Dream Machine

Paraphrased from a talk by Thich Nhat Hanh:

“When you look at a cloud you think of the cloud as a being; and later on when the cloud becomes the rain, you don’t see the cloud anymore and you say the cloud is not there. You describe the cloud as non-being. But if you look deeply, you can see the cloud in the rain; and that is why it’s impossible for a cloud to die. A cloud can become rain, snow, or ice; but it cannot become nothing. And that is why the notion of death cannot be applied to reality. There is a transformation - there is a continuation - but you cannot say that there is death; because in your mind, to die means from something, you suddenly become nothing. From someone, you suddenly become no one. and so the notion of death cannot apply to reality - whether to a cloud or to a human being. The Buddha did not die; the Buddha only continued by his sangha and by his dharma, and you can touch the Buddha in the here and the now. And that is why ideas like being born, dying, coming and going, being and non-being should be removed by the practice of looking deeply; and when you can remove these notions you are free and you have non-fear. Non-fear is the true foundation of great happiness.

When you hold your glass and you drink your tea you can see that you are drinking clouds. And if you look into a river, you see nothing but clouds. And if you eat your ice cream in mindfulness and wisdom, you see that you are eating clouds also.”

Hindu scholars thought of it as a game of form perpetrated on the world by the gods. They felt there had to be an explanation for the multiplicity of very, very similar forms throughout the world, both in human and animal form. Thinking this way lowers the importance of the individual lifeform by necessity, I guess. It causes me to pause when seeing a dead animal in the road while driving to work; watching the dogs get older and trying to push thoughts of their possible mortality further from my mind; or making the mistake of watching the world news for five minutes and seeing how many people died today, either by their own hand or someone else’s. It makes me feel unusual - am I supposed to care more about some lifeforms than others? Why do I get so defensive of mammals when I drive to work and kill dozens of insects every morning through the sheer impact of my vehicle moving down the road? Is there a difference? Is my conflict over this matter part of the game itself?

It’s strange.

For a long time I tried so hard to give up the ’self’ - the mind-created fictional definition that my ego has created and continues to polish, refine, and propagate. I think I shared P’s fear that loss of ’self’ would include loss of edge - of joy of living, of a sense of humor, the enjoyment of an occasional humorous, cynical or sardonic moment. I don’t think that’s how it is anymore. I think the trying, striving, wishing and reaching are antithetical to truly letting go of all this stuff, even if what you’re reaching for is ‘enlightenment’ or ‘presence’. Newsflash - you don’t reach for presence, you just do it. It’s all there is - right now. It’s like asking a tree or a robin what their plans are for next Monday afternoon.

I was on a long car trip with someone as we made our way toward an unspecified location. We drove through small southern towns, but it was snowing and messy and everyone seemed aggravated. We finally made it to a large restaurant with common seating where I and a group of people I was meeting were introduced to the rest of the patrons as persons who had finished some sort of quest or challenge to be here. We were supposed to receive something in return but it wasn’t forthcoming.

I’m standing in a dimly-lit dining room of a crowded restaurant. There’s a device in front of me with a large screen that I can use to create animated video and music montages. I start making one on the fly using the faces of people in the restaurant. I finish in a couple of minutes and start playing it back. Very few people are paying attention but they seem to like it. The main character in the montage is a middle-aged woman who looks like a banker. The woman’s also present in the room and I start to feel worried since I made her look haggard and ugly in the video. She doesn’t say anything about it, though - she just keeps sitting at her table.

I was at a resort of some kind - a mountain spa or the like. For some reason the people I was with had invited the jazz guitarist John Scofield to accompany us. I walked up to the vehicle they came in, and saw John in the back of the truck. We started talking, and for some reason I said that I thought for the longest time that he was the worst person in the world. His face changed immediately and I started to verbally backtrack as fast as I could because I could see that he was infuriated and insulted. I kept apologizing but he wasn’t having any of it. I offered to shake hands at the conclusion of my stammered apologies, but he just stared at me. Everyone went off to try and enjoy themselves but I was consumed by guilt and remorse about insulting John. Stronger, though, was my horror at being someplace with someone who had such a low opinion of me - though such an opinion was deserved. It was an abject and absurd sense of insecurity. I haven’t felt insecure in my normal life in so long that I didn’t know what to do with the feeling.

We were leaving a house where we had been staying. I walked up to the door and opened it a crack. There was a man standing on the other side who said he wanted to let us know that people were aware we were going. He gave me some clothes that he had purchased for a job at my workplace. The logo was embroidered on the back pocket of the khakis he gave me. He wanted me to return them for some reason but I knew I wasn’t going to do it. As we left I looked up in the sky and the clouds were blowing by at hundreds of miles an hour.

I dreamed I was in some sort of school as the year or term was drawing to a close. Everyone else had vacated the building because of some unusual circumstance, but two friends and I stayed. When we finally walked out, the entire population of the school was standing in a big field at the top of a slight rise above the building. Everyone - including ourselves - was in formal wear. As my two friends (one man and one woman) and I walked forward toward the group, a voice over a loudspeaker asked ‘who would agree to be paired with our heroes?’ My companions were paired up right away, but it took a moment before a woman walked out of the crowdd and said she would accompany me. It was my friend K. from high school. She seemed shorter and was wearing some sort of strange pantsuit, but she was smiling and seemed pleased to see me. We joined everyone else dancing slowly in the field and talked for a moment. I told her that I didn’t see her before or I would have said something, etc., but she didn’t mind. We chatted about the twenty years that had passed and other topics, and after awhile we were silent. She looked me in the eyes for a moment and rested her chin on my shoulder and didn’t say anything more. I felt weird then - sad or something, but peaceful.

I was attending a week-long class that consisted completely of mathematics. At the end of one day, I was standing outside a building in my old hometown. My mother was there and kept asking me why I was taking such a long math class. After a while I got tired of listening to her, so I got in a car and drove away, telling her I’d be right back to pick her up. It was night-time and I could see a small bit of slush on the road reflected in the orange glow of the streetlights. I drove a couple of miles up the road and took a left, thinking that I’d be heading downtown and could double back. Instead, I ended up in a neighborhood not far from where I lived in Portsmouth. It was still night and everything seemed abandoned. I kept driving around, but I knew I was never going back.

There’s a lot more that flew away, but here’s what I remember. P. and I are in a restaurant having a discussion/argument with a couple of people. One of the people is a woman who is angry with P. for not taking care of the woman’s kids for some amount of time. There’s another person there who’s defending P. I’m laying on my stomach on the floor of the restaurant telling the woman that she’s stupid, etc. She turns to me and says that I shouldn’t be interrupting them, which makes me angry so I start yelling obscenities at the woman. The more I yell the funnier it is for some reason, and I start to laugh.