Dreams and their corollaries

Dream of mother, Sept 2018

9/16/2018

Eunice Blanchard Poethig died on Palm Sunday, March 25 2018 at 7:00pm. Erika and I were with her. Vida (yes), a Filipina nurse, had arrived to take her "vitals." Vida couldn't get a pulse, so she was shifting the medical equipment from one side of the bed to the other. Then Vida stopped, peered, whispered, "she is not breathing." Mom had been actively dying. But this, this was not what I'd expected. Eunice was, then she was not.

The after-wards is dream-like. Tears, calls to siblings, to dad on his way down from his Independent Living apartment. We dressed our mother in clothes that Johanna had selected, laid her out on the hospital bed she'd kept trying to escape. Dad sat beside her, head bowed and held her hand. The nurses arrived to mark her departure. They called hospice, who contacted the Illinois Cremation Society. These are the protocols of death. My mother's body stayed warm, but turned a kind of caramel white. Her death grimace softened. Joy, her minister, arrived to help us pray, and sing, and say a bodily goodbye. I climbed onto the hospital bed to lie beside my mother's body for the last time. Joy, bless her, finally went home. A cheerful hospice nurse arrived. She left. The Cremation society arrived. A man wheeled in gurney and a velvet casing. He and a nurse shifted mom's body onto the gurney and gently, with great care, he enclosed her in the case, leaving her face for last. He wheeled her away. It was almost midnight There are so many tasks after death -- social security calls, emptying her room, redistribution, picking up the urn. Grief is exhausting. The next day and weeks blur. I returned to California to continue teaching the semester. While others had an inkling of her presence, I couldn't feel her, so mired in the entanglement of her dementia and excruciating physicality of her last months alive.

I've had several years of dream drought. She arrived last week.
In the dream we siblings are clearing various rooms, selecting, packing, giving away. (We have also closed down dad's Independent Living apartment in Chicago and settled him near Scott in Philadelphia, and this dream closing felt a little like that.) I am lying in bed in last room. Mother comes in and stands at the left corner of the bed. She is tall, younger, placid. Has she been coming down the hall? I'm surprised, "mom, I didn't know you were here!" She is now at the right corner of the bed, whisking her arm briskly, back and forth. I wake.

When I am ready to leave, will she come for me like that: Softly, wordless, gesturing, "I am not like this anymore."?

Illumination

7/16/2016

The wind chimes clatter,
you look up,
a sudden & strange light
breaks from behind your eyes,
you begin to talk,
and pick at the chip in your coffee cup
til you realize, surprised, that
your lover's voice is violet.

When snared like a lynx,
you wrench free,
gasp like a fish thrown back
weeping silently
and unashamed
while her breathing beside you
reminds you what is warm and plain.

You can return,
but by another way
to our place in the Laniakea,
to the space
where, deep
as a deep sown seed
your life unfurls
while you turn, restless
as the dark earth stirs
under the furrow:
a sweet bright green.

This poem, 1979, lost and forgotten, and revised just returned tonight. So maybe the furrow...

Horse heaven, Jaguar Heaven and Milagros

2/20/2016

I came on this 2009 journal segment and its value has ripened, so I post it in cyberspace.
---

Thurs, Feb 5 Chicago, 2009, visiting the parents in Hyde Park
Read Inana’s songs, Sumerian goddess last night.
A sleepless night in apt 614. I pray, half awake, conjure up a half-dream sense of celestial power. Stars appear in black immense cosmic space. A creature appears, Milagros, a small figure in the midst of dark, a little like Mary Poppins. She channels star energy. She has a starry heaven metallic hat. I can draw it. Feels like pink, light circuitry.

That day, the flight Chicago-Oakland is cancelled in Denver. I think of Milagros when my chest is anxious and tight, and feel a distinct warmth. It really surprises me. So I talk to her when I’m afraid I’m going to have to go into SFO at 11pm and Customer Service find a formerly non-existent seat on a United flight into Oakland. Milagros my practical angel. Thank you! Arrived in Oakland and got to Jo and Chris by 9pm without my luggage.

