to give muscle to such assertions is still an open question.
I contend that humans are species adept at pushing sensory boundaries. But given our tendency to self-limit whole realms of knowing, we declare ourselves not musical, not mathematical, face blind, or possessed of two left feet. We are oh-so-good at denying our mundane sensory apparatus; it’s amazing we give any credence at all to ESP. Opening to possibility of capacity often facilitates exactly that. For example, being born into a family that accepts prayer as more than superstition can open the door to spirit. If prayer, why not extra-sentience? On the other hand, a grim sterility of sense is sure to squelch woo-woo chit-chat.
This concern first appeared on my radar in the West Virginia winter of 1960. My daughter Melanie and son Dale shared a quiet respite in their playpen while I brushed my hair in the next room. Always long and tangled, it needed daily brushing. The odd quiet moment lulled me into a reverie watching the brush reciprocate in the bedroom mirror.
Suddenly I just knew a horrific truth. Melanie was not to be long with me. I gasped, dropped the brush, and dashed into the living room. I peered down into the playpen and denied the possibility of such a thing. I sagged to the floor and sobbed, rubbing eyes and praying that it not be true. I took baby Melanie up into my arms and prayed like never ever before. It was three years before that prayer was answered. The answer was “No.”
After that frightful comeuppance, ESP faded into a one-off life experience until one day in 1968 Richardson, Texas when I crossed the street to pick up a jug of milk at our neighborhood Seven-Eleven. A flicker of green registered at the outside corner of my left eye as I stepped off the curb. Hanging on to both sons, I hurried on across the highway, passing between autos head-in parked in front of the store. Suddenly I felt that I needed to look beneath the vehicle to my left. I shooed the boys up onto the sidewalk and knelt on the hot pavement. Under the car, two twenty-dollar bills shivered in the hot Texas zephyr. I grabbed them both and with a smug smile scrambled to my feet. But no—this wasn’t over. On my knees again, I inspected further beneath the dark undercarriage. A third twenty lay further back deep in umbra. This reach netted me a total of three crisp twenties, and a surety that something weird was afoot. Then it was into the store and treats for every kid in sight. Fun!
How could I know the money was hiding under the car? I couldn’t. Not until I knelt and bent down, near nose to ground, could I spy those bills. How from across the road could I see any glimmer of green as a flash of left peripheral vision when the car was directly in front of me? I couldn’t. Any normal visual would have been straight ahead. I didn’t know what to make of my sudden windfall, but enjoyed it and tucked the whole adventure away for future musing.
~~~~~~
My next attack of ESP occurs on the old home place near Azle in Parker County, Texas. Two ancient cedar trees had grown together, meeting over the front porch steps of the old house. I part the branches just enough to climb through. The concrete steps look good as new, but the porch floor is iffy, many of the boards rotting, some even having crumbled and fallen through tangles of spider webs into the dark mystery. Who knows what waits there? Copperheads? Black-widows? It’s safer keeping to the periphery where weight is supported by the much overbuilt footings. Grandpa had fashioned them out of his collection of geological finds appropriated on his travels.
The front door stands ajar. Local rowdies have long ago broken in and helped themselves to all the old furniture. Even Grandma’s rocking chair, worth nothing on the local “we buy junk; we sell antiques” market, has been carted off to who knows what oblivion. It would have at best been good for kindling, but I would love to have it just to remember her sitting and rocking, rubbing swollen knuckles on her old hurting hands, and murmuring “I wish I had ever-thin’ done.” One arm of the rocker, broken beyond aesthetic repair, had been salvaged with a bolt, a quarter-twenty flat washer, and a length of baler wire.
The ancient bed, where several generations of Reynolds and then Martins had been conceived and ultimately delivered, is gone, leaving a large unworn rectangle in the corner. Even the old wood stove is conspicuous in its absence, leaving only a gaping maw of blackened stovepipe protruding from the wall. Nothing holds my interest in the stripped front bedroom but memories, so I turn to the door that leads to the parlor.
It resists my pressure, hip shoves, and even a hard kick, but finally I’m in. Stacked up beyond are crates and boxes of electronics journals, as well as piles of individual issues that have been dumped out by the scalawags in their joyous creation of this mess. My Dad, who never discarded an electronics reference source, had long before he died stored his precious stash of information in the old parlor. Now his once neatly packed and stacked boxes are a metaphor for chaos. My stomach sinks. I am glad, so very glad, that he didn’t have to witness this desecration of what he had deemed precious.
