Dreamy

So I wanted to write something this in this space, because it's been a while, and if I don't tap on the keys with my fingers, they get restless and start doing the New Jersey Devils' work. Problem was, nothing was coming to me to write, so I'll start with the dream I had last night and go from there.

Weird one. Good weird though. My dreams lately had been weird and a little uncomfortable, like a movie more concerned with being personal than good. This one was fun though. It took place variously in Japan and my homes in New York and Berkeley. It involved Buddha, some sort of nature spirit, some sort of emperor, flying cartoon bunnies, and a visiting friend from New Zealand.

The main part I remember is a Japanese coworker (not one I had in real life) having me help him carry a table over near a stove. Behind the stove was the Buddha, or perhaps just a concentration of Buddhaness, or Buddha, but not the only Buddha. The table, which had to be rectangular and wooden, was an offering to Buddha. Not that Buddha actually took the table in any way. For starters we couldn't even get it behind the stove. It was just a way of showing him that we were putting in effort around being in his presence. Something like that. I told my Japanese friend that you can send Buddha good vibes, and that's sort of like a present too, just in case there's no one around to carry the table with him.

We both went back there and got a good Buddha high. Later I went back again and the stove was much more similar to the one in my home in Brooklyn. I still got the Buddha high, but things felt straighter and flatter. The Japanese guy said he can get a similar thing when he goes to Madras, India, and I thought about highs can be triggered by all sorts of things.

There was a bunch of stuff with the nature spirit and the emperor that I barely remember. The emperor wanted to turn invisible, but it was pointed out to him, perhaps by me, that between Buddha and the nature spirit, someone was going to be able to see him. Let's be reasonable here. There was also a moment where something or someone was ascending toward the ceiling because of something the emperor was doing, and a cartoon bunny jumped up and knocked it out of the beam it was ascending in. That was good, and someone needed to do it, but I don't remember why.

The rest was mostly mundane, involving things like assembling a bunk bed and getting ready to go outside.

I don't know if I'll ever hear a satisfactory explanation for why I get to experience things like this several times a week consciously and probably every night unconsciously. Obviously elements of processing recent events and various emotions and feelings is a big part of it. I've heard that if your relationship between body-mind and mind-mind gets more consciously communicative, that your dreams will become more obvious in what they mean. I'm loosely familiar with the idea of astral travel and similar concepts of some part of you literally wandering around (expanding? airing out?).

Those explanations, and plenty more, make enough sense. I just don't know if any explanation that was explained to me without some sort of seminal experience could make me say, "So that's why I thought Buddha was behind my stove when really I was just passed out in bed." Maybe if the explanation could be predictive or testable in some way. But no, that seems unreasonable, given the subject. I think if I'm ever going to really understand dreams it will probably be through them.

There is a sort of "loophole" that might provide for something that I can work with. As some of you know, I'm pretty into the Hawaiian system of thought known as Huna. The central principle of Huna is ike (ee-kay). Ike refers to the senses of sight, hearing and touch (possibly the other ones) and also means experience. On the esoteric level, it refers to the idea that your experience is all you have and all you know. A lot of people know this as the "your blue might be my pink" idea, but really it's "your walking in the park might be my battling space lizards," and "my whatever could be your anything." Um, got that?

A corollary of all that, and one of the main ideas contained in the word "ike" is that experience is not passively absorbed by your senses, but actively created by your being (I'm saying "being" because I don't want to get into a whole body-mind rigmarole). Our hardware is all very similar because we are all the same species, and our categories are somewhat similar, so can we agree on a lot, and we spend more time on what we can all agree on (I don't mean political issues, I mean that I am a human, and that is a computer, and these are words and they mean stuff, and we can mostly agree on what that stuff is). The experiences that are completely personal- the ones that only you have and only you CAN have- those we don't talk about as much, tend to forget, and tend to write off. The only catch is that anything you call a distinct entity has a distinct experience. What I'm saying is that qualitatively, dream experiences and "real" experiences are the same, but the real ones don't reveal as easily how they are created by you, and how personal they are. Fortunately, our completely personal experiences can also be largely shared, which I'm tempted to call a miracle, but what I really mean is that experience, both shared and personal, is a mystery on the level of why anything exists at all. If you say you know the answer, I probably won't believe you.