A Triunity of Conscious Remembrance: Writings on Noetic Symbolism

“We can dream about anything, no matter how preposterous, topsy-turvy or unnatural it may be.” Cicero

The three-tiered modes of consciousness, being unconscious, subconscious and conscious are reflected in the synchronous relationship between dream and memory. This is a daily experience from which we may understand the depths of mind on an elementary level. Fundamentally, it is a known fact that all people, and even many animals, are inevitably sent into the subtle realms of dream; it is part of our natural physiology. The three modes are as follows:

1)

Unremembered dreams are phenomena of the unconscious. The subtle emotions that the body and mind feel as a reaction to such dreams are only known by the most acutely aware. 

2)

Dreams that are had, and are known, where the dreamer on waking knows they were dreaming, however cannot remember any specific details apart from references to waking experience, are manifestations of the subconscious. At this point, waking and dreaming states of consciousness meld into a noetic dialogue, an inter-meeting, wherein the fluid exchange of reason and sense are exchanged with imagination and emotion. 

3)

Dreams that are remembered vividly, and dreamt lucidly, are part of the conscious realm. Most people are not fully conscious in their waking life, meaning they are not fully aware and actively engaged in their own lives, as in the source of their own lives, spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically. A conscious dream is more than a physiological memory of the natural, instinctual imagination, it is a gift from the transcendent inner world, a gate into our inmost being, where we contact that which seems at once incredibly strange and entirely familiar, our fully exposed, and whole selves. 

__________

The sting of marshland rushes bruise and cut the soles while tangling the toes in knots of wet, risen moisture. The earth perspires with enduring anxiety under these blank skies. Emitting the hot sweat of gaseous vents through the decaying roots and bacterial soil, I trudge. 

The Pontine Marshes at Sunset by August Kopisch

On the horizon, a large city is burnt to ash. They say it all begin with the conflagration of a movie theatre, and a plane crash that split the small city in two with massive fires extending outwards. Not a soul survived. The earth feels cleansed by the death of a throaty death rattle. The decay of human bodies seems to rise as from the strength of the grasses rooted in the damp, dank shifting ground. 

The Unknown by John Charles Dollman

Above our heads, a plane spews hot trails of ash. A man behind me loads a rocket and stings the plane through its side. I watch as the behemoth machine incinerates in mid-air, crumbling with a hauntingly delicate rush through the death-consuming land. I am surrounded by a feel of homicidal, at once in the horizon, while within the breast of the alive. The air is heavy with fate. 

__________

The rains bear down hard and long
On these deceased pangs, longing to embrace ghosts
Long shied-away, deep within memory’s misbegotten despair

...

The diminished poor bear arms while the rains fall

Calling them home no more to breath

In the air of pure and raw savagery

Beckoning our rice-fought union to work

In undivided shame across river’s breadth

That brings wealth and a name to the American prince

With breast inflamed

Prepared to reason with his shame

And engrave in the desert an unplanned way

Towards brotherhood

...

Freeing spontaneous whispers

To a last pleasurable remorse

Upraised and sacrificed

As great offering to the Klezmer bonfire

Whitewashing the New York tide with Greek verse,

In one soundless escapade towards relaxed state of being

...

Cyclically bridging the human body with the global fate

In one silent orbital wave that resounds instantly in every curve of lost strength

Between arms where the beat follows to our brethren and kin,

A growing and invisible host to our name, thinking up a sound

And so, calling forth the blessed invocation of being

excerpts from "The rains bear down"

I Awake in the Name of Django: Romani Jazz and the Dreamer's Embrace

"I'll see you in my dreams / And I'll hold you in my dreams" Gus Kahn's original lyrics

It was in a downtown French bistro where I listened to the hackery of a pseudo-theatrical storytelling musical showcase on the life of Django Reinhardt. I was expecting a real return on a small investment to witness the life of the Romani Jazz legend through his music. I was disappointed to say the least. Genius can never and should never be copied in any way, shape, or form. He made recordings.