Friday, Feb 6 in Oakland, Johanna's TV room
Dream: Feast of nuns (Hebrew not Catholic)
I was preparing an important dish. Planned to teach it to people who would teach to large classes. It was a special flat meal, like quiche, with special ingredients. There was something very unusual, rare, maybe magical about it. We were in an old stone house, as in Europe (I don't usually dream of European landscapes). The five people arrive together instead of their designated times, I'd scheduled everyone too close.

Delfina one of the 5. She says "I looked it up" and shows a white piece of paper. At the top is a line of Hebrew nuns, vavs and zayns. (I was learning the Hebrew letters in Chicago). I can't write them here, but like this (don't know how many in the line). I noticed that the first was a nun and was violet.
    111111111

    I thought: yes, these are the symbols for the ingredients in the order to be added. It was simpler than all the elaborate directions in my recipe. I wasn't certain we were going to use it because there was so much going on.
    But the image kept appearing - 1111111

    I think there was more to the dream, but can't recall it anymore. This was the most powerful part of the dream.

Feb 7 on way back to Watsonville
Get home in the rain, go off at Exit Rio del Mar to park and write in the car in the rain. Thinking of nephew Sammy with aspbergers as a song comes on the radio about loving. Sammy might have a hard time finding a young woman to love him. Overwhelmed, I pull off the hiway to cry. God please help him, praying pretty hard, and weeping on the steering wheel. Then, out of the blue, sense of Milagros, a quick bright image of a fairy who arrives after the curse, to give the saving last blessing. It’s a clear feeling, full of grace and love. The prayer was answered even as I prayed it. Sammy will be OK.

Feb 9
In the night I hear the words: Horse heaven, Jaguar Heaven
DREAM 1:
Young brown boy is taking me on his vehicle (sometimes a motorbike, sometimes a bicycle) to get a horse heaven (horse latitude?) Tee shirt. He’s peddling fast because it may be closing time. We get to the market – lots of men (Filipino?) outside, hanging around, playing cards mostly, drinking maybe coffee. They look up. One man in particular, the boy asks, “Lo-o?” which I understand as ‘closed’? (but in Khmer it means beautiful, so I’m not sure what I think it means.)
The man nods, but gestures to go back. He’s in charge. “Sa likod,” I ask? I think in the dream that we are speaking Tagalog.
We go down into a gloomy textile open market. Most stalls are closed in the low light. Feels deserted.
On the way, I take out $20: two crisp $10 (round trip) and one $5 for a tip. I can’t decide. If I give it to him now will he still take me back?
We get to the back stall of textiles that is still open. There a room in the back with tall shelves filled with merchandise.
There’s still time. The shopkeeper, the guardian, has what we want on the table in front. But then we move back to where there are three really smart people, self-confidently aware of their star power. The line is full now.

I wake up, I think: horse latitude?
Either of two subtropical atmospheric high-pressure belts that encircle the Earth around latitudes 30°–35° N and 30°–35° S and that generate light winds and clear skies. Because they contain dry, subsiding air, they produce arid climates in the areas below them (i.e. the Sahara). The Southern Hemisphere, which has more water area than the Northern, has the more continuous belt of subsiding air. The belts contain several separate high-pressure centres and shift a few degrees away from the equator in summer.

DREAM 2: Milagros finds me a seat
In a lecture hall, a woman is talking from the dais. I have a seat up near the front to show I’m interested and will do well.
But I'm sharing a single seat with a short woman in a beige yellow suit. I get up to give her the seat – its not worth it to sit this way – she falls backward headfirst. I get up and walk down the wide middle aisle back to the seat I first had, but now it’s full. There is nowhere to sit. I see that the lecture hall is now filled up. I don’t care if I’m walking in full view, I’m looking for a seat.

Then look over to the right and see a woman in a hat with a star on it. She gestures that she has a seat for me. It’s in the back. When I get over to her, she says to me conspiratorially, “I saved it for you.”

