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Posts from the ‘Dreams’ Category

Sep 3

Tornado_Warning_by_Meerin
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The Valley of the Shadow of Death

We were at my Nana’s house watching TV when I had this strange feeling that the air was being sucked out of the room. I yelled for everyone to get down on the floor and I covered them with blankets. Then, all of the windows in the house exploded inward and there was this overpowering sound like a train coming toward us. I ran outside and stood in the driveway looking at what must have been an F4 tornado about half a mile in the distance. It was uprooting and destroying everything in it’s path and heading directly for me.

I was just staring at the blackness of the tornado as it ripped up houses and trees in its path. But I couldn’t move. My family was yelling at me to get out of the way and run but I was paralyzed with the insatiable curiosity of staring death in the face. It was just a few yards off and I marveled at the beauty of it and the perfection of nature.
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Jul 27

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You’re Already Dead

I’m not sure how the dream started but I found myself in the middle of a worldwide panic. I think I was watching the news. There was some sort of catastrophe approaching. In my dream it seemed to take the form of an earthquake. I was in a large city and the buildings were collapsing everywhere around us. I was somehow able to jump from building to building. A friend was always there with me but I’m not sure who. I saw another friend and his kids. I tried to get him to leave with me but he said that he needed to stay with his family. A moment later we were all underwater. I was looking for a little girl’s stuffed animal. I found it and gave it to her but it was the wrong one. It belonged to some other kid. She died holding some other kid’s teddy bear. My friend and his family were gone and somehow I moved on to the next place.

I was standing on the edge of a large window while a building was falling backwards and I jumped and somehow floated to the next building and then ended up on the street. People were flocking to priests of all sorts on the street corners. Each priest was trying to help people by quoting words from each of their scriptures. Donald Trump was on another corner selling cars and gasoline for ridiculous amounts of money so that people could try to escape. I remember looking at the crowd and thinking of a quote from Moby Dick about Jonah: “He thinks that a ship made by men will carry him into countries where God does not reign…” I ran to a gas station where I found a puppy and I held on to him. I think it was a bulldog. We jumped to a parking garage, a big ship floating through the middle of the city, and other strange places. And, after what seemed like an endless journey of jumping from building to building I finally said, “This is it” as I looked up and saw the side of a skyscraper falling on us.

The next thing I knew I was standing in a garden with Vishnu, Buddha, and Jesus. I asked why I was there and they said it was because I truly believed. I said that of course I believed. Then credits started rolling like it was the end of a bad religious movie. Next, I found myself floating just above the chaos as if taking a tour of the devastation. Some people were still barely alive but most were dead. The people that were still alive were like zombies. One of the barely alive zombies saw me floating by and tried to shoot me. The bullet went through me and I said, “you missed me.” But they responded by saying, “No, you’re already dead.” Then I woke up.

Jun 21

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Underlying Reality Beneath It All

As I have gotten older and had a chance to catalog my dreams, I’ve noticed that each dream, though bizarre and individual in narrative, are beginning to self-assemble. It’s as if I am given only brief, random glimpses into another life – a life that keeps on moving even when I’m not around. This is not a normal life and perhaps the oddity of it all comes from our conscious attempt to make sense of the nonsensical. However, over time, recurring geography, architecture, people, machines, and themes all overlap into something more cohesive than random.

I doubt all of the pieces will ever completely fall into place, but I do wonder what it all means. I guess it is easy to dismiss as meaningless and silly the though of meditating and focusing on these dreams. But at one time it also seemed silly and meaningless to focus a telescope on a dark section of sky. If there is something to be seen, surely we can see it. Of course, we could not see it and the film on these night-long, telescopic exposures revealed the most amazing and wonderful things. Distant galaxies, quasars, pulsars, supernovae – these would all be hidden from sight without astronomy’s patient meditation on the heavens. And, taken apart, these cosmological phenomenons all seemed utterly mysterious and random – it’s only when we realized that there was an underlying reality beneath it all, did it begin to make some sense.

I’m sure we are still many millions of years away from really understanding it, but perhaps there is a psychological parallel to our cosmological discoveries. Many great thinkers have already said that the greatest frontier left to conquer is the mind. Who knows what amazing and wonderful things await us there. Here is the latest glimpse from that bizarre world, my dream from last night…

I was in someone’s backyard, somewhere in some suburb somewhere in the United States. We sat at a picnic table discussing the demon. I had requested a mandala tattoo from the tattoo artist that had a studio there in the backyard. He asked his assistant to begin. Before I knew it, the tattoo covered my entire left arm including the palm of my hand. I had to explain that my career would not allow such things. The artist seemed disappointed, like she had done me some favor that I was not happy about. She searched for a way to strip off the first few layers of skin to remove the tattoo. I asked her to complete the mandala anyway. I was weak. The mandala had to be complete before I could fight the demon.