I did learn from the storyteller with the gypsy guitar that Django, in fact, means "I awake". One of my favourite films, "Sweet and Lowdown" by Woody Allen features "I'll see you in my dreams" an all-time classic jazz beauty for our time. It speaks numbers with the instrumental ingenuity of the two-fingered guitar player, whose myths struck a chord from my earliest days of musical appreciation. It was especially this Antique FILM which got me hooked on Django! I've been awake ever since! 

__________

I Awake Too Long 

& Photographic Clarity Re-Places My Eyes 

From Dreamscapes Lingering

In His Element by RK

Color of the Horizon by RK

I Am Seen by RK

A Shared Path by RK

Domestic Offerings by RK

___________

“A full expression of Love in mind, heart and wisdom”

“Will the new being have music in Their veins?”

“If marriage of shared blood, the perfect union of musical harmony and universal rhythm will mark the forehead and line the bones of the little one to be”

Raised on the pressure of finger to string
And palm to drum

excerpt from "Spreading Easy Freedom"

Alchemical Poetry of Terence McKenna and "the last Renaissance Man"

"Awake is where the laws of physics are fully operable...I've found by observing sleep, and some of you may recall the motto in Athanasius Kircher...that's chiseled over the alchemist's doorway, I can't do it in Latin but it says, "While Sleeping, Watch' 

I've noticed that while going to sleep there is a barrier, a place in the process of going to sleep, that is like the mercurial edge, it's a river, it's a zone of hypnagogia...true hallucination...

At any given moment on the planet, because of the way the planet is, as a thing, some considerable percentage of human beings are asleep always, and many are awake. And so if the world soul is made of the collective consciousness of human beings, then it is never entirely awake, it is never entirely asleep, it exists in...some kind of indeterminate zone...

The real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control, absolutely no one...It's like trying to control a dream, you see. 

The global vesting of the species is somehow unfolding the logic of a dream. Well now a Jungian would say, no surprise here, history is the collective dream of humanity, it is run by the archetypal energies of humanity...

You choose to be asleep or partially asleep or fully awake...if in fact we exist inside some kind of morphogenetic field that is created by the sum total of human minds on the planet, and if in fact in half or more of those minds in any given moment, the rules of the dream hold sway, then it is no surprise that when we make our way into society, or just when we live our lives there is an eeriness to it, there's a fatedness to it, there's a plotedness to it, we are inside some kind of engine of narrative...Greg Egan and others have suggested that this could even be a form of recorded medium...you can see the thumbprints of editors on our reality if you are truly paying attention...

...it is the plasticity of historical time and the acceleration, a sense of an out-of-control spin-up or spin-down into new domains of possibility, that is the strongest evidence at hand that we in some kind of dream.

 The world is made of language...reality can therefore be hacked...if it's code, then it is far more deeply open to manipulation than we ever dared dream."

I stared into the posthumous cyber webs of knowledge and insight, uncovered from the alchemical poetry of Terence McKenna and other renegade pop philosophers of the American psychedelic era. Often listening and reading through the dawn, I touched the cosmic giggle in the meeting of minds, my young sensitivities saturated by the egoless dreamscapes of the oft-unspoken myths of immemorial lifeways in the light of a kind of thought that assumes the entire body of Humanity and the World in a universal freedom of sight and meaning fruiting on the branch of the Tree of Knowledge as a clear and lucid dream of sensual immersion in the core and nature of mind. 

Visit the Alchemical Archives for a fantastic resonance of thought!

_________

the island forest, cycling with parents, where am I leading them? where are you leading me? they gaze interminably confused as we map out the vineyard over a restaurant stave, the dripping loss and upended commotion, a swill of pain in the forgetting distance, they follow diligently beyond manicured brush and antique streets. 