Wake up.

     x
------- -------
------- -x----- - my first seat
------- ------
------- ------
------- -------
-------- xxxxxx - lots of people sitting, no room
--------- --------
----xx--- ------- - where we sit

When I do a dream reflection on this dream, I realize that the woman in the hat is Milagros.

not become the fox

11/8/2015

"Ah, the emotions of supernatural beings reflect the meaning of human existence!" Jenshi chuan, (Miss Ren") a T'ang folktale. 1.

Jesse the buddhist santa cruz therapist listens, reflects. She helps to pan for gold. All the nuggets say: time to go. Time's up from the administration dungeon, a profession I no longer fathom, the classroom, though I (sometimes) love the time there. Time to seek integration. Why lingering? There's too much to do, so I keep staying. She listens, and at the end of our last session, she becomes quite still. She leans back, then forward. She says, "do not become the fox."

I nod and shift on the soft couch, not quite comprehending. The room is warm and dark. I check the lithograph of birds above her head. I imagine Kitsune no Yomeiri, the eerie fox wedding in Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurasawa's film Dreams.

No, not that fox, the wild fox, the fox of fools she means. The monk who becomes a wild fox for 500 lifetimes because he mistakes the question of cause and effect. I don't know this fox, or how to follow the warning: Take Notice.

What's the story? I google wild fox koan and find many. I like Japanese Zen master Dōgen Zenji's wild fox koan.

When Zen Master Daichi of Hyakujo-zan mountain in Koshu gives informal instruction, an old man is generally present. He always listens to the Dharma along with the monks, and when the assembly retires, the old man also retires. Then unexpectedly one day he does not leave. The Master eventually asks him, "What person is this, standing before me?"

The old man answers, "I am not a person. In the past age of Kasyapa Buddha, used to live [as master] on this mountain. Once a practitioner asked me, ‘Do even people in the state of great practice fall into cause and effect, or not?’ I answered, ‘They do not fall into cause and effect." Since then I have fallen into the body of a wild fox for five hundred lives. Now I beg you, Master, to say for me a word of transformation. I long to be rid of the body of a wild fox." Then he asks, "Do even people in the state of great practice fall into cause and effect, or not?"

The Master says, "Do not be unclear about cause and effect." At these words the old man immediately realizes the great realization. He does prostrations and says, "I am already rid of the body of a wild fox, and would like to remain on the mountain behind this temple. Dare I ask the Master to perform for me a monk’s funeral ceremony."

The Master orders the supervising monk to strike the block and to tell the assembly, "After the meal, we will see off a deceased monk."

All the monks discuss this among themselves, saying, "The whole community is at ease and there is no sick person in the Nirvana Hall. What is the reason for this?" After the meal, the Master is seen leading the monks to the foot of a rock on the mountain behind the temple, and picking out a dead fox with a stick. They cremate it according to the formal method. In the evening the Master gives formal preaching in the Dharma Hall and discusses the preceding episode.

Obaku then asks, "The man in the past gave a mistaken answer as a word of transformation, and fell into the body of a wild fox for five hundred lives. If he had not made any mistake at any moment, what would he have become?"

The Master says, "Step up here. I will tell you."

Obaku finally steps up and gives the Master a slap. The Master claps his hands and laughs, and says, ‘"You have just expressed that a foreigner’s beard is red, but it is also a fact that a red-beard is a foreigner."
(This is a reference to the first Chinese patriarch Bodhihdharma, who brought the transmission of Zen "from the west" )

What are the multiple moral and contradictory messages of this koan? Why a fox? Why not to become a fox?

There are countless Ch'an/Zen medieval commentaries on the wild fox koan. Dogen offers several treatises on Hyakujo and the Wild Fox. He first gives a conventional interpretation of the koan, but towards the end of his life, he shifts towards a more imaginative and supernatural interpretation. Why did Dogen change his tune?

