Last Night I Had the Strangest Dreams

Actually they came this morning, not last night.

With my mind much agitated by daily meditations and like a person carrying a strong light into a pitch dark cavern, I slept in shifts last night; up in the middle of the night, back to bed early this morning, and that's when the dreams came.

The first, even though the cast of characters consisted of unknown foreigners, concerned my generally manipulative relationships with women over the years. I've mostly excused myself for any behavior as long as it got me what I wanted. That was unpleasant, if digestible. However, the images that followed were simply strange and inscrutable, although certainly not unfamiliar. I remember seeing them in one of the story books of my earliest childhood. The picture of the adolescent boy in the sailor suit using an oar as a weapon was there, on my dream's computer screen as I blogged in a roadside cafe, along with the strange, frightened frog forever escaping from him.

These pictures, so familiar and now recovered for no apparent reason from so far away, are apparently frozen like flies in amber in some remote memory vault. Dreams like this are kind of like an anthropological dig, but turning up results whose meaning is obscure and indecipherable as ancient Etruscan inscriptions in the sunken cellar of a buried villa. But maybe I can read these things if I can unblock the channel...

I was almost afraid to start practice today, for fear of what I might turn up. Still, I prayed to be able to continue, to go further.

During asana I had trouble bending to the left. The hip joint on that side refused to pop, as it was blocked by an immobilized connection in the sacral/pelvic junction, but I kept working. At the very end of that part of the practice something gave way in the pelvis -- on the right-hand side, unexpectedly, and the blockage was undone.

I went through the chants and pranayama, and started meditation, meditating on the heart chakra, Anahata, for the first time today. I've had a blockage in this chakra most of my life, and it's poisoned my relationships with others, and led me to this isolated state I now find myself in.

The sun was shining intermittently before I began practice, and I had begun watering my sister's yard, but as I was meditating on the heart chakra the weather broke, and the sky gods sent a thunderstorm, complete with light show and a hard, pelting rain.

Photograph by Alan L. Bauer.

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