Crescent of Houses II (Island Town) by Egon Schiele

at a rest, I stop into a hotel, and serendipitously meet a band of world music ghosts, swimmingly seeking my attention in their anxiety, and they are old friends, I promise to return, yet with bigger gripes out front, my family argues over plates and glasses in their passive-aggressive fate, and I saunter off, towards a third direction, a middle way, of indifferent pastures in the awake forest of billions of gods

Burial place of Hone Heke, Bay of Islands by Alfred Sharpe

the damp leaves are cool in the thanksgiving autumn wind, as I step forward towards a drying pond, and above its shores, lounging in a rest chair, atop the indiscernible ground of multicolored arboreal death, my professor of ethnobotany, what eyes of fire and livable sight, she sees me above her book, and I admire her smiling countenance in all its simple glow 

Vali and Sugriva Fighting, Folio from the Dispersed 'Shangri Ramayana' by Unknown

and then, to my right, through to the thick of woods, a billow of smoke, and an old friend, luring me forth into the wilderness bed, yet with cooling head, I steam off in another direction, leaving his darkening crown of endless dreads and staggering worldview to dry with the faint bearing of the unreflective pond behind us

_________

The unwritten page, a calming exercise, a psychic intuitive drive measured by release

           

In the catalogue of words strung into structured grooves

     In our common sonic language,

     Yet to scalp the music in speech & create 

     Only the pale imprint and seed

...

     Mindlessly astir on into the human binge on space, land & foam

...

As we enjoy the insane destruction,

The chaotic living wilderness

Dreaming up deadly bared weak sleep into our holy lawless cast,

With land forsaken by mistreated burdens

And the murderous pride in a grieving home

excerpt from "A Gorgeous Nudity"

The Achuar and the Meaning of an Indigenous Map

“For many years these Achuar communities have dreamt of introducing themselves, their way of life and the beauty of their ancestral lands to the rest of the country and the world. For the Achuar, a dream is not simply a passing, nocturnal illusion without relation to one’s waking life. On the contrary, dreams are gateways allowing communication with the spirits of their ancestors, who come to visit and talk to the living, giving them advice and a vision of their future so that they can tread a clear path in life.” (Source)

_________

North America on a map, tangled in intercalated diagrammatic linearity. A pale shade of red loosely emboldens Native lands. The patchy splotches of coloration on the otherwise black and white delineation of national-political boundary displaces geography with a time-bound worshipping, a cultural veil of truancy, a wakeful respite from truth. Looking at the seemingly random collection of red area follow my eyes as my eyes follow easterly into the heart of New England, my mind is inundated with a series of educational videos on sexual abuse in reserve/reservation communities. Homoerotic visuals tear my stare into blurry remorse for the heady desperation and wasteful racism, looking away from the natural history, the undeserved step over fellow men. As I contemplate the madness of the contemporary imagery presented to me, I turn a corner atop a towering butte in the skyscraping mountainous land, hiking through a valley pass, immersed in the cold sky air, unobstructed by not but stone and hair. 

________

Map

"To dream of a map, or studying one, denotes a change will be contemplated in your business. Some disappointing thing swill occur, but much profit also will follow the change...To dream of following a map means you are going in the right direction in a real life situation. It also symbolizes emotional and spiritual growth...A confusing chart may indicate that you lack a clear sense of direction in your everyday life or are in the midst of changing long term plans." (iDream)

________

to the racist, sexist and conservative religious wine,
intoxicating the West
with a throat climbing upwards
to vomit the female's adam apple,
now so dry, shriveled with frost,
cracked and permanently wasted,
not a thought to re-cycle,
only the Mother (Mater/Matter) abuse,
to forgive latent mindreaders
stating new thought dictionary entries

new, with fresh ink over the staircase travelogue,
leading yet leaderless,
wading in the warm bathwater
fresh and awash with the purest feeling,
drinking earth and swaying so slightly
atop family trees brushing neatly
along the skin-touched pages
leafing soundly into a freed paradigm
lonesome with radical imagination,
to resist the sufferer's cold throne and sleep
instead in the deadly fog of oblivion,
away from the driven masses
who prepare to wake
...
who failed to swear an addiction into existence
over the creator's blue telephone,
hushing the musical light from beyond
into anonymity,
whose authoritarian drug was fixed by the word,
and now silent to the punch,
a subtle dream

slaking the thirst for lucidity to be
in modern consciousness,
say

"it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society" (J. Krishnamurti)