I go to Hein (1999) to understand these fox-persons in the koan. In Japanese lore, foxes are demonic (the nine-tailed fox) and shape-shifting tricksters. One can be possessed by the fox. They populate folklore and popular texts. (Bathgate 2004), so there actually is a connection between my fox wedding and jesse's wild fox. Hein reviews the sermon of Chinese abbot Pai-chang Huai-hai. In this sermon, the non-human monk confesses to fei-jen, the term for spirit possession in East Asian folklore, indicative of the six realms of transmigration. The fox/monk is liberated by the "turning word" of the abbot who responds that even the enlightened must submit to causation. Now liberated, his fox corpse is found on the temple grounds and he is given a monk's funeral at the abbot's instruction. The fox, Hein offers, is a door between realms, both philosophical and folkloric. In this first rendition, Hein says that the koan might be less about metaphysics of causality, as it seems to be, but rather about supernaturalism and ritualism. This is about the fox-monk funeral that the abbot conducts. You know already that I follow Dogen on this, from a formal reflection on causation to an interest on metamophosis and ritual action.

And why does Pai-chang receive a blow from his student after successfully cremating the old monk? The first of a Zen ritual of insubordination. A wake up?

Was jesse boxing my ears? Am I already a fox? Have I been a fox for these many years, possessed by the mistake of causation? In Turning Word, James Ishmael Ford reminds us, We are what we do. Reflecting as a UU/Buddhist minister on this koan, he says, "whatever we are, unless we notice and take corrective action, we just become more of it."

Shift, regret, act. Now.

1. Heine, Steven, Putting The ``Fox'' Back in The ``Wild Fox Kōan'': The Intersection of Philosophical and Popular Religious Elements in The Ch'an/Zen Kōan Tradition, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies Vol. 56, No. 2 (Dec., 1996), pp. 257-317 see also Heine, Steven, Shifting Shape, Shaping Text: Philosophy and Folklore in the Fox Kōan, University of Hawaii Press, 1999.

Citation
Bathgate, Michael, The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Culture: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities, Routledge, 2004

hummingbirds

10/25/2014

0 Comments

Hummingbird hassles eagle.

Oakland in the 1990s, sweating out my dissertation on a computer that unravels each day's work. Some secret worm has burrowed in my hard drive. It's like writing on quicksand. I type for eight hours, and the next day nothing is saved, but today it sticks. Like Penelope secretly unraveling her day's weaving each night. Does this misery ever end? I walk to the Oakland Catholic cemetery, a mile from our house. Victoria and I go regularly. I remember it as a blue clear day, the grave stones gray against the bright grass and spiky pine, the divine wanders among the dead and the humans leave you to yourself.

Hiccuping with tears. Nearly seven years. Am I going to get through this? Give me a sign.

And YHWH, in a good mood offers a "Gideon moment": Test me. Now, I like the Gideon story in Judges 6. Gideon is no respecter of persons. The angel interrupts his secret threshing to recruit him for a manly job; take down the Midianites. Gideon basically says, "Pardon me, but we didn't make this problem." After a series of tests for Gideon, Gideon tests God: wet wool on dry ground, wet ground and dry wool. What's it to God? Not like parting the Red Sea. But then Gideon has to complete his impossible task. YHWH says it's a breeze. Seems more like a little league playing the Kansas City Royals (world series tonight). Gideon wins. But I'm not thinking that when I say, "If things be OK, I want to see an eagle and a hummingbird together." After that big declaration, I look around sheepishly. Think: this is the fairytale of three wishes. You always fuck up.

Which, in a nicer way, is what my mother says when she hears this story later: Don't test God. And she shoots me a strong look that I interpret as, How did I raise this one.

The good news is that my Gideon moment stops my tearful petition. It's dusk and as the light turns rosen, a conference of birds rise up in the tangled bushes that border the cemetery. They twitter in gorgeous chaotic harmony. It's enough, I think, this bird anthem; it's answer enough. And up from the memory, I hear, first one line, then another, a song I composed in my evangelical Minnesota days. A Malcolm Solbakken hymn Kari would love. I sing it to myself, surprised, but glad to remember it.