I want to find something of personal meaning to keep and treasure. But how? Where? I’ll never be able to sort through it all. Discouraged, I pick my way across the room to the fireplace and sit on the raised hearth, closing eyes and retreating to a place of no thought, just being. Suddenly I’m up, slip-sliding through slick shiny magazine covers and staggering to a spot that seems to be calling to me. I kneel and begin to dig, tossing aside volume after volume of out-of-date material that had once been state-of-the-art. I dig all the way down to linoleum, uncovering a small red box. It’s a standard package for top-tear bank checks. I reach for it with both hands, smile, and yank off the lid.
It’s mine, left from years ago when my Dad and I had collaborated on a new concept wound suction pump, and I was tinkering with an improved mammary implant combining silicone gel with Emerson & Cuming Eco-Spheres (microscopic glass bubbles). Sweet memories come flooding back. Inside the box is a Polaroid snapshot of one of my engineering drawings speckled with red sticky dots. Each crimson circle had called attention to a small change that was needed before the drawing could be declared finalized, ready to publish. Under the photo is a head of matured wheat that my sister, Leslie, had tucked behind my favorite piece of wall art. The painting had given me the pleasure of beauty while working at my desk, creating side by side with Daddy, thinking up wild and wacky widgets, a lifetime dream on its way to fulfillment. The wheat reminds me of a future harvest, wished for and hoped for, a gift from Leslie, the little sister I loved but hadn’t yet tried to know, the one who was very much afraid of spiders. I wonder if she continues to fear them.
There is no need to look further. I slip out the back door clutching my box and wondering how it was that I could have been drawn almost magically through a roomful of detritus to that small buried box of memories and dreams. There is surely more to living in a physical world than can be explained by fact alone.
~~~~~~~
More. Much more. There was the California day I moved from Irvine to Diamond Bar, closer to work. The van was cleaned out, the furniture unloaded. Vehicle doors were locked, everything moved inside the new apartment and accounted for. A big job! But not quite done. Not a single box was yet unpacked.
Only Kurt, my youngest, was present and still dwelling under my roof. Dale had moved to West Virginia to keep his promise to his grandpa. He would till the Taylor family farm, and Ray Rex would name him testee in his will. Kurt and I curled up on bare mattresses and gave ourselves over to sleep.
But then I awoke with a scream. OMIGOD! I dreamed that Dale was in trouble. Heat and flames everywhere. What to do? I had to find out, call the farm, and verify his safety. The new phones weren’t yet turned on. Nobody those days had a cellular. It was hard wire or nothing. So Kurt and I jumped in the car and at 2AM went on the hunt of a pay phone. Finally I spied a booth in front of what was to be my new Ralph’s Market. With the phone change always stashed in the car, I managed to raise the Taylor farm. After a good many rings it was a sleepy Grandma who answered.
“Hello?” She wheezed, stopping to hack, hawk, and (I assume) spit.
“Hi!” I shouted, making sure my voice carried all the way to West Virginia. “I need to talk to Dale. Is he alright?”
“He’s asleep. Want me to go git ‘im?”
“No, that’s OK. Just tell him I called. Are you sure he’s safe?”
“Oh yeah. He’s fine. The big barn burned down tonight, and he had to move all the equipment away from the building. We lost everythin’ inside, but all the tractors and the harvester are safe. He was plumb tuckered and had to go to bed a’fore he dropped.”
“Thanks,” I choked, hung up and gave in to a mother’s tears.
I have always sensed a psychic connection with my firstborn. Before, I had suspected; now I know.
~~~~~~
The famous analyst Carl Jung was fascinated by the possibilities of synchronicity. I share his excitement when things seem to line up just perfectly, out of all rationality, to make way for something wonderful. One day, because Hyde Park’s Remke’s was out of my Fage Yogurt the night before, I had to stop at Kroger to replenish my supply. It was a bit of dust that had stuck in my iPhone’s on/off switch that caused me to miss all incoming calls the day before and took me past Kroger on the way to the Verizon store to address the problem. In the Nature aisle I met a friend. If we had chatted much longer, or even a mite less, I would have missed the most exciting announcement I had ever heard on Public Radio:
“The discovery of gravity as a waveform,
emitting from the collision of two black holes.”
That byte of knowledge had won the Pulitzer! It would become the basis of thought experiments, fodder for human’s creative imagination for the rest of our lives. Learning that gave me a ripple of joy!
What can we do with gravity, now that we know it to be a wave? Have I finally found my illusive anti-gravity? My point, however chimeric, is that if Remke’s had filled their stock of Fage yogurt, I would have missed out on a life altering tidbit of science, and I wouldn’t be blathering about pairs of colliding black holes, offset or in opposition, causing perturbations of gravity in the universe. Is that synchronicity? Perhaps.
