India's First Poet Sees Rama's Dream Journey

Ramayana by Prashanthprao

"Now a dream which is terrible, causing the hairs to stand erect for the destruction of ogres and for the welfare of Her husband, has been seen by me."

"Of what kind is this dream seen by you. Tell us". Listening to this utterance that came forth from the mouths of those ogresses, Trijata spoke at that time this word relating to the dream.

"Now it has been seen by me in the dream that Seetha also wearing white clothes was sitting on a white mountain surrounded by the ocean."

"Thereafter it has been seen by me that Seetha with eyes like lotuses has risen up from the lap of Her husband and gently touched the Moon and the Sun with Her hand."

"Rama with strength equalling that of Lord Vishnu, born in Raghu's dynasty together with brother Lakshmana and with Seetha has been seen by me thus in the dream."

"In that dream the ogre Kumbhakarna has been seen thus by me. All Ravana's sons have been seen to be sprinkled with oil."

"An assembly also of ogres drinking oil and wearing red garlands, with red clothes, with the sound of songs and musical instruments has been seen by me."

"Which woman while being sorrowful, such type of dream has been seen, that woman being released from various sorrows, will get unsurpassed pleasure."

"I am seeing Seetha coming near accomplishment of motive. I also see the destruction of Ravana also and victory of Rama coming near."

- excerpts from Valmiki Ramayana, Book V: Sundara Kanda [Book of Beauty], Sarga [Chapter] 27

"The main book of reference for dream – interpretation is Charaka-samhita by Charaka, part of which is supposed to be based on Valmiki Ramayana" writes Jayasree

Read this fascinating article on Hinduism and Dreaming

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Private museum screening: Amazon Tobacco Memories. A fellow artist, a sculptor of all things spirit, places his Kali – Uma papier-mâché work on a cabinet in a whitewashed room. The black fire spits with discerning ash, impeded by the radiance of the all-mother’s gaze. I am impressed by the artist’s visionary innocence, conveying a child-like eye for the Hindu cosmology, expressed as a Faustian drama of Dadaist cultural syntax. And the screening begins. 

The dark howling jungle cackled and hooted in the avian-simian craze, a sonic insanity swept through my over-civilized musical palate as the humid tension raised sky high in the Amazonian night. The river vessel, motionless across from an isolated village of thirty native inhabitants, I smoked a Peruvian cigarette with a quiet, philosophic friend. In a moment of uninvited silence, a hand perked up from the lower level through a handrail, offering us a leftover packet of smokes. We grabbed them, thoughtless and looked at one another. Returning the steaming laughter of the sleepless rainforest, we stained the lungs of the earth with anxious conversation and latent abandon. 

Later that night the clear skies illuminated my mind with obsolescent memory, the archaic wisdom of unpolluted climactic earth-born advancement reflected in the translucent universe, wherein my eyes sank as a body of thunder into the dank rainforest moat, encircling the mother of the universe, freeing the reptilian scale from the mammalian chord, giving voice to the source sprung with Martian light. 

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Sculpture

"If your dream featured sculptures, it is a warning to pay more attention to your own personal affairs and less to those of others." (iDream)

Movie Theatre

"If you dream of being in a movie theatre, you are attempting to protect yourself from your emotions or actions." (iDream)

Tobacco

"To smoke tobacco, denotes amiable friendships." (iDream)

________

the always unborn

Kuan Yin companion

breathless nerve

lying, sweat dream,

figure of local poverty,

the sleeping wretch,

half-haggard with princely sexdom

wilderness of mindplay

needing rough deranged feeling,

entranced idiocy

blank eyes

pouring into belief,

experience for greater hilarity,

and necessity bred from popular hysteria

or psychic discomfort

in the open field

laughing out

the distressed boredom

to desire comic failure

in the moment's strength

aware

for newfound rich seeing

that once led animals into the evolutionary mold

senseless through plant networks

supporting with the medicinal love of creation

softly growing inside the mammalian egg

with lonesome prowess

over the angry female

war drama untold

over millennia

of gross mourning

in the struggle for simple pride

or earnest life,

never acknowledging the ageless

being of each seed

that lives.

Borges On Volcanic Riddles of the Unconscious

“The great English writer and dreamer Thomas de Quincey, wrote in some of the thousands of pages of his 14 volumes wrote that to discover a new problem was quite as important as discovering the solution of an old one. But I cannot even offer you that. I can only offer you time-honored perplexities.”