Then home, had supper with Victoria. To bed.

And the next morning, when I looked out our window: a wild band of hummingbirds whizz through the garden. They circle up and down, in a crazy abandon. All morning, they buzz the air. I watch them, breathless. When I sit down to write one flies up and peers through the window. I get it, I see it!

Years later, at the Wisconsin lake, the bald eagle sits in the high branch of a white pine facing our island, I kayak out to get closer and disturb a hummingbird nest set in the dark of the lower trunk. They buzz out to shoo me away.

For years, I called this a miracle. Now, I wonder about the Gideon-God pact. What was my part of the bargain? Jesse says: beware that you honor what you've been given, and not become the fox.

0 Comments

Balaam the dreamer

10/25/2014

Been interested in Balaam, mostly because of the donkey and angel. See below for a post of my sermon on this.

But as I prepared, I learned more about Balaam.

Who is Balaam? A mesopotamian soothsayer who “sees” into the future, usually through dreams.

Balaam arrives at a critical point in Numbers. The book itself has been organized into five parts. Let's just use Unger's three geographical divisions coupled to two units of journeys:
(1) Israel in the Desert of Sinai (1:1 – 10:10)
(2) From Sinai to Kadesh (10:11 – 12:16)
(3) In the Kadesh area (13:1 – 20:21)
(4) Detour to avoid Edom (20:22 – 21:35)
(5) Israel in the plains of Moab (22:1 – 36:13).

The little story I love best - his trip on the donkey and encounter with the angel - is set inside the Balaam oracles that occur from Chpts 22-24, usually called the Book of Balaam. Hackett indicates that "Balaam is a diviner, a form of intermediary apparently acceptable in court circles in preexilic Judah, as elsewhere in the ANE [Ancient Near East]; [. . .] In those verses generally called E, however, we see in Balaam a typical Yahweh-prophet, one who can only speak the word that Yahweh puts in his mouth, a phrase reflecting the paradigmatic description of a prophet in Deut 18:18.” ( Hackett, 1992, p 569).

A wonderful discovery at Tell Deir ˁAllā, on the Ammonite site of the Jabbok River in the late 1960s produced plaster inscriptions now called Book of Balaam. This Aramaic/ Canaanite the text dated 800 BCE refers to Balaam's visions (or Bileam). He is a “seer of the gods” (ḥzh ˀlhn). Here is an excerpt.

The gods came to him at night.
And he beheld a vision in accordance with El's utterance.
They said to Balaam, son of Beor:
"So will it be done, with naught surviving.
No one has seen [the likes of] what you have heard!"
Balaam Reports his Vision to His Intimates.
Balaam arose on the morrow;
He summoned the heads of the assembly to him,
And for two days he fasted, and wept bitterly.
Then his intimates entered into his presence,
and they said to Balaam, son of Beor,
"Why do you fast, and why do you weep?"
Then he said to them: "Be seated, and I will relate to you what the Shaddai gods have planned,
And go, see the acts of the god!"
Balaam Describes the Celestial Vision and Its Aftermath in the Land
"The gods have banded together;
The Shaddai gods have established a council,
And they have said to [the goddess] Shagar:
'Sew up, close up the heavens with dense cloud,
That darkness exist there, not brilliance;
Obscurity and not clarity;i.9So that you instill dread in dense darkness.
And - never utter a sound again!'i.10It shall be that the swift and crane will shriek insult to the eagle,
And a nest of vultures shall cry out in response.
The stork, the young of the falcon and the owl,
The chicks of the heron, sparrow and cluster of eagles;
Pigeons and birds, [and fowl in the s]ky.
And a rod [shall flay the cat]tle;
Where there are ewes, a staff shall be brought.
Hares - eat together!
Free[ly feed], oh beasts [of the field]!
And [freely] drink, asses and hyenas!"

