I have been told since childhood that everybody dreams in Black and White. The people who told me this were old. As with hair, maybe the color fades from dreams with age. This is an entry from a notebook in which I wrote about a dream I had exactly 10 years ago, Jan 2006. I’ve always dreamed in vivid color, and this was a colorful dream.
A wide, grassy valley ran North and South between high mountains under an azure sky. They were not like most mountains which to me are overgrown hills whose tops one can reach in a morning of walking. Instead, were as mountains should be. They were steep, awe-inspiring mountains with snowy tops. They seemed to reach into the celestial realms. The meadow I stood in was spotted with millions of colorful wild flowers painted from a vivid palette. Here and there across the valley were small forests, groves, and hills. A river flowed from between two forested ribs of the mountain closest to me to the East. I approached the river and followed it into a little valley or gorge that cut deep into the root of the mountain.The path ended at a waterfull streaming down a 10000 foot cliff. A rainbow formed where the spray caught the sunlight. Above the roar of the cascade, I heard singing. At the top of the fall was a woman. She cried and her tears formed the cascade. I stood at the bottom holding a prospector's pan trying to catch the tears. They had little bits of gold in them. Every now and than, I bent down and used the pan to get the gold from the sand in the bottom of the stream.
The singing was strange as though performed by a chorus of circus clowns:
"Stella on the silver screen,
was once a silent movie queen"
There were many more words to the song, but it was a struggle to remember even those few until the end of the dream and until I had a chance to wake up and scribble them into the notebook beside my sleeping palette in the dark. I don't know where that dream came from. It sounds like a fake "Indian Legend" I read about and forgot and this was a re-hash of the story in the form of a dream.
At the time, I was lving alone in a rented house in Dinky Town, Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was around 4 am, and I had just woken from that dream. After writign down the dream and going to the toilet and I couldnt get back to sleep so I decided I would have an Out-of-Body-Experience (OBE) instead. So I relaxed, got the “Kundalini” oscillating hard and finally a strong pulse of "kundalini" pushed me into the astral plane. Kundalini is a phenomenon one feels physically but whose nature is not understood. This was a promissing start to an OBE.
I floated weightless through empty blackness for a moment not knowing where I was or which way was up. Soon, my vision cleared. I could see the details of the darkroom vividly and in full color. My visual perspective was spherical. Briefly, it's kind of like having eyes in the back of your head. Everything in front, behind, to the sides, above, and below is simultaneously visible. Spatial perspective is not consistent. Humans are used to going in the direction they are looking, so navigatiion can be difficult when looking in all directions at once for the first time in life but without realizing it. The non-Euclidian viewpoint of Spherical Vision didn’t confuse me this time.
I did my usual check for corespondance with the waking world. I drifted around the house making sure everyint was in its place. The dresser was in its place. Book shelves were okay. The laptop was on the table. Piles of junk mail, papers, pens, pencils, pocket change, and dirty napkins were on the table where I had been tossign them for the past year. Specifically, I was tryig nto make sure I hadn’t accidently drifted into some Alice in Wonderland dream world that is only a reflection of the shadows of my mind.
That’s what usually happens in OBEs. They start out being dead on real as in you can see the dead squirrel in your neighbor's backyard, wake up, go outside, look over their fence, and see that there really is a dead squirrel in their yard that had not been there the day before. But after those first few mind-blowing brilliant moments that break the known laws of physics, something quickly goes wrong. Often, I guess, dealing with the spherical visual field, someting so alien most cannot even imagine it, confuses the astral traveler, and the experience degenerates. At this point, it is no longer OBE at all but has turned into a dream that is not worth remembering.
As I entered the kitchen, I felt an overwhelming urge to go down into the basement. I hate going into basements during OBEs. Anything underground like caves, cemetaries, and abandoned buildings are creepy. They remind me of openings to the Underworld which is full of horrible un-dead things and walking nightmares. The basement door that opened off the kitchen was shut, and it was not openable so I had to float through it. I distinctly felt the splintery wood and a tugging in my solar plexus as I phased through it. On the other side of the door, the stairway was dark. I heard ominous clicking sounds, chirps, and rhythmic whistling all around. I was getting scared, and I kept thinking “Gateway to Hell.” I drifted down the dark stairway. Lights don’t work during OBEs so I didn’t bother trying to turn the switch. The stairway seemed like a long dark tunnel in a carnival fun house with weird flickering lights inside the walls. It was definitely too long to be the basement stairway. Finally, there was light at the bottom of the tunnel.