“And in our less beautiful mythology we speak of the subliminal self, of the subconscious, of course those words are rather uncouth when we compared them with the muses or with the Holy Ghost, but still we have to put up with the mythology of our time.”

- Borges, from his 1967-8 lectures "The Riddle of Poetry"

_________

An acquaintance, an intellectual from Latin America sends me an email bursting at the seams of the twenty-five megabyte limit. The prolific backlog of written research, charts, graphs and maps is stunning. He has proved, through simple correspondence, a scenario for the turn of the tide, an epochal shift in the geological age of the planet. The continents will roll, as on a dial, between the ocean currents. Coastal lands will be subsumed one on side by the leeching magma, on the other by tidal waves with enormity enough to swallow entire cities in a heartbeat’s notice. During this time, mythical beasts make themselves known, many from the below, many from above.

The Edge of Doom by Samuel Colman

The swirling aftermath of an ocean-swept city follows us upwards toward the mountain peaks. The shifting plates boom and gush, spitting fire and ash into the sunless sky, raining in metals and the boiling fury of an endless toxic night. We are protected by a subterranean demi-god, hidden to our waking eyes in the days of light. The simian beast grapples a crushing hammer, defeating a swimming ape three times his size emerging from the opaque, deathly soup of ocean water below. The battle is, to our human eyes, a goliath sight, many proportions beyond our own. Greedily, fear seizes as a last hope in the will to life. The blasting mountaintop seethes with equal force as the rising waters. 

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Volcano

"To see a volcano in you dreams, signifies that you will be in violent disputes, which threaten your reputation as a fair dealing and honest citizen...Volcanic eruptions in dreams usually represent our erupting emotions. Feelings that you may be harbouring during the day might take the form of a volcanic eruption in a dream state. The unconscious psyche might be releasing positive or negative feelings in a safety of a dream (e.g. strong sexual feelings, passion, anger, rage, and fear). Superstition-based dream interpretations say that pouring lava is a warning about poor health. Dreaming about a volcano means the dreamer is in danger of losing a close friendship if she is not honest with that person." (iDream)

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...
a planetary dissolution,
wavering on the edge,
deemed a wanderer,
stolen soul,
dreamer in artistic wonderland,
or violent binge-seeking parasite,
working miracles inside a silenced freedom,
without home, or conceived place
guiding mundane goals,
roaming vagrant, or seer,
yet still unripe,
recently fallen
from knowledge,
into wish, luck, intuition, and the all ecstatic
passion,
bellowing "good and evil are through"
impaled by the one breath,
strange yet true
...
throughout the known universe,
into the home of a single man,
living atop a mountain,
dreaming in the orbital spawn,
a satellite, the globe itself,
winding round, predictably,
to the course of light,
ending with beginning and finding us along the way
on the way,
all along

- excerpts from "Divorce & Diaspora" 

Liberation in the Unconscious Embodiment of the Archetype

“The last dream of that series, I can not tell you all the dreams, was that I was out in nature, I stood in a field of wheat. An enormous field of wheat, that was ripe for harvest. I was a child and I held her in my arm like a baby. The wind was blowing over that field of wheat, now you know when the wind is blowing over a wheat field those waves over the wheat field, and with these waves I swayed like that, putting her as if were to sleep. She felt as being in the arms of a god, of the Godhead. I thought, now, the harvest is ripe. I must tell her. I told her, you see, what you want and what you project into me because you are not conscious of it, you have the idea of a deity you don’t possess, therefore you see it in me. That clicked…It was a hedonist god, it was a god of nature, of vegetation, he was the wheat himself, the spirit of the wheat, the spirit of the wind. She was in the arms of that numen. That is the living experience of an archetype…instantly it clicked…it is as the dream says, she is in the arms of that archetypal idea. Now that is a numinous experience and that is the thing that people are looking for, an archetypal experience that gives them an incorruptible value. They depend on other conditions, their desires, their ambitions, they depend on other people because they have no value in themselves, they are only rational, they are not in possession of a treasure that would make them independent…that is a sort of liberation.”   

- C.G. Jung, from "Matter of Heart" 

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"What primitive African stirring is this? What crowd of blundering hippos gawking and feeling for life in this mildew maw parade!" 