Is he a sorcerer or a diviner? Sorcery, or keshafim, was banned and punished by death is Israel (Deut 18:10). In Mesopotamian laws it is also a capital crime. Divination, nahash, involved reading omens, casting lots, interpreting oil or water in cpy, terafim - was practiced by the Levite priests who threw the urim and thurim. Balaam is considered nahash (23:23, 24:1) and kesem (22:7, 23:23). This form of divination could be tolerated in Israel since it wasn’t incompatible with monotheism.

So, turning to the Oracles of Balaam in Numbers 22-24, we have Balak King of Moab worried about the ways this immigrant force the Israelies have plowed through neighboring territories. Following protocol, he hires Balaam the seer to curse them. Balaam tells him he will consult El about this, so he dreams and El or YHWH tells him he can't curse the Israelites because they are blessed. Balaam says he can only do what El prescribes, so he can't curse the Israelites. Balak, increasingly agitated, thinks Balaam is bargaining for a higher divination fee. So he sends messengers a second time with more gifts. Balaam goes back to dreaming. He receives the same answer (no), but then El permits him to meet Balak if he repeats what El tells him to say. It is structured like this:

Numbers 23: 7-10 – Balaam sees YHWH won't curse the Israelites
Second oracle (23:18-24) Balaam learns YHWH is resolved to bless Israel.
Third oracle (23: 3-9) blessing comes to a climax – God originates curse or blessing, and God’s word cannot be revoked (23:20).
Balaam renounces divination
Fourth oracle (24:15-19) Balaam infused with divine spirit, prophesies that Moab will be dominated by Israel.

Like the jewel in the egg, we have the story I will tell next.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hackett, J.A., Balaam, Anchor Bible Dictionary, New York: Doubleday, 1992, 569-572.

Levine, B.A. "The Deir 'Alla Plaster Inscriptions", in: W.W. Hallo (ed.), Context of Scripture, vol.2 (2003), 140-145.

Oppenheim, A. L. The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East, Philadelphia, 1956

Unger, M.F. Unger’s Bible Dictionary, 3rd ed.; Chicago: Moody Press, 1966, 799.

See this collection of dreams in the bible

focus, flow, flourish

6/1/2014

Gendlin's Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams helped me, an undergrad caught up in the rip tide of U of Chicago. He taught in the Psychology dept and I now wish I'd taken a class from him. But I was consumed by the auto-hypnosis experiments of the charismatic Erika Fromm in those years, traveling like Billy Pilgrim through self-hypnotic time zones, turning myself into a tomato, growing wings. So recently arrived as a "mk" from Philippines, the transition was its own awful Wonderland. And I was slowly dissolving, besieged by nightly terrors. My body stitched by worms, decaying in old blood, teeth popping out. Some days I woke so depressed my body ached.

Gendlin's book was practical. His method gave me questions to approach the nightmares. But it wasn't only the questions that helped; it was his description of Focusing: the body's affirmation though a buzzy, shifting feeling when I'd found the right interpretation. My body was willing to reveal the riddle that the unconscious hid. Whenever I named it (Rumpelstiltskin!) a surge of energy surged forth. Many years later, Gendlin promotes "Thinking at the Edge" through his Focusing Institute. "Focusing is the murky edge…" he says here. It's worth a look. That murky edge is the limit situation, the place in ourselves that is inchoate. Our ability to focus helps us slog into the mud of our murk with a confidence that our intuition has its own GPS.

Which leads me to Flow. The wild red-haired Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, taught in our Common Core. You'd think I majored in psych. No. Betrothed to Anthropology. The impossible-to-spell genius was testing well being at that school where "fun goes to die." Flow, he says in this Ted talk, is a mode of self absorption that draws you into action and creativity. It strikes me as similar to the mindfulness that Ellen Langer has theorized about for several decades now. Mindfulness and flow restore the body-mind divide through the intuition and imagination to give us a more expansive way of being past our social instrumentality. They free us from the lock-down of our routinized life.