...

a healthy wave reaches sky's peopled shores,
wherein all are recognized within the womb,
unborn demigods come to that awareness,
giving lush expressions to instantaneous action,
rousing impassioned need to flow with an artistic palette,
swimming above extinction in winter's unprepared lulls,
choking the urge toward movement within,
a mental pride

singing zealous
while sad, and diving earnestly
into depression's darkest ignorance

shadow's dust so remote
now only found in greed, sick corners
within a Southerly, Global hate,
trading laws with resistance,
scheming out of natural dependence,
realizing childish humility, and finally
forgiving the precious sources of Love,
kneeling before forests,
swamps, wetlands, rains, fogs,
winds, grasses, bushes, trees,
soils, shores, stones, and all measure of fungal being
as barefoot sleepers,
smiling at the unknown,
unknowingly

- excerpts from "truth, judgment or unknowns"

Lucid Remedies Affects Waking Consciousness

Lucid Dream Tea from Algonquin Tea Company is a wild-crafted sweet gale / bog myrtle. Drink 1 cup, well-steeped before bed.

The tea has the effect of extraordinary stimulation, wherein the mind is active with constancy, which is why the normal state of consciousness carries over beyond the threshold of sleep. Beware, sleep on the tea is not as restful as without.

- testimony of a personal friend

__________ 

In Monterrey, Mexico, I am living in my old place with parents. I was the same age as now, though living with them. It’s funny because my Dad is dead. My brother was around but did not talk, he was just a presence. We had to pick up someone from my old elementary school. As we drove by, with my grandparents in the truck, we saw a big new door on the school. There is a park across from us. As we drove by in the park, we saw lots of birds. They were having a feast of food from the street vendors. There was an owl, crow, peacocks, turkeys and other strange birds. As we passed by the door, a girl shared a corn on the cob with a huge black turkey taller than her. The turkey would bite a few grains and the girl would bite from the outside. She was waiting to be picked up. We went around the corner and parked behind a tricycle. I got out of the car. I walked in the park and chased the birds. There were people there waiting for the kids. The birds got angry and the people ran away. Now the school is empty, all the kids have been picked up. I crossed the street and went in the school. A big patio is caked with mud. A few kids were playing soccer there. Since I was there to walk through the school, I searched for my old classroom without success, the school changed a lot. They had new buildings with big glass windows.

With my cousin, we received some coupons from the newspaper. Mine said “Monterrey” in big, red letters, handwritten as by a child. My cousin had a different piece of paper. I looked at his.

On another night under influence of the tea, I am with a group of people in an isolated cabin in the mountain wilderness. We are besieged by a ravenous pack of wolves. The cabin is invaded completely. All we have to fight back are pillows and straw brooms. 

_________

There is slight chance that the Dream Tea may affect daily waking consciousness, i.e. in the form of recurrent deja-vu as “dream characters” and “dream figments” however in life. In these cases the recurrent manifestations which trigger a dream-life liminal state are in the form of plants and certain characteristic features of people. The following stories are two examples.

In Michoacán, hiking through mountain range. I traveled much these days, walked a lot. On the corner of a road, tall up to the torso of a medium sized person standing with small, orange flowers in the shape of trumpets. Seeing the plant became a catalyst for dream recollection, it was as if the plant had existed purely in dream, though was interestingly present in my waking consciousness.    