"No, this is a wisdom gathering, a hapless ruse, to stun the oceans in a violent gaze of electric natural law. This is a spectral breeding ground for the insane and loose, those wilderness souls born of less indication about human truth than one would suspect from a life lived in the rut. Theirs is a tribal howl, a martyr’s plea, scintillating rasps into the smoked down calling of witchcraft and group camaraderie through spirit, through visceral tongues." 

I am drowned in a haze of strident intensity, pulsating with every leap from the vibrating mud. The trickster’s love emanates with personified blood from the livid sky teething for human thought and supernal desire in this mundane autochthona of self-engendered lust, detoxified in a laughing rite with the living dream of mystery, hatching from this circle of African might. Their clothes, wooly, with animal fear still stretched in the discolored hair. Their homes, perfect and ingenious with seamless appropriation from this their exploited grounds, invoked to newborn life again in their visible joy, communal through and through.

I escape along the brush torn paths, bitten with stings of lightning and the swatting touch of snakeskin and the feline tail, scattering an infinitesimal infinitude of insects grouping. The countryside folds past over the close horizon, a dense lush grows as by sight. A beast moves, unknown. Feathers, white and tall scatter in the noiseless round. I can sense auspicial animation as the forest glows and rumbles ever slightly. The bird is infamous for its glaring foresight, its strength and unearthly demeanor is its hallmark to fruition in surviving this drunken dreaming landscape of danger without forewarning. I follow the animal beyond the gates of our natural boundary, or has it followed me? Can we both be following? There is no end. 

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Africa

"To dream that you are in Africa surrounded by Cannibals, foretells that you will be oppressed by enemies and quarrelsome persons." (iDream)

______

Branded with the seal of history.
Final and rushed.

“Oh, this is dramaturgy for the sentimental boorish audience of the mob,
who critique and pander with total, serious divorce from the actuality of the place
an energy, which creates law from reason and implements cost
with soul in the spiritual night of the living ghosts.

Do we haunt you?”

“You are my foreboding reminder
behind the veil that shivers with end of day
returning only for the antipodal colour
resembling rust,
yet focused in bottom-up vines that reach to an endogenous planet.

It is leaving earth. We are going with it.”

- excerpt from "Brimming with Dissatisfaction"

Malaika! Mama Africa Malaika!

"Little bird, I dream of you, little bird / Little bird, I dream of you, little bird"

- from "Malaika" favorite song of Miriam Makeba, also known as Mama Africa

________

“It all started when we began busking” she eyed me cruelly, feeling distant as ever while my scanning eyes pierce through the dizzying array of salacious bodies. The cutting immensity of decadence harbored on this night pours into our uniquely sized and filled glasses with an escalating temperament, roiling above our heads as a foreboding torrent.

I call into my childhood school from Alberta. Anxious as ever, I need to cover a deadline, before the end of spring. “I will not be present! Count me out!” as my letters turn to poetic dissertations on the finality of my language experiments, careening over a maelstrom of an ill-conceived message.

Back at the opulent restaurant table in Calgary, different sized glasses and their respective bottles and pints adorn our dining area. High end whiskeys, beers and wines flow into the embittered majestic glares at the end of a Canadian winter, survived now in the meager worries of our sex-pampered minds. My wife beside, is marked by an intense anxiety.

Exiting the table, I endeavor through night-fallen passes in these drought-severed western plains. Magically, the air breathes with otherworldly hosts. A threesome of burka-clad young girls strides deliberately from an outstretched grove, slowly needing life to burst through its seams of wintry bark. They disappear at the edge of a mysteriously placed river. The night is confident upon its paramount hour on which it enshrouds the hidden world in a veil of the spectacular above. I find a clearing. The new moon tears into the sky with quiet appeal, yet the starlight and planet’s reflections intermingle upon the wooly grass. The aura of Venus, Source of Love, kisses Jupiter, God of Power. 

