When I was a child, something felt very wrong. I could not bare to witness the suffering of others or endure my own. I tried to figure out this human world and my purpose. I was alone and terrified, helpless against dark forces, and yet I sensed a power inside me. I had a tremendous will.
No matter how far I might rise, I always crashed down.
Beautiful things appeared, but I could not feel them.
I awakened within my dreams. Oh, I'm dreaming. I can do anything. So I'd fly. Across sparkling seas and purple mountains. I once woke up in Harlem, but I was embarrassed to just start flying in front of the normal people walking around. I found an alley to take off from. The last time I woke within a dream I thought: why do I have to fly just because I'm having a lucid dream? I couldn't think of anything else to do, so I woke up.
I used to be a big sleepwalker and sleeptalker, and have awakened from nightmares screaming out embarrassing stuff.
Once I did that when all my relatives happened to be sleeping in my sister's one-room apartment.
It was a rare family get-together and we'd spent the day walking around New York. One of the family members, who was not among the sleepers, had shown up in my nightmare.
"You &%$!!!, I will KILL you!!" I screamed. My heart was slamming and I was punching the air, and the words echoed in the room of six sleeping relatives. But were they sleeping?
My sister's ancient blow-up mattress was totally deflated and so was I.
So I said, in this sweet tiny voice--sorry guys.
An explosion of laughter. They'd all heard.
For what was left of the night, people took turns piping up:
"I will KILL YOU!" And then: sorry guys.
I have also awakened to the sound of the dryer going and some guy in my room blasting a radio and guys in jackboots on my roof, these things woke me up, and I was awake, hearing it for a few beats, and it would go on for one or two more highly unnecessary beats and then I would realize none of it was real.
What is that?
Two years ago, when I was in the pit of pain and insanity, I had the sense, each morning, of waking to a reoccuring nightmare. My guards and torturers were invisible; they lived in my brain and body, although I sensed them in every corner of the world.
Everything about this nightmare screamed out to me to figure it out. How could I could rise to the challenge, without knowing what was being asked of me? At first, all my energy was concerned with getting out. Fixing it, or escaping it, and neither worked. Later, I believed I was being asked to accept the suffering, and use the time of torture to help others.
At first, the nightmare was more real than the world.
It was like that children's fairytale where the devil drops a mirror and a tiny piece of glass lodges in a little boy's eye, and he can only see the ugliness and pain in the world.
He becomes cold, and frozen and stiff with pain. His little friend never left him, she followed him everywhere, determined to stay with him. He could sense her, but did not want her around, did not love her, and could not yet know the truth about her goodness.
He knew only suffering as the truth, and he clung to it, because we cling to what we believe is true. And it was the love of this friend, that finally reached him. Her warmth, like the sun, bypassed everything, and he turned to this warmth and was thawed. And then he knew it was real. That the time of coldness and suffering had been a small perspective, and as eternal as it seemed, it was temporary. When he turned to the warmth of her love, and chose that, he woke from the nightmare.
When I succeed in turning to that which I never knew or trusted before-- sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, a door opens which never opened before. I do not know how this works. But a way out appears--in some form. And when I feel my feet on the path of freedom, once again, I know a true aliveness that surpasses any dream of flight.