This growth of positive psychology is enlightening in an advanced capitalist society mired in debt, depression, and over-consumption, and now finally addressing its inequality. These vehicles for the royal road to well being might help us navigate past the old sign posts. Perhaps they can help us read the new ones. Because it feels, even from my sleepy chair on Almond drive, that we are on the juggernaut towards accelerating social change, economic stress, personal hardship, conflict, disaster, collapse.

One might wonder if focusing, flow and (let's add to this Seligman's flourishing) can teach us resilience.

As the Positive Psychology Center at Penn proposes:

Central to PRP is Ellis' Adversity-Consequences-Beliefs (ABC) model, the notion that our beliefs about events mediate their impact on our emotions and behavior. Through this model, students learn to detect inaccurate thoughts, to evaluate the accuracy of those thoughts, and to challenge negative beliefs by considering alternative interpretations. PRP also teaches a variety of strategies that can be used for solving problems and coping with difficult situations and emotions.

This is an elasticity we need with ever-increasing urgency. Avenues that encourage the expressive imagination, critical thought, and the ability to sustain deep reflection are worthy of our scattered attention.

blueberries

6/1/2014

Tues May 27
Dream shard

We've moved to a small courtyard with Japanese-style open rooms, like an extended L-shaped porch. (I can't imagine a room to the left.) The rooms are constructed from redwood; they are small, empty, but feel airy and spacious and meant for cushions. We're carrying our things there. And look, look! Blueberry bushes cluster along the periphery. Abundant, deep blue, I pluck some to eat. We have brought someone, and lay her down on the porch floor.

figure on the forehead

5/12/2014

May 9, 2014
This shard of last night's dream presents itself in the middle of the day.

Men and women stream out from a religious place - after a ceremony? They have figures marking their foreheads; I don't recall if the symbols are alike. I think of Shaivites or the prayer bruise of devout Muslims. One brown man turns to me with a radiant sly smile and I notice his symbol the most clearly. It is vaguely familiar- it has appeared in other dreams. Wish I could draw it here. Looks most like the symbol for Jupiter, but with three lines along the lower bar. It's tattooed on his forehead in black ink. Permanent, simpler.

Buddha's mother and her son's dreams

2/16/2014

Queen Māyā of Sakya (Māyādevī) conception dream

On a full moon night of a midsummer festival, Queen Māyā retired to her bedroom and fell into a deep sleep. In her dream, she was lifted by four devas (spirits) to Lake Anotatta in the white capped Himalayas. There, they bathed, perfumed and bedecked her with flowers. A white bull elephant clutching a white lotus flower in its trunk appeared and circumnambulated her three times. Then, he struck her right side and disappeared into her. The queen awoke in a blaze of energy and relayed the dream to the king. Since the elephant is a symbol of greatness, he summoned 64 brahmans who told him that his son would be a world conqueror or world renouncer.

Conception dreams are common throughout Buddhism and recorded in biographical literature of famous bodhisattvas and siddhas. Depictions of Queen Maya's dream are some of the earliest representations of Buddhism in iconography (Young, 2003, 167). Not to be outdone, the future mother of Mahaviras, Jain Queen Trishala is also visited by a white elephant in her conception dream. This is followed by thirteen auspicious dreams.  One could say much on the topic of conception here, how women's bodies require visitations from angels, elephants, lions, and goddesses (!) to announce - and impregnate women - for a holy boy. Young notes that the Hindu Palija takas are rich with the dreams of women (166).

Let us return to Queen Maya.

When she was nearly due, she travelled to a sacred grove near her parent's home. In Lumbini, when labor was upon her, she caught a blossoming branch of a tree and painlessly produced the child. (Like Maryam in Islamic tradition, holy trees -- and their spirits--assist the birthing woman.) The Flower Ornament Sutra depicts it thus:

As Lady Maya leaned against the holy fig tree, all the world rulers, gods and goddesses... and all the other beings... were bathed in the glorious radiance of Maya's body .... All the lights in the billion-world universe were eclipsed by Maya's light. The lights emanating from all her pores... pervaded everywhere, extinguishing all suffering... illuminating the universe (Shaw  1998).