I had a piece of raw chicken with an embedded switch that vibrated when the demon was close. I clicked the switch to the highest level of sensitivity. I was sitting next to the tattoo artist. He seemed worried and he watched the chicken to check the vibrations. We noticed that the chicken stopped vibrating – I think the batteries ran out. Then we ran into the house and saw the flying demon approaching in a flying limousine. My weapon was a samurai sword. He was too fast and I could not hit him – no matter how hard I tried. He bounced around like Nightcrawler from X-Men.

I did go to sleep reading Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse, so perhaps this dream makes perfect sense.

Nov 16

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Hunting for Papa

We entered a huge structure, like the Great Pyramid. We were on a quest to find some stuff that my grandfather (Papa) had hidden there. Some of my family was there with me. We explored several areas and could not find what we were looking for. Everyone else that was there was running to get out.

After exploring the entire upper levels, we found a large tunnel that declined steeply into another hidden area of the pyramid. We decided that what we were looking for must be down there. After finally making it to the bottom, there was a door that lead into a regular looking bedroom – like we had walked into someone’s house.
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Feb 7

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I Woke Up In Burundi

I was at a beach party late into the night. The sand was black and rocky – the ocean was beautiful. As the party was winding down, I realized that I had no idea where I was. I asked one of the guys that was at the party where we were. He said, “We are in Burundi.” I have dreams all the time where I find myself far away and have to walk back home, so this is not that unusual. When he said “Burundi” I realized that I was not going to be able to walk. How had I gotten here? Only if I had woken up on another planet could have been more lost. My friend said I could stay with his family until I figured out how to get home.

When we got to his home there were some local men that wanted to harass me. They didn’t trust me because I was white. I told them that they should probably be nice to me because I was an American (some echoes of the movie Babel in my dream?). They finally left me alone and we all ate breakfast together.

The next morning I was on my way out of the country but we had to take these government officials to a strip club and get them drunk as a favor for letting me go. I sat at the bar and the waitress brought me a Perrier Budweiser (I have no idea – I guess a really fizzy beer). Somehow Duran Duran was in the club, too, and they were all dressed up like women. Why Duran Duran was in Burundi, I have no idea.

I had to make a a phone call to the U.S. Embassy and I also called home. The waitress at the bar said she would call my parents for me to see if they would pick me up at the airport. She dialed the number, and I was thinking to myself, “How does she know my parent’s phone number?” I made it out of the country and the next thing I know, I’m in a Jeep and it’s summer in Southern California. I’m driving through L.A. Then, I woke up.

Jul 3

Weightless Body, Weightless Mind

My dream last night: I’m in a mansion somewhere. There are rock stars, physicists, artists, and other creative types. This was where I worked and I found myself talking to the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger asked me what my favorite Stones cut was and I told him Undercover of the Night. I was reprimanded by our company owner for being too restrained in my creativity. He said that I would be let go if I didn’t stop being so conservative in my thinking. We had our usual 8am meeting. During these meetings the gravity would be turned off and we could float around and jump from wall to wall spinning and doing all kinds of tumbles. I was the day’s case study and I was asked to just float around as if no one else was in the world and speak what ever came into my mind. People around me took notes. It was an incredible experience and I said words like “revolutionary,” “simple,” and “one”. All sorts of thoughts came into my mind.

It was only later that I realized I was working at a creative idea corporate think tank. We would invent these new ideas and then patent and sell them to businesses around the world. After our meeting I had an idea for a new kind of document management system that contained an intelligence engine that would make knowledge management as simple as dragging a file to the trash can on your computer desktop. The work and intelligence was flipped to the computer rather than the human. It could all be done in 3 simple steps. I wrote up the patent information and submitted it. Our owner seemed pleased. It’s amazing how mind liberating floating around a room weightless can be. It induced all sorts of creative ideas. This must be what deep meditation is like. I guess it all depends what you decided to meditate on.

Feb 20

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I Was Clearly Upside Down

I read an amazing article two nights ago about an autistic savant that has the incredible ability to communicate his thought processes. The majority of savants are unable to communicate in way we can understand – because of the odd nature of the condition language centers are often rerouted or damaged completely. Most of the damage is found to affect mostly the left hemisphere of the cerebrum.

One of the most amazing concepts researchers have been able to learn so far is the way savants visualize numbers. They are obsessed with numbers and calculations. Even more fascinating is the way they visualize them – by seeing numbers with texture, shape, taste, and spatial orientation. For example, if you ask a savant what 679×621 is, they instantly “see” the answer in their mind’s eye.

