Only a Dream

I dreamed last night that I over heard a former professor talk to someone else about his recommendation of me for Journalism College.  "Say that he has a good outside shot," he said to his student-secretary, who was filling out some form.  After some silence, I couldn't help but butt in.  "Also, say I play good defense," I said, poking my head into the room.  "Yeah, that's good, write it," he said.  There was a sheet of paper with everyone's class ranking and I was somewhere in the middle.  "That isn't right," I thought, but didn't say anything because I was not suppose to be looking at it.  "I should be up much higher." Then I noticed that my religious beliefs knocked me down a few notches.  "Is vegetarian, subtract points," the professor had written in another part of the paper.  Then I remembered the guy was big-time pig-time on cooking and eating meat "gourmet."

I left the room but I wanted to go back in to protest.  When I did, the guy was lying down with his student-secretary and it looked like they were about to go at it.  He looked at me like "Shut the damn door," so I did.  Then, my dream became lucid and I realized I was only dreaming as the dream was going on. "Only a dream," I said to myself. "Only a dream."

When I was in high school I used to have nightmares that I was failing class and not going to graduate.  I would wake up and then gradually realize that it was only a dream.  When I was in middle-school, I had the common dream that I was going through the school day in my underwear, and somehow or other getting through it despite the embarrsment.  I had that dream once after I was walking through my sister's neighborhood in Willimantic, Connecticut, and I saw a kid on the sidewalk yelling to another kid standing in his doorway.  "I saw you in your underwear," he kept repeating loudly.  Finally, the kid in the doorway responded, "You don't have to tell the whole neighborhood."

When I was 19-years-old and newly living in the temple, I sometimes dreamed I had smoked marijuana again and felt awful.  Before I was a devotee, I smoked weed everyday for about four-years.  I always felt super-relieved after I woke up and realized that I was still pot-free.  

After my mother died, I used to have dreams that she had come back to see me but was on borrowed time.  She would talk to me a while or hug me then said she would have to go.  Her heart would always start pounding out of her chest until it exploded.  Those dreams always started out sweetly and ended bitterly.  I would wake up to stark reality.  

Perhaps my worst nightmares occurred when I was around five-years-old.  They were particularly bad, I think, because I was so young and they really scared me.  I used to regularly dream of a monster in my closet, like the one I had of a toy.  I would open the closet, and see the monster there.  Sometimes, I was convinced that I really got up and saw the monster standing in the closet. To this day, I'm still not sure it didn't really happen.  He looked kind of like the Creature from the Black Lagoon and would put his arms up at me and roar.  

Later, I had regular dreams of a friend of my sister's who was in her twenties named Lizzy.  She had long black hair and in a dream, for a few months straight, would come to my house, pick me up and take me away.  In the dream, my brother and I would be playing in the kitchen, and he would look at his wristwatch and say, "It's about that time."  At that point I would see the locked door slowly open and start running away.  Invariably, I would always fall and start crawling down the hallway.  Before I got to the end, Lizzy would always pick me up and carry me out the door.  She looked like a witch and I was terrified.  I told my mother and sisters about it, they showed passing interest but could do nothing.  Months later, the dream continued like a serial.  She was holding me in her bedroom, telling me she wasn't feeling good.  I had become less scared and more acclimated to her and was jumping on her bed.  

When I was a brahmacari, I occasionally dreamed about women coming to seduce me.  It wasn't one of those desirable "wet dreams" you enjoy when you're a adolescent, at the time for me it was a nightmare because I was seriously trying to be celibate.  They weren't coming to consciously seduce me either but that was the affect of them flirting with me.  I used to distribute books and an older devotee, who was now  married, told me he had a similar problem when he was a brahmacari and therefore decided to follow a vow to stop distributing books to women for one year.  If he accidentally approached a girl, he would simple curtly say, "It's a book, do you want it or not." I thought it was a little artificial and decided I just had to be humble because there were forces much greater than me in the world.  Anyway, why should women not get a book on spiritual life just because I was in the wrong ashram?

In this material world, I understand we are already living in a dream.  As this life is temporary, our memories are quite comparable to dreams.  We have dreams in the night and we have "waking" dreams in the day.  Just because the night dreams are another layer away from reality, doesn't mean that the day dreams are the real ultimate life.  Who can say we are not already sleeping somewhere else?  How many layers of dreams could we be experiencing?  These are all questions I wanted answers to from the time I was very young.  I remember watching "Horton Hears a Who," and wondering whether ants knew about the existence of humans and how there may be Gods that human beings similarly were unaware of.  I also started thinking about dreams and the nature of reality but they were difficult for me to articulate about during those times.

Sometimes, when I dream, I actually fly out of my body and it's not really a dream per se, but more like a trip into another dimension.  I float off, look around and then take off into interesting adventures. Such adventures I will not write about here today but will leave for another time "How do you know it's not just a dream?" people ask.  To that, I usually give different types of circumstantial evidence, like I saw my body laying on the bed, etc. but does it really matter that much?  I mean, I'm not trying to prove anything to anyone and ultimately we all are living in a kind of illusion as the the famous poem by Lewis Carrol goes, "Row row row your boat gently down the stream/ Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream."