Waking Up to An Open Mind


We are such stuff as dreams are made on.

Shakespeare

My best friend’s name was Rock Cherry. Isn’t that a great name? But when you’re five you don’t appreciate things like that. One day I was pushing Rock and his sister—who was babysitting us—on the garden swing attached to the garage of our house. It was composed of a large horizontal 8 X 8 beam attached to the garage on one side, and a vertical 8 X 8 on the other. Between it and the garage were two sets of chains supporting the three-seater swing that Rock and Maureen were on. I was behind them, pushing, when we heard a loud crack.

The vertical support had splintered about a foot or two above the ground, and the entire giant section was now angling down toward me. Without the swing in their way, Rock and Maureen were able to run forward to safety, but because it was twisting on two axes, it was impossible to predict where the swing-frame would land on my side. I ran for the neighbour’s fence and the next thing I knew I didn’t have a top to my head.

I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Rock’s sister Maureen to have to carry me to her house, two doors away, with the top of my head missing. Worse, my poor mother had to drive up just then to see her son being carried across the front lawn with blood gushing from his head.

I don’t remember any pain at all, but my hands wouldn’t work. No matter what I told them to do, they just sort of palsied up. Mrs. Cherry, a nurse, got me to use them to hold facecloths over my cracked-wide-open skull. I complained all the way to the hospital that I wanted to ride in an ambulance, but fortunately my Mom is as cool as a cucumber in an emergency and she got me there fine. I remember a nurse not looking up and being rude to my Mom, telling her to just wait a moment, and then when she did look up she gasped. I got a room right away.

I don’t recall anything after that until the surgeon said “hi” and told me that he was going to put a needle in my arm that would make me sleep. I also remember that I saw but did not feel the needle going in. And I remember the density of the sleep that followed. It wasn’t even like sleep it was so… void. There wasn’t even enough matter there to call it dark. It was just empty.

I’ve spent most of my life writing and producing film and television, so I tend to see the world as camera angles. So I’m not sure if I’ve created this next memory to fill in the blank of the anaesthesia, or if it’s an experience I actually had and the angle was just reminiscent of how one might film it. But I do remember my operation, and when I do I always see it from up on high in the room, in the corner. At one point something goes wrong and everyone is very excited and they rush and talk louder. Then it calms down and I can’t really say I remember anything after that.

Waking Up


When I woke up a young nurse was sitting right up against my bed and she was looking really closely at my face while she fingered a simple crucifix around her neck. She said, “They said you was dead. Where was you?” I remember recognizing that her grammar was wrong, but I didn’t have enough experience then to recognize it as Irish syntax. I had no idea what to say to her so I just held her hand.

This collection of experiences led me to a deep curiosity regarding the notion of “consciousness.” I now knew it was possible for the body to die and then come back to life, but where was the “alive” part stored while the body was dead? I asked my parents, doctors, even a friend’s father who was a minister, but no one could offer me any kind of useful definition of what me or my consciousness was.

Fortunately, five year olds can be extremely clear-headed and practical and so before long I somehow realized that sleep represented a change in consciousness. I resolved to learn more by catching myself going through this shift. Every night, I lay in bed determined to be—to some degree—awake for this change. I’m not sure if it took three months or a year, but by practicing it every single night I eventually managed to stumble into… something.

The First Time


I recall only very specific details of that first dream. It took place outside my parents home on a warm summer day when the lawn needed mowing. I was on the front sidewalk with my red Mustang bike with the chopper handle bars and the banana seat, when I suddenly realized I was dreaming. The reason the details of the dream aren’t as clear as they often were and are is because the sense of being dream-awake was so incredibly strong that I was entirely focused on that. At first I simply noticed that something was “different,” but I couldn’t tell what. Then I remembered I had gone to bed and done my usual routine of trying to stay awake through the falling-asleep process. But how did I get here, in front of the house with my bike?

Eventually I started wandering around the yard just looking at things. Frankly, I wasn’t really sure what to do now that I was conscious “in” a dream. Over several weeks I “woke up” in my dreams every night. Over time I got bolder and bolder, first doing things my mother told me not to do (like ride my bike around the block across the street), and eventually I tried things that seemed impossible. I jumped super high. I ran super fast. I made baseballs curve into my glove when my hand-thrown pop flys went awry.

By the time I hit my early teens one of my favourite dreams was to climb into a sports-car and fly it down a main street near our house, slaloming between the lamp posts with my tail-lights glowing like space-age afterburners. I could go canoeing in Europe. I could visit a rock star in Beverly Hills. I could jump hundreds of feet, know kung fu, fly like a bird, or even play guitar (while in the waking world I was a drummer who only wanted to play guitar). I could become a dragon, or a cat or a different version of myself. For many years this was a constant source of joy and entertainment. Before long I was being teased by my brothers and sisters for foregoing Happy Days or M*A*S*H to go to bed before my bedtime just so I could go dreaming.

