'And I fell asleep and had this dream':
after continuing to read about awareness, eternity, and timeless responses to tragedy or despair in the Upanishads and Buddhism and Taoism;
after the last in a long chain of long days of meetings, tired of but not upset about so many things, and after some champagne (the farewell reception for Religious Studies, in a context of hearing startlingly bitter farewell speeches) and wine (dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant, where they always treat me like family, where I had a brief discussion with the waiter of our mutual reactions to death, loss and return in Solaris):
A dream, almost without incident, but all made out of a single incident – a single process, with the kind of magical aura that would make Jungians consider it a 'deep' dream – in this case almost without embellishment, the most naked of processes, perfect, clear and reassuring, almost startlingly stripped of unnecessary detail or story.
On a hillside near where I grew up – as it so happens, on the hill where the house stood of those neighbors who, mysteriously enough, had as a family name my own first name – I was friends with their middle son, whose first name the same as my father's, and my brother's – all very confusing, I'm sure, for me as a young child; and of course rather obviously now, from a dream point of view, intended to point back directly at me, in the most arresting way –
a dream of a vast year's process of planting, summer, winter; of the empty hillside with the tiniest of seedlings, then a long process of growth into a thick harvest, then rains and water pouring down the hill in literally torrential floods (that vast flooding: I must have been so impressed, when I was five or six, at the changes in weather when they turned to snow, ice or water, and ran down that steep, long hill near my parent's house – an entire street, Overlook Drive, had been built along a deep ravine, and many of our neighbors lived in houses at the top of long steep stretches of ground): and change, and the death of all the plants, but with the knowledge of their return. All of this blended in what was almost a long stop-action movie in a single arch, which felt both like a travelogue, and also like an experience, as if I were born to this change, to this harvest, as someone who knew these plants and their cycle intimately.
I told you it was obvious. But how extraordinarily powerful, nevertheless....
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