(Sunday, December 15, 2013) I’m in my mid-to-late twenties. I run and leap like a gazelle into a workout room with wooden floors and floor-to-ceiling windows. I’m in peak condition: every part of my body feels very fit.
The space has the aura of the Friends Meeting Room. A blond boy, around the age of 12 or 13, watches me. An adult male voice in my head tells me, “you ARE an athlete.”
(Sunday, December 8, 2013) I am giving my sister-in-law Kathy Day a tour of my house. The house was constructed before the time of power tools. The wooden floor boards are thick and roughly hewn (I can see the trail of saw blades in the wood), but the house itself is finely crafted with loving care.
We take in the rooms on the lower floor, which are flooded with light. I remember entering a black and white kitchen with large, square windows that look out on the countryside. The rest of the rooms have faded from memory.
We walk up an enclosed staircase to the second level, which is darker than the first. Our bodies seem to emit a glowing light, which is how we navigate the dusky chambers. Or perhaps a light follows us from room to room. Door trim stained in magenta and covered in a varnish that shines like translucent gold catches my eye. It’s more an oil painter’s technique than a carpenter’s trick. I tell Kathy this color is something I applied many years ago.
We walk into a hallway and find a porcelain-coated cooking stove stored against the wall. It might be from the 1920s. I tell Kathy I remember preparing meals on it. We turn a corner and find an even earlier stove, maybe from the middle of the nineteenth century, one I also remember. We move from room to room. At this point I must become lucid, because I realize that the number of rooms is infinite and that even the most ancient items appear new and luminous. This must be the house of my past lives. Or maybe the house of all my lives. I’m not surprised but I wonder why Kathy is with me.
Day notes:
It’s a simple enough dream, but the reason I want to record it is that the colors in the second level were multidimensional and shimmered in an exquisite way. The sense of loving craft was alive in the house.
My current kitchen is black and white and magenta, in a vintage late 50s style. It houses a growing collection of handmade dishes and objects by local and national ceramic artists.
Kathy and I have been mistaken for blood sisters. The last time she was at my house was when Chris was in a coma.
(Monday, December 2, 2013) Bonnie and I are at the dream conference. It’s wrapping up. We pass through a door into a feedback room, a dark, quiet place set aside for attendees to complete the conference assessment form. I’m not sure how we see in the dark to fill in the paperwork; maybe we are working online, at computer terminals. A small amount of light shines from under the door at our left. People on the other side are laughing and saying their good byes.
Bonnie has a lot of questions about the form. We sit next to each other in the dark, at separate workstations. She is whispering loudly, and Robert Van De Castle is irritated with her. He outlines the rules of the assessment and how we are to approach filling it out. I’m intimidated by Dr. Van De Castle; I think Bonnie has intelligent and interesting questions, as usual.
I sense a brightening of the light at my back. Ernest Hartmann is seated behind me, his back facing mine. He is sitting in a very erect, meditation posture. His spinal column is completely activated, as in a T’ai-Chi exercise. The warmth of his energy field is palpable. I don’t need to turn around to see him; I can “see” with my spine. I am able to receive a direct communication from him, spine to spine, energy field to energy field. His message is one of gentle love and peace.
Day notes:
The plumb line (spine) in T’ai-Chi (and in meditation and yoga, for that matter) is the connecting circuit between heaven and earth. It activates the heart chakra.
This is my third dream about Dr. Hartmann, my first about Dr. Van De Castle (from the castle). The day I found out about Dr. Hartmann’s passing I walked past a sign on the Big Rivers trail put up by the family of a man who’d had a cardiac arrest on his bicycle, just like Dr. Hartmann.
I have this dream three days after I register for the 2014 IASD conference.
An advanced T’ai-Chi skill is the ability to use chi (the body’s energy field) to see behind oneself or in the dark. My teacher Rob has started directing us to “see” with our plumb line.
The character of Robert Van De Castle actually seems to be an amalgam of Van De Castle and Dr. Robert Larsen, the Jungian head of my T’a-Chi school. Bonnie and I went to one of Dr. Larsen’s dream groups last winter.
In T’ai-Chi the full set of movements is referred to as “the form.”