A few days later, she was dead. (All previous mothers died after giving birth to Buddhas.) But she watched and instructed her son from the heavens. Buddha too can traverse these three realms.

Shakyamuni's five dreams

Siddhārtha Gautama's father, wife and aunt all share dreams portending his departure. Gautama himself has several dreams. In one, "He saw millions of beings carried away by the current of a river. He crossed this river and made a vessel to carry others across" (cf Young, 31). More famous are his five dreams before the world-trembling event of his enlightenment, itself so dream-like.

Young argues that Buddhists hold to an the activating potential of dreams. An example occurs in the jataka tale in the Divyavadana when Gautama Buddha as a Brahman in a previous meets Dipamkara, a former buddha who predicts his future buddhahood (1999, 26). Here, the young Gautama-as-Brahman has ten dreams (he drinks the great ocean, flies through the air, held the sun and moon, is the king's charioteer, saw ascetics, white elephants, geese, lions, a great rock and mountains). He takes them to an ascetic, but they cannot be interpreted. He learns that only Dipamkara the buddha can interpret his dreams. These dreams resonate with Queen Maya's conception dream, King Suddhodana's dream of his son's departure and Buddha's five dreams. Through these dreams, his own route to buddhahood is predicted and projected. And as we learn from the Divyavadana, only those with superior ability can correctly interpret dreams.

But let us know the five dreams and their interpretation:

Monks, before the Tathāgata, the Arahat, the Fully Enlightened One attained enlightenment, while he was still a bodhisatta, five great dreams appeared to him. What five?

He dreamt that this mighty earth was his great bedstead; the Himālaya, king of mountains, was his pillow; his left hand rested on the eastern sea, his right hand on the western sea; his two feet on the southern sea. This, monks, was the first dream that appeared to the Tathāgata while he was still a bodhisatta.

Again, he dreamt that from his navel arose a kind of grass called tiriyā and continued growing until it touched the clouds. This, monks, was the second great dream....

Again, he dreamt that white worms with black heads crawled on his legs up to his knees, covering them. This, monks, was the third great dream....

Again, he dreamt that four birds of different colours came from the four directions, fell at his feet and turned all white. This, monks, was the fourth great dream....

Again, he dreamt that he climbed up a huge mountain of dung without being soiled by the dung. This, monks, was the fifth great dream....

Now when the Tathāgata, while still a bodhisatta, dreamt that the mighty earth was his bedstead, the Himālaya, king of mountains, his pillow ... this first dream was a sign that he would awaken to unsurpassed, perfect enlightenment.

When he dreamt of the tiriyā grass growing from his navel up to the clouds, this second great dream was a sign that he would fully understand the Noble Eightfold Path and would proclaim it well among devas and humans.

When he dreamt of the white worms with black heads crawling on his legs up to his knees and covering them, this third great dream was a sign that many white-clad householders would go for refuge to the Tathāgata until the end of their lives.

When he dreamt of four birds of different colours coming from all four directions and, falling at his feet, turning white, this fourth great dream was a sign that members of the four castes— nobles, brahmins, commoners and menials—would go forth into homelessness in the Doctrine and Discipline taught by the Tathāgata and would realize the unsurpassed liberation.

When he dreamt of climbing up a huge mountain of dung without being soiled by it, this fifth great dream was a sign that the Tathāgata would receive many gifts of robes, alms-food, dwellings and medicines, and he would make use of them without being tied to them, without being infatuated with them, without being committed to them, seeing the danger and knowing the escape.

These are the five great dreams that appeared to the Tathāgata, the Arahat, the Fully Enlightenment One, before he attained enlightenment, while he was still a bodhisatta.

Aṅguttara Nikāya An Anthology, Part II, Selected and translated by Nyanaponika Thera and Bhikku Bodhi, BPS Online Edition, 2008, pg 1

The dream worlds of South Asia are verdant with imagery, profound and quixotic. In the Kurma Purana, this kalpa (eon) is a great ocean in which Brahma (or Vishnