I've never had a dream related to my recently-acquired Buddhist/Taoist beliefs until now.
In this dream, I was with a group of people. As I've mentioned before, there are frequently people in my dreams who give me some vague sense of friendship, hostility, indifference, whatever, and they are almost always people who don't exist in my waking life. In this case, they might have been my Red Cup/Paseo friends except that there was no one in the group I actually recognized.
For some reason, I began chanting to myself in a soft, barely audible voice. And it seemed to hurt my throat a little to do that, so I pitched my voice a couple of octaves lower. I don't know music so I can't tell what key I changed to, but it was down in the baritone/bass range.
So I started to chant like that –– Om mani padme hum –– and when I reached the down-inflection on 'hum,' something really weird happened. I spoke 'hum' in exactly the same key as what I guess I would call the basic pitch of the universe, and I felt this resonating vibration that encompassed my entire body and seemed to spread out and cause furniture and other objects to resonate as well. It felt like I had hit upon something powerful and amazing.
I did it again –– Om mani padme HUM –– and again everything around me seemed to resonate with the sound. I felt myself floating off my feet and I remember I drifted toward a mirror, but I didn't see anything in it. I didn't come right up to it; it was more like I drifted to withing three feet or so of it, then started to drift away again. Then I sort of floated toward a coat tree.
Om mani padme HUM.
And then I woke up.
I don't think that means anything spiritually profound, but it was an interesting dream. I have those floating/flying dream frequently, but the chanting thing was new to me.
I always wonder what's happening in my brain that makes me have the dreams I have.
4 comments:
Wow, I had a really similar dream last night. I was sitting in a bar with a group of new friends. A man (He looked like someone who might have been a Rat Pack member at one time or maybe in a cartoon about a skunk.) at the table started to tell a story and I took a straw full of water and spit it on his hand. I, too, felt the world vibrate.
miss anonymous is a fucka
Peter Lawford lePew
Wow, I had a really unsimilar dream last night. I was in New York City again, and I was with some people who just wanted to hang around this generic hotel and blather to each other and go to the workshops at this convention we were attending. No one wanted to go see the sights or go eat somewhere good or just walk the streets and see what juicy variety life had to offer. I really didn't want to go on an adventure by myself, but I became so frustrated with their lack of interest in the life around them, I left. New York is fabulous, even if you're alone.
PS Miss Anonymous--your dream still makes me laugh!
I believe the only "meaning" a dream has is the meaning we ourselves assign to it...if in fact we DO assign meaning to it. Which I never do. It's just swirling neurochemicals and tiny electrical flashes, triggering weirdness.
But it can be fun to assign symbolic "meaning" to different elements in the dream. For instance, a dog "means" friendship and a cat "means" a stinky litter box.
Or, think of an element of the dream. Then open any book at random, close your eyes, and stab your finger onto the page. Whatever word your finger covers, that's the "meaning" of the element.
Do this for as many elements there are in the dream, then create your own MeaningWeirdness.
I implore you to leave my weirdness intact, if not unmolested.
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