(Thursday, August 1. 2013) I am in Hollywood, but standing on the beach. I am aware that this makes no sense: I know Hollywood is in the hills. I face east, and the ocean is to the east, as in Virginia Beach. Again, awareness of no sense.
The locals are talking about how the ice just went out for the season. This is another physical impossibility.
A small wooden railroad trestle reaches out into the sea. In my gut I “get” the incongruity of a bridge able to span the breadth of an ocean. Yet I can smell the creosote in the old, heavy timbers.
A smiling dark-haired woman appears and stretches her left arm gracefully over the water. Very relaxed, like a move in Tai Chi. As her hand and arm extend, I see another, much larger wooden bridge magically begin to appear, flowing from her fingertips like pixels in a CGI movie. Her arm is a visual reality paintbrush. She is playing, delightfully, at the edge of the sea of the unconscious.
She says, “Oh look at the saba grapes!” A green vine, full of grapes, clings to the dark, spicy wood of the trestle. “You don’t have saba grapes in America.”
Where am I?
Day notes:
This dream offers a multitude of opportunities for lucidity. It’s as though I am being teased by incongruity.
I had never heard of saba grapes. I looked it up: it’s not a variety of grape, but an ancient Italian recipe. Grape must is slowly reduced over heat to become a thick, sweet syrup.
Saba is also the smallest Dutch municipality, an island five miles square, in the Dutch Carribbean.
Lovely dream. I love the woman playing, delightfully, at the edge of the ocean. I wonder if the direction, east, has anything to do with new beginnings. The trestle-the transition. You have any insights?
Yes. New direction on a communal vehicle. Trains have engineers: the dream is also about creating/engineering one’s own reality, which is why I think Hollywood movie-making comes in as a theme. I like that I perceive the woman as English speaking when she in fact may be from the continent (Europe). Nothing is as it seems in this dream. Underlying movement of energy creating surface reality. Wave collapses into particle.
I picked up Nick Brink’s book at the dream conference, “The Power of Ecstatic Trance: Practices for Healing, Spiritual Growth and Accessing the Universal Mind.” The book’s introduction states that Nick’s work is based on the Cuyamungue Method which teaches the ritual body postures of indigenous peoples. ” … in ecstatic rituals something must be done to the body to activate what we now know is the body’s innate capacity for expanded states of awareness. These expanded states are not necessarily mental conditions but rather have their roots in physiological changes that then stimulate changes in consciousness. Think of it this way: The body is a computer, the hardware; our mental conditioning, our beliefs and attitudes that come from culture, early life experiences, and personality orientation, comprise the software. The outcome of the interaction between the hardware and the software is our state of consciousness … changes to either the hardware or the software can change our consciousness.”
Tai Chi and Yoga work from the same ground, I would say.
Interestingly, three days after I had this dream I met with Jeanne Cowan. She told me about a nightmare she had just had: her right hand gets caught in the wheels of a locomotive. Her fingers are crushed and she cries out in pain, “My artist’s hand!”
Jeanne has black hair. In my dream the dark-haired woman paints a railroad trestle with her left hand.
I also watched several episodes of “Hell on Wheels” last night. The characters in the film are hoisting huge timbers to create the first American railroad trestle.