(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.”
I love being your partner in some of your dreams! Perfect name for him(Hartman). Van de Castle sounds like my inner critic. In my dream, there is some inner assessment going on. (dark-some light under the left door). I like the difference between the asking questions(brain/head) and the communicating spine to spine (body).