Eventually the experiences got so common that I lost interest. I became more fascinated to see where the dreams would take me if I just relaxed and let them run their own course. I didn't have to worry. I remember the movie Jaws being so scary that I couldn’t get to sleep, but after I was asleep I never had to worry about nightmares because I could always leave anywhere I wasn’t comfortable. To this day I’ve only had a few bad dreams and even those were ones I permitted to unfold. I’ve certainly never had anything I’d call a “nightmare.”


I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly,
  or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.


Chuang Tse

It was only recently that I found myself wondering more about the transition period itself. How did one get from this one state of consciousness to this other state? Like when I was young, I resolved to watch myself closely to see what I could learn. I was quite surprised that it only took about a week and a half before I had a very clear sensation of what it was to “change consciousness” from wakefulness to sleep.

I would liken the transition to walking on a mixture of cobblestones and those large, wandering stepping stones like the ones that often make up pathways in Zen gardens. The difference was, as I walked, the solid stones of my waking life slowly gave way to the more ethereal ones of the dream world. As I continued to move forward, there were fewer and fewer “waking life” stones and more and more “dream life” ones until I was totally in the alternate reality of my dream. And I realized then that I had unconsciously been taking this very walk every time I fell asleep for my entire life. The only difference now was that my dream-me remembered my awake-me.

Since this was my first real study of my dreaming since my life-changing experience in 2001, I found I had a new perspective on an old ability. I suddenly realized that my waking and sleeping lives were not as different as I had once believed.

How To Use It


My experiments in my dream life had told me that I could do whatever I believed I could do. I could steer my life in any way I wanted, from getting along better with my siblings to flying high over the city with nothing but a t-shirt and shorts for an aircraft. Meanwhile my 2001 experience had shown me that I was in much more control of my waking life than I had ever dreamed possible. I realized that my consciousness brought to life both of these worlds and both of these versions of me. And I knew if I stayed rooted in that awareness I could assume greater control over the direction of both my waking and dreaming identities. I might not have figured out how to fly without a plane in my waking life (yet), but I could certainly change how I related to my family.

Hovering over my ego like an observer, I could now tell that little “me” to do all sorts of things I found challenging or “impossible” previously. My family isn’t one for displays of affection and yet suddenly I found myself being able to tell any family member or friend that I loved them. I could get along with people that were previously vexing. I could stop feeling insecure and conjure confidence instead. I may not have been able to detect any affect to my physical world (other than my own health), but I certainly seemed to have much more control of my mental-emotional life.
You are now in control of your life. You see, the ego is never in control.
The ego is controlled by wishes for comfort and convenience on the part
of the body, by demands of the mind, and by outbursts of the emotions.
But the higher nature controls the body and the mind and the emotions.
I can say to my body, "Lie down there on that cement floor and go to sleep,"
and it obeys. I can say to my mind, "Shut out everything else and concentrate
on this job before you," and it's obedient. I can say to my emotions,
"Be still, even in the face of this terrible situation," and they are still.
It's a different way of living. The philosopher Thoreau wrote: If a man
does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps he hears
a different drummer. And now you are following a different drummer
--the higher nature instead of the lower.

Peace Pilgrim

Dreaming a Better Life Into Being


Now that I live virtually stress free, with no lasting ill feelings toward anyone or any thing, I feel liberated and free. I learn faster, enjoy things more, and in general I am drinking in much much more of life than I ever have. With that accomplished I have now resolved to work at impacting the physical world. I am employing intentional thinking to test the impact my thoughts have on the slowest form of spiritual energy; the physical world.

I’m not sure where this will lead but I will keep you posted. In the meantime, I hope you too will join me in taking greater control over your life experience. While we might need some negative contrast to help us find our way, we really can overwhelmingly enjoy our lives regardless of its outside circumstances. And in doing so, we give ourselves the greatest chances to affect and change those outside circumstances.

In the end I suspect my next realization will be when I realize how to not just appreciate, but how to adapt what I perceive as the “outside world.” I’m confident this will happen when I have a stronger knowing that the very outside that I wish to affect, is really just another manifestation of my inside world—much like the dreams.

In waking life and in dreams I still must face what the universe sends my way. But by being clear that it is all just an aspect of my true infinite self, I can take these experiences that get categorized as “good” or “bad” and instead turn them into the stepping stones that will lead me to even greater understanding and an even greater connection to the universe often referred to as “God.”


Sweet dreams.


Enjoy your day.


peace. s
Posted on Friday, August 1, 2008 by Scott McPherson

No comments (Add your own)

Add a New Comment

Enter the code you see below:
code
 

Comment Guidelines: No HTML is allowed. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Thanks.