In Your Dreams

In Your Dreams

I wander in the city with time on my hands, wondering what will happen. By chance I stumble into a Hindu temple as festivities are beginning. A grand ballroom is decorated with paper flowers of every hue over a large canopy at the front of the room. I sit down among the others and prepare to be amazed.

Hundreds of people, women in saris, men in dark suits, chant melodically as a man and woman beneath the colorful canopy light incense before low tables of fruit. They bow to the left and to the right while an officiating personage ties their wrists together with a red thread.

I realize I have become part of someone’s wedding ceremony, the only indigenous person present, and dressed in jeans. Yet no one seems concerned about this. Upon the wall is a photo of the temple guru, cheerful and benevolent though naked to the waist but for a bright red bindi.


Here is a dream in the making - a dream within the dream! The wedding, with all it portends. The grand beginning, so myth and fairytale worthy! It is a relief to know I can walk out of their dream at any time.


Walking out of my own dream is a completely different story, however. The connections, meanings, duties, obligations, lists (things completed, things still to do), the grand accomplishments, the abysmal failures, the grieving, the hoping, the longing, the regretting, the variegated emotions with all their ceaselessly shifting convictions, addictions and restrictions.

It plays so well, that dream, so completely, penetrating into the psyche, searching out every possible route into the heart of madness. One feels devoured by it, overpowered by its chaotic, nonsensical plot turns.

“Look, look! Listen and feel!” it cries. “All this! All this and more! Here is your life, all that there is and all that there isn’t! Let your senses run riot with it, forsake your mind and submit to the drama of dreaming!”

And yet the spirit breathes gently with the wind and speaks with a voice so quiet that the boisterous world cannot drown it out. One touch from this spirit and wordless weeping begins, sorrow for a lost love remembered from the eons.

And so I forsake the temple merriment before food is served, lest a speech be requested from the strange stranger who hangs around when he can’t understand a word.

My steps continue toward the swollen river upon which natives recreate. I find a quiet spot on a floating boat dock irradiated by the presence of mostly naked bodies (these without the offsetting benefit of a bindi) that are soaking up sun and suds on the Willamette. Canadian geese swim inches from my dangling hand, apparently curious.

The spirit calls again and I feel a cavern forming around my heart. It quivers with ache, like a zombie that yearns to awaken into normal life at last.

“Let go,” the spirit says. “Just let go.”