If you’re in Mexico, this kind of person sticks out. He was 14, but looked 8. He looked like the main character from the film “The Blue Lagoon”. He was very blonde with curly hair, a strawberry or crystal blond. He liked to dress with a loin cloth and perform fire juggling. I arrived in Palenque and was hanging out with street drummers. Among them there was this kid, playing drums with a girl. I thought she was his mother. Later on, we stayed in the same place close to the ruins in Palenque. He asked me if I could buy gas for him for his fire show. He looked to young. That girl I saw with him wasn’t his mom. I helped him. He started his show on a street crossing. I collected the money. We got money at least to pay the hostel camp site and to get burgers. It was already dark and we were heading back to our place, some cabins near to the pyramids. He told me a bit of his story. He said he was 14, and fled home to look for his brother. His brother was a drum player and hitchhiker. He started telling me incredible stories like traveling to India and practicing mantras. We were hanging around a hippie commune with Hare Krishnas so I wouldn’t believe him. He sung mantras like, “Hare Hare Hare Hare Sham Bo”. I wondered how such a young kid traveled alone. He had his own tent, all by himself. I think he would have liked to travel with me, but I didn’t offer and he didn’t ask. This is a recurring situation with many of my blonde male friends and even my Dad (who was also blonde).

_______

“A struggle to exist.
In any form, taken
whether through ideology or bread
the resonance of the painful universal cry
into an imperfect echo that was never us.”

“In the process we have transformed
and become unrecognizable to ourselves
as the mirror casting our own reflection dirties with our pathetic work
for the sick sighs that last only in the mind after the inescapable is approached
finally
with complete resolve
in the last gasp
before the drop into…”

- excerpt from "Haunted by the lack of breath."

Dream Interrogations and Literal Family Torture from Montego Bay

Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbor by Georges Seurat

Why are waking notions of the word dream a synonym for something to attain…where as in the notion of a subconscious dreaming, the word dream connotes a separate reality. Where is the relationship between these two associations? Is the difference between waking and subconscious perspective or in the idea of dream itself?

I am sitting at my grandmother’s couch in coastal Massachusetts. She shows me a pop can with Chinese characters on it, and mentions something about Hawaii. Next, my mother offers my wife and I a trip to the Caribbean. Through a song of my uncle about Montego Bay, I imagine I am in Montego Bay. The hotel resort is as one would typically imagine an upscale hotel resort in the Caribbean to appear. In my hotel room, however, my toes and fingers and parts of my chest and head are being wired to a torture device that my stepfather is operating. I attempt an escape from the hotel resort, but it turns into a kind of Cretan Labyrinth, where the Taurus is my own family. 

Dream Memories Fleeing Religion and Hitler Himself

Over the past days, a series of dreams have not left my memory, and for that I wonder about their place within the whole of my Life.  As I continue to reflect on a dream that stays with brutal clarity within the near-reaches of my waking mind, the dreams I have anew continue to resound with equally inescapable clarity while awake.

Snow at Louveciennes by Alfred Sisley

Dream 1

Inside of a large cathedral, with many rows of seats, I stand from a balcony. I look out, and the audience attending seems to resemble that of a large concert hall, stock full with individuals in highfalutin suits, they mostly represent a rich, upper class of solely European ancestry.

I am told by an individual sharing the balcony beside me that all of the congregation is from Brazil. At first, I wonder, am I in the church of the Santo Daime?

Then, suddenly, out of the back hall, a Torah emerges from the crowd, towering to the height of the near ceiling, whereupon the highest balcony leans down to touch the top of the Torah's immense scroll handle, reaching upwards towards the top of the cathedral wherein the light pours with blinding illumination.

As the crowd exits from the cathedral, one man stares at me, he is much darker in complexion, and appears to resemble an individual I had met near the border of Brazil.

