Rest into Christ

5/1/07 Tues 1342

Last night’s dream was so strong I felt no doubt at the need to write it down, even in the wee hours when I woke from it. It was another of those that feels so very real, where I very strongly feel the feelings.

Usually in those dreams I’ve done something wrong and am about to get the consequences—stuff like driving a car over a bridge. Last night’s dream was very different with me among a group who were going to be executed. It was along the lines of me being a political prisoner, but there were elements of slavery too.

So here’s what I wrote:

Wow, what a strange frightening dream. I and lot of others were being rounded up to be put on an execution ship. We’d been deemed ‘dispensable’. They rounded us up & said we could have our things. All the time I’m very afraid. I knew something was coming. We learned that as soon as we were out at sea they were going to force us overboard and kill as many of us as they could. (There was a little diversion in all this. We had company, Gary’s brother. In the course of the dream I learned the slaves had come up with plans for an uprising. I kept moving from fear to excitement, & fear again. I could feel there would be whips falling on me in my mind. I was dreading that. I dreaded the drop into the sea & the desperate attempt to save my life.
The thing was I had a book that was a valuable first edition of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland” I couldn’t find it though it seemed important to have this. I kept finding an inferior version of it. I thought I had it stashed, but couldn’t find it. I accepted the burden having it. But I couldn’t find the first edition & there was the terrible feeling of the time running out. Would it have made a difference to our captors & murderers? I don’t know—it seemed important but I could only find the inferior version, titled ‘Through the Looking Glass’ Gary said something about keeping. It was ‘Alice In Wonderland’ I wanted The original version seemed to have the power to save me & my loved ones. We were rounded up & taken to an execution site. I came up with a plan to survive, & my deep fear became a little more plausible—I felt some excitement with the fear that I might be the exception and somehow survive. But I was very afraid of what was coming. They took us to a playstructure they’d build for kids. I felt everyone would be trying what I was planning, to dive very deep, & hope luck would keep the bullets from hitting me & the other heading us apart. We were taken to the deck & were told not

I was so relieved to wake up & realize I did not have to go thru that.

A couple more hours left. Well, actually less than that. I spent the morning doing administrative details, all with that curious sense of abstraction and detachment I was feeling yesterday. Like things were only border-line making sense, where I did not feel that I had any kind of clarity at my disposal. Part of it may be about missing the anchor of my week, which is Wednesday pms, Sharon nights. She will be away this week. Darn, & I’m having some interesting dreams. Last night I actually had another, a vivid one before waking up. It had to do with some sort of plush hotel room, very red. Scott may have been there, too. But the execution dream—the strongest feeling associated was this notion that it wasn’t a dream, it was real and it was inevitable that I was going to be experiencing these horrible sensations, including the desperation to survive. The frantic effort to dive very deep, deeply enough that I couldn’t be seen and could then swim underwater a way and maybe be unnoticed when I surfaced for air. I pictured it vividly in my mind as the character in the dream. I saw the dark blue, getting darker blue as I went deeper, the sense that the odds were very against this working out with me surviving, especially since I was probably hardly the only one who had thought of this strategy for self-preservation. (I’m reminded of a novel where children were kidnapped in Cambodia or Vietnam and were tied to a wheel. The kidnappers were soldiers, or maybe insurgents who were going to use the children as child soldiers. They were herded toward a cliff while tied to this large wheel, and the ones who realized this were attempting to maneuver the wheel so that when it crashed to the ground below they would be on the top, not the bottom to bear the full impact. There’s something to me in this about having to make choices from horrible options, knowing that no matter what you choose there’s a good chance you will be dreadfully hurt.)

I fear the pain, is the very truth. That and the psychic pain of all that fear and hope and desperation all combined into the sharp desire to not surrender.

So, in the dream I am part of a group who will be executed, though it ‘s a while before I know that. We’re taken on a ship out at sea and the plan to kill us is by dumping us far over down to the sea, then shooting us. I am trying to master my dread and have a plan, and sometimes I feel the relief of my dread turning to excitement. I’m also seeing that I don’t have any illusions that my plan will save me, though, since I’m sure others will have the same idea. I’m seeing that essentially it will be luck, random, blind luck that saves me. I’m dreading the sensation of falling and hitting the sea, of trying to get the breath I need beforehand so I can swim as far away as possible. My dread is sharpening as we are being taken to the place where we will be pushed.

A few minutes later I’m back with some thoughts about what I’ve written in my journal in 1978. I’m resonating with the awareness of intense feeling that I was having then. I was feeling a sensation very acutely, I guess of a kind of inner agitation. I mean as I was writing it. It was the sensation that Jeff had identified to me, that feeling of inner shaking or vibration that makes me produce psychically a high-strung note. I felt it often around Jeff, more so I guess because I knew he was aware of it, and thus sharpened that intense feeling. Trying to make it seem less pronounced or non-existent in response to feeling like I HAD to to keep a friend—that in itself was a cause for that hum. Within the context of this I feel a ghost of that hum in my ribs, and try to breathe into it. Part of me says it doesn’t know what good breathing into that tight feeling will do. But then I realize that was the sensation I first felt, long ago, that enabled me to let the hurt of losing Rick gradually co-existing with the remembering of the beauty—tolerating beauty and pain together, with the beauty more powerful. I realized there was a way of slipping through the cracks of the pain that was enormously comforting and allowed me to co-exist with it and preserve the benefit that came.

As I write all this, complete with the sensation of deep discomfort of the sensations in my dream last night, I’m made aware of something that’s hard for me to admit—my own fear of pain. As a Christian I feared being martyred—tortured for Christ (which I read about in some of the Christian books about Christians enduring persecution in the Soviet Union). Perhaps what this is about is that in a way I have lived in dread of physical pain, crushing circumstances with sensations of visceral agony. And why does what I wrote in 1978 have something to do with it? Reading what I wrote, in the context of the dream I had last night, seems to activate first of all the high-pitched hum that was my background sensation back then, and also my fear of pain. I suppose some of it is because I was feeling very anxious when I wrote what I did. I felt the anxiety of several conflicting sensations at once, amplified and sharpened into such a shrill hum. A conversation with my mom’s former neighbor had set off an examination of this. At the time I hadn’t been capable of slowing down the sensation so it loosened up and I could sink through the cracks of it and see what was there without the distraction of reacting to it. I was vibrating so fast that the sensations inside felt like something solid and impermeable, rather than being able to come to terms with their details and let the sensations open a bit, show their inner space in order to be able to see them objectively. In a way, as I read, I try to do that for her now; breathe into what I’m reading. Though oddly, I’m also having to breathe into mySelf, because those ghost feelings are uncomfortable to me in the present. I still feel an inclination to try to resist them, and my discomfort is sharpened by those feelings of resistance. I have a feeling of awareness that there is a Me that I can just rest into because I’m a Part Of. Something Bigger than me is carrying me, in a way. And it feels like I would imagine it was meant to feel when Paul, I think, would exhort his followers to rest into Christ. Be a detail on the surface of this Thing that is really, really Big. What I am resting on, and am a part of simultaneously—That which I am resting on, is backed by something Much Bigger.

~ by kaleidoscoperefractions on July 3, 2009.