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Planets

"Dreaming about planets could represent desire to explore either our internal world or the world of our egos (the external or physical world). Planets could also represent deeper things such as the way that we relate to ourselves. They can say something about the relationship that exists between our soul and ego...if what Carl Jung said is true, all dream images bring us back to issues of self-identity and profound understanding of self." (iDream)

_________

“majestic beauty of rushed earth” 

the Arab quest 

rinsed of ritual hatred

town-crier 

ancient as the dust 

gone

sailed 

into the flux of a speedy end

“arisen to stone but failed

shrank to mist and sold mazes for tears”

- excerpt from "Rushed Earth"

As a Child of Light, Embraced by Thoth in Dreamland

Ramses III. in front of god Thoth in tomb of Khaemwaset, 12th Century BC. by Ancient Egyptian Painter

"Thoth, the Atlantean, at the 26,000 year ago beginning of the Cosmic Cycle now ending, aided in the building of the Great Pyramid and secreted within it records and instruments of the Motherland Mu and Atlantis explaining how the 'Children of Light' dwelt amongst the Ancients and are not as sons of men, except when they are in physical bodies. Thoth incarnated again in the Third Dynasty of Imhotep as architect under King Zoser, was Socrates and Simon Peter among seven incarnations. He knew that all men were essentially Spiritual Beings, for he said, 'Man is a 'star' bound to a body! Man is space born, a Child of the Stars(a Starchild!). Man is a flame bound to a mountain!'"

Source

For More Mysteries: Where the Lines that Divide Science and Myth Intersect 


"Dreamland" refers to the areas in and around Nevada and New Mexico where extraterrestrial mysteries intersect with government security, arcane science and high technology. This is the setting of my dream.

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After this series of dreams passed through my consciousness, upon waking, I had intended to discard the activity of recording this night of dream substance, as the sketches of dream memory seemed to be far-fetched, or too far removed from my daily, waking reality. Then, upon waking, I was forwarded the above message from an old friend. I thought this was a sign that I should indeed record this dream.

I seemed to be returning from the West Coast, driving across the United States, when I passed through the Southwest. I feel as though I’ve ended a part of my life where I was deeply embroiled in study. As I traverse beyond the coastal horizon into the desert landscape, I am somehow drawn into one final “course” if you will. I stop in an area of absolute desolation somewhere deep in the deserts of the American Southwest. The only nearby city is way far off beyond the horizon. We are in pure desert. I see a familiar face in a crowd of indiscernible human shapes and activity. Suddenly, though curiously expected, there is a presence above, a directing mysterious light, leading us to raise our arms in recognition. I feel we are being taught something, as my entire body begins radiating with harmless visible electricity. There is a pulse coursing through my limbs with a vibrant white glow.

Suddenly, I find myself, in the state of a child. I perceive myself as a small, minute entity, like a small child version of myself, however, somehow smaller, as my surroundings are proportionately more massive than I’ve ever experienced. I feel as if dropped into the middle of the desert, with only a couple companions, equally disoriented. We begin stumbling through the desert brush in an unknown direction, thoughtless and with a daze of incredulity and stubborn introspection strong enough to leave us careless and at once convinced as to the security of an optimistic fate. As we continue our walk, we soon happen upon an open cliff, leading into a canyon of vegetation and water. This source of life is our destination, we can feel it. As two children, however, we fall headlong down the cliff, without heed to caution or ability to properly maneuver the descent, and find ourselves plunging into the cool stream below. This is refreshing, however disconcerting, as we feel we have lost things of importance. There are beings upon a hillock above us, so we slowly collect ourselves and find our way to the top. We are welcomed by a towering figure, an alien body, whose shape and features remind us of an insect, although this being commands great respect. There is an exasperatingly strong resemblance to the living Thoth, Egyptian God of Knowledge and Writing! We are comforted in the presence of Thoth, and he sees to it that we are taken care of, while being independent as ever to splash about for our things in the water and climb the forested canyon hills.

Now that I reflect, I believe more and more this was the figure of Thoth as we know from Egyptian mythology in the flesh. In the dream, Thoth was of certain humility and held an unassuming air, embracing me and simply allowing my inner Child to explore (with personal neuroses intact) under the beautifully humane security of his nearby presence. 

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Watch about another incarnation of THOTH in New York City!

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"there's an old saying,

that goes something like;

‘a person that knows their place is a demi-god,

and the place of a person,

is a god,

and the One who has no personality

and is everywhere,

is the God’

a really old saying,

no one knows where from"

- excerpt from "An Old Saying"

Petronius' Mortal Dreaming...

Illustration for Petronius Arbiter's Satyricon by Norman Lindsay

Encolpius speaks to the wilderness around him, his friend Ascyltus lies dead.

"Where is all your joy now, your arrogance?

Now you're at the mercy...of fishes and wild beasts, you who bragged...of your warlike innocence.

Come now, mortals! Fill your hearts with dreams!

O Gods, how far he lies from his destination!"

From the penultimate scene in "Satyricon,"  by Frederico Fellini.