I almost never see real living people during OBEs. If anything, beloved pets that died during my childhood greet me. I was very surprised to see y landlord, Clint, in the basement. He was healthy and happy yet had a strangely sheepish look as though he was ashamed of something.
I said “Hello,” and he pointed to a white wall. I knew Clint to be a man of few words. Usually, there is an 8 foot Scar Face poster (he put it there when he decorated the hosue) on that wall, but this time, there was a hand painted mural covering the wall. That was not supposed to be there. I was no longer anywhere near reality. I had fallen Down the Rabbit HOle into a normal pointless dream.
Clint was looking at me intently, seemingly eager to tell me somethign. He was standing beside the mural holding a paint brush and a palette of paints. I didnt know he was interested in art. He was an auto mechanic at a garage he owned. He collected bicycles and drove a Harely Davidson motorcycle. Those were the only hobbies of his I knew about. I never took him to be somebody who had the ability to consciously enter the Astral Plane either.
I had been acquqinted with Clint for around 1 year by now, but we had never said more than a few words to each other. He generally didn’t like students. He owned the house but I only dealt with his wife when paying rent. Like most middle aged MInnesotans, Clint and his wife were friendly and had a folksy Mid West vibe. They often visited the coffee shop together nearby tath I would study in, yet we never talked. So why was he here?
My curiosity piqued, I gave him my full attention. He wanted to tell me the Meaning of Life. I remember thinking big things about tryign to solve world poverty, cure cancer, achieve world peace, discover faster than light space flight, immortality, etc.
He pointed to the painting. It gave off a strong impression of being incomplete, but I couldnt figure out what was missing as I examined it. It was a life like paintin of Minneapolis with a city skyline against a dark blue sky during a colorful sunrise or sunset. The painting was impossibly detailed. It was full of tiny realistic people going about their lives in the cityscape. He said it represented life or collective humanity on earth as a whole. He wasn't using words, but was thinking at me telepathically. EVery human life, no matter how short, seemingly worthless, rotten, or insignificant, contributes a significant and necessary brushstroke in this painting that advances it to its evolving completion. EAch life has its own place in the painting. They all blend together, sometimes completmenting at other places clashing, to create this work of art that ends up being a beautiful and strangely harmonious maserpiece.
He wielded his brush, dipping its bristles into some golden/red pigment, and made a very precise and delicate stroke completing the crimson clouds in a magnificent sunset. Now the painting was complete. Every life makes one brush stroke and Clint had made his one. I don’t know the meaning of life, but I was happy that Clint had found it.
Two days later, I went into the coffee shop. The owner, Dave, greeted me. “Your usual?”
“Yes please”
I pulled back a stool, thunked my book-filled back pack onto the wooden counter, and sat while he pulled the special big blue 24 ounce coffee mug from the shelf that is usually reserved only for me and filled it.
“Hey did you hear about Clint?”
“Clint, our landlord?” we were each renting a place from him in the area. “No,” I said.
He spoke very quietly as he set my coffee and cream on the counter in front of me, “he died two days ago.”
“What happened?”
“It was the problem he had that I told you about.”
“What?”
“YOu remember.”
“Ohhhhh,” finally realising that DAve had told me Clint was horribly addicted to crack cocaine and everybody was worried about him.
“ His wife found him dead yesterday in his garage. He had a heart attack, from an overdose,” he whispered.
After that, I would see his wife a few times a week either at the coffee shop or around Dinky Town for the year I still lived there, and I always thought aobut that dream when I saw her. I had never raelly talked to her before then, but after that, I would have conversations with her. It was always about daily stuff like town life or gardening or sthing, ;I never told her about that dream.