Synchronicity, as the gravitas of a single piece of dust, is interesting but hardly provable. It’s only when it happens again and again, advancing some identifiable agenda, that we are tempted to ask, “How weird is this?”
~~~~~~
Not as weird as this: One morning in 2008 Virginia I jumped in my car and headed for work. The driveway from my apartment went down a sizable incline to a signal controlled intersection. At the top of the hill, I had another strange encounter with ESP. Time stopped. The car hesitated in a time out of mind while I had a quiet discussion with amazement. Far off to the left I glimpsed a tiny flash of red. My inner voice proposed a strange scenario, to wit:
“If two rectangles,
one red and one white,
occupy the same space,
the red would rub off
on the white.”
“So?” I shrugged my mental shoulders and rolled on down the hill, eager to get to work. It was Saturday and I wanted to set out some bedding plants at the To Life! Medical office. An Einsteinian observer watching me would have noticed nothing out of the ordinary. The car moved on down the hill. A lovely green light said, “Go,” and I was delighted to see that I wouldn’t have to stop for a red. No hesitation at the top, no slowing at the bottom. I rolled out into the intersection and was T-boned from the left by a speeding red Jeep. The front grille of the snarling velocipede looked like it was climbing right into the driver’s seat with me.
My beautiful new Acura TL did its thing. Its famous inside-front-door stiffener bar stayed firmly in between me and that red monster. The door held. I was plastered against its inside, spine deforming against the shape of the arm-rest, and the pain defied description. I screamed—started and couldn’t stop—finally howling a duet with the approaching siren. But I lived.
The next month after being released from the hospital, I drove my replacement car to the spot where time had stopped that morning while I had philosophized with the bug in my brain. It makes no sense. Some part of me must have known a red object would be impacting my silvery white vehicle. The red did rub off onto the white. An inspection at the vehicle impound yard verified that fact. Beyond that, nothing was elucidated except that there is more, much more, than we can ever hope to explain.
~~~~~~
I woke up one morning in 2012 Cincinnati, pregnant with a question: “Who is that person who speaks in a clear strong voice during my dreams?” The voice is female. It displays none of the subtle cues alluding to self-doubt that characterize every other human voice that speaks always conditionally, surrounded with the frippery of adjectives and adverbs. Whoever she is, she simply knows. I decided to name her Knowa.
This must be how evolving humanity conceptualized God. I’m not special; everybody must have their own Knowa or Knower. It is interesting that the strong center of my being is gender defined. I should think something so basic would be androgynous. Perhaps the true essence of sexuality is defined by much more than genitalia. Maybe it really is all about the Yin and the Yang.
Thinking back to past dream encounters, I remember Knowa instructing me in her clear resonant voice to coat every joint with synovial fluid before subjecting them to my body’s weight. Ever since, I do my morning ballet horizontally, still warm under the covers, placing my structural components in every position I can imagine. It never fails to allow me to move through the day with more fluidity and less pain. At last I throw off the covers, stand and do my morning belly-dance, undulating to the zither in my head. My inner Catholic does the obligatory spectacles, testicles, watch, and wallet, as a final blessing on the morning rite. I smooth my hands over all my curves. Yes, all of me is accounted for.
It’s comforting to muse about Knowa. It was she who warned me of my father’s transition in a dream, even as he lay dying. Asleep in a Virginia motel room, I envisioned the deathbed agony as a concurrent California happening. Then in her clear unmistakable resonance, Knowa spoke my name and intoned in a voice that covered the horror of the scene like a soft blanket, “Dorothy, we are showing you this because otherwise you would be much too upset.” She was right. If I had found, with no forewarning, that note from the Columbus Police Department posted on my front door, explaining what had happened in my absence, I would surely have died on the spot. As it was, there was all the guilt associated with being unreachable when my father needed me to tell him one last time that I love him, but the pain was cushioned by the beautiful knowledge that dream really can express the actual. This was my substantive proof that there is more than what we can ever know, and that even though I can in no way explain the workings of the Infinite, I know it exists. It knows my name. It cares about how I feel. What greater gift could my father leave me as his last goodbye?
All these way-out-of-the-realm-of-sensation experiences have led me to believe there is more than what we can see, hear, touch, taste or smell. More. Ever-so-much-more. They demand that I leave the door ajar to the possibility of what might be, must surely be, a universe measured in dimensions of spirit.
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