I was absolutely blown away by this. If you have time, read this article in The Guardian. What would it be like to experience this? Could a normally wired brain even handle this?

I thought about this problem until my head ached. I’ve hurt my head thinking about problems like this before. The last time was when I discovered the book, Hyperspace, and was asked to contemplate what a 4 dimensional cube would look like. The author, Michio Kaku, takes time to explain a thought experiment to lead the reader into this. I tried for over week to visualize a tesseract, a 4 dimensional cube. Salvador Dali painted the famous Corpus Hypercubus (depicting Christ nailed to an unfolded tesseract). This is a glimpse of the idea.

Where am I going? The ancient Pythagoreans actually used this as a form of meditation – focused on imaging a hypercube in their mind. To attain this would be equivalent to nirvana in the East. What if at the next level of space/time all things actually are connected in ways that are impossible to imagine because we are locked into 3 dimensional space? What if savants have somehow glimpsed this higher plane that is unavailable to a normal person’s mind or visual field? It would be like being able to see spectrum of light that others can’t see. Science tells us it’s there – even though we can’t see it. Similarly, M Theory (String) tells us that there are several higher dimensions that are unavailable to all but the most sophisticated mathematical equations.

I know it’s a stretch. I did have a dream about this. In my dream, my mind was in pain because the stimulation of perceiving this higher “spectrum” was overwhelming (I actually did wake up with a terrible headache). I dreamed I was roller skating through a geography I can only describe as an M.C. Escher painting. The angles were impossible, the motion did not obey physics, my entire body was twisted and warped like spaghetti … but, my feet never left the ground. Even when I should have fallen because I was clearly upside-down, my skates stuck to the ground like glue. I was with several other people, too. It all seemed normal to everyone else. Imagine yourself skating on the street and now take one end of the street and connect it to the other end – but, before you do that, twist it so that it ends up looking like Möbius strip (the symbol for infinity). All the buildings are in the same place and gravity is always acting downward relative to your feet. However, your head and body can be way behind you and under your feet, stretched around the Möbius. If you jump it will take you to a space where you can see in front of you but not up or down. [I have read Edwin Abbott's Flatland and the similarities are not lost on me.]

Not only did I wake up with a headache but the dream stuck with me throughout the day. Most dreams evaporate like vapor when we wake up, but this one stayed right with me. I have no clue what it means but I do think that this is my own (un)conscious speculation on trying to solve the savant question.

A personal confession: I mentioned that I spent some time meditating on the tesseract before (during college). It wasn’t a complete waste of time – but it did scare me – enough that I haven’t repeated the thought experiment since. Just as in each moment (time) there exists an eternity, in each spot (space) there exists all the universe living in just that space: all dimensions, all matter, all space. To unravel the tesseract in your mind, opens this space, this eternity, and you see, not with your eyes, but with your mind, as if a curtain has dropped on reality to reveal that which is always present, but never seen. Christians have always called this presence ‘angles’. I guess ancient shaman called this ‘spirits’. For a brief moment reality dropped away, I was in the presence of something that words can’t quite do justice to. What I saw with my eyes, heard with my ears I would never repeat. Fear gripped me so much that I’ve never looked too far beyond this experience. I’ve certainly never talked about it. People would think I was a complete freak. The psychological read on this is also too revealing to write here. You can draw your own conclusions.

Of course, this is called “Maybe Matthew” … maybe sometimes I just make this stuff up.

Jun 2

Humanity’s Last Hope …

Last night I had the strangest dream. NASA was involved in trying to change the trajectory of a comet. Most of our comets originate out in the Kuiper Belt, far, far away. However there is some speculation that these comets somehow keep the Solar System’s gravity in check. It’s a sort of self-regulatory system. NASA was trailing one of these comets (as they have actually recently done) and accidentally knocked the comet out of it’s normal orbit. Instead of the usually figure eight around the Sun and around the Kuiper Belt, the comet was moved to the next closest star Alpha Centari.

A few months later it was made known by scientists that the orbit of the planets was going to disintegrate and that instead of orbiting around the sun like normal all the planets would drift out into space. There was nothing we could do about it. The world’s best scientists and politicians were selecting a lottery system for those that would be launched on the most sophisticated space craft to the nearest star system where they would hopefully be able to make a home. It was humanity’s last hope.

I remember the figure eight figured largely into the dream as I was watching CNN they kept emphasizing the figure eight orbit and how we had destroyed it accidentally. The new orbit was more of a normal ellipse or circle orbit but with no clear boundaries. The orbits just kept decaying more and more in the ellipse until all the planets were out in empty space just floating lifelessly. The process happened fairly quickly and only left us a few decades to figure out what to do.

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