Dream 2

I am in what seems to resemble a mechanical tunnel system, similar to that seen in films set within the body of a spacecraft (2001: A Space Odyssey; Star Wars). I am fleeing through the endless tunnels with my wife. We are fleeing from the wrath of Hitler himself! He follows us with a few of his heavy-handed cronies. One catches up with us and strikes my wife on her shoulder with a deadening blow that sends her wildly stretched out into the vacuous space of the concave tunnel. Hitler himself is fast approaching. I look at her shoulder, it is very bruised, and I fear for her ability to continue to play music! Nonetheless, we continue on, fleeing on into the endless tunnel system.

Next, I find my wife is caught behind, she is executed by the wrath of Hitler before my eyes, and disappears. I exit from the tunnel system out into a nighttime snowy landscape. I find that there are people following who are in much better condition. They have guns. I am in the midst of war time. In the middle of a field, I am stunned by the encroaching enemy. Surrounded, I am snuffed out into the deadening silence of nature's own wintry night.

I find Hitler himself is caught within the tunnel system, I have extended myself beyond death and reach into the tunnel system to finalize my own revenge against Hitler and keep him in my newly found giant's grasp. I reach into the tunnel, and what emerges but a violently green bird with a red tuft around the neck. The bird flies away.

Who we are in Dream; are we in Life?

"Who you are in Dream is not who you are in Life."

I find myself echoing a statement made by Tyler Durden in "Fight Club"

Yet this is my experience: there is a more subtle interplay of consciousness woven through "dream" than in that it simply ends upon waking.

Dream crosses over into our waking consciousness as does our Life into dream. The greater one realizes this, the less important things become which are predicated upon the line where waking becomes sleep and vice versa. The realization that Dreaming is, in a sense, a refined way of living, and that its genuine energy, which makes purely mental creations on us while inwardly fixated on our most natural processes, can occur at any time when the mind is used accordingly. Dream is a finer interpretation of the mundane mind by the human heart.

When Dream crosses over into the awake mind, we are creating music, writing inventively, singing passionately, thinking imaginatively, etc.

Life feeds into our dreaming when asleep, in our most vulnerable state of mind, we involuntarily re-live personal desires, social obligations or anxious occurrences in the guise of the mind's own conceptual spin stripped of normal sensory perception.

So, when one goes beyond mere "lucid dreaming" and interacts with a newfound sense of their Dream, as where the their dreaming is united in all aspects of the mind, whether awake or asleep, that person may be known to adopt strange habits such as going under pseudonyms (such as myself) or more overtly in simply taking their lives into their own hands, speaking their mind and dedicating their time to what they are passionate about, what unites them with an eternally alive Dream, that is at the crux of creation in a profound relationship to something actual as opposed to the appealing to what is currently acceptable in its concave, boxed-in drudgery of a life lived without dreaming. For Dream is Spirit, it is the true Source of Life, and ground within which all life must inevitably resolve.

Dream to Dream

The writing herein identifies dream as not the opposite of waking.

The word "dream" has many meanings, as does "art." Both are words fastened tightly to the hip of creation at its deepest root, and most inlaid core.

Dream can be identified as a phenomenon which overlaps between waking and sleep. What we normally refer to as "dream" or the subconscious activity of mind while asleep, is broadened in this sense to include the imagination, aspiration, desire, and all forms of creativity suspended in mind's eye whether awake or sleeping or somewhere in between, outside of both or nowhere near!

To explore the meaning and place of dreamt expression, we must explore "dream" seamlessly.

In purity, dreamless
Still, mystery pervades

Leaving sleep
And wakefulness

Leaving conscious
And subconscious,

Inverting our self
into the role of one Dream,
united with all the dreaming.

The seamless expression of dream occurs when the verbal/symbolic/metaphoric aspect of dreaming animated by subconscious and involuntary psychic, phenomenal mystery are interfused with the fully conscious and unmistakable urge of a dreamer to create, do, and be a fulfillment of one Dream.

Each entry which falls under dream description will be an anonymous purveyance of an experienced dream, and in keeping an anonymity, begin to draw connections to a single, unified dream of all humankind.