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Dreaming Blindness
The day is bright and beautiful. Sunshine is filtering through the trees as I drive my car through the countryside, enjoying being out. There is no sense of destination, only the immediate enjoyment of driving along, doing what I am doing. I am alone in the car. Suddenly there is a disruption to my enjoyment of the moment. As the car keeps moving along as swiftly as ever, I become aware that I cannot see! I am seized with terrible fear as the car keeps hurtling forward and I have no idea how to steer it to keep it on the road.
It seems completely reasonable to expect a terrible fiery crash at any moment. As terror grips my stomach, all I can do is cringe and await my fate. There may be the instinct to brake, but it doesn’t happen. I just freeze in terror, and wait and listen to know my fate. I hear sounds of what I assume to be the car going off the road, but they are gentle, not fiery, as if the car is just passing through light underbrush. In a few moments the car comes to a stop, and I’m still alive. Without being able to see, I sit listening, wondering what happened and where the car may have ended up. I hear the sweet gentle sound of water running, pleasant like a cheerful bubbling brook. The terror vanishes, replaced by the sweetness of the sound, and by a curiosity. Where am I? I awaken in my bed. I am here. Warm and safe and awake now.
It is blatantly obvious that not seeing where I am going is a perfect metaphor for the experience of letting go into a trip to Chicago that I am just ready to embark on. I have received a last minute invitation to the Oprah Winfrey show and what I thought the trip was about doesn’t seem to be where it is going at all. Fresh new things are happening and I have no idea where it is all leading. The dream seems to be a wonderful illustration of a truth about how life is working. I can’t really know where my life is leading. I used to imagine that I could see that, that life would simply go where I made it go. Lately I’m learning to live with the ongoing conscious realization that I don’t know at all. Not at all. Life may have a very different plan for this life than any idea that I ever could come up with about what was or wasn’t possible for this person and what she knows and is capable. What a lovely message this dream is bringing me about the gentleness of whatever end I go towards. Or about it being a journey to no end at all, just the gentle sound of a brook, bubbling along, always in motion, always here.
A week later, tired from doing back-to-back book events around New England, I fall asleep in the middle of the day at the home of my elderly parents in New Hampshire: I am driving again, this time with my parents in the car. Suddenly I notice it again that I am hurtling along a road but I can’t see where I am going.. It’s as if I’ve never been able to see, but I just suddenly notice the fact. This time it is so familiar that I don’t panic at all. I calmly recognize the situation from the previous dream, remember the sound of the brook and smile inwardly. There is nothing to be afraid of. It is only a dream, and not even a nightmare. I may be blind but it doesn’t matter because I am really safe in a bed with a soft quilt wrapped around me. There is not even any sound of leaving the road this time, just a soft return to the comfort of the warm quilt at the beginning point of the dream. The home place where dreaming arises, and into which it falls in silent cessation.
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The photos are taken in Guilford Vermont. The top one is the farm of Oscar and Lottie Weatherhead. They have both passed away but the farm is still beautiful as a reminder of their lives, and the maple sugar buckets are still set out for the spring run of sap. The bottom photo is one of the homes in Green River Village, Guilford Vermont, built in 1805, standing well cared for into the 21st century as a reminder of a lifestyle that is fading away as it quietly watches the last snows of the winter melt away.
For further news of this trip, visit the Wide Awake Living blog at:
www.wideawakeliving.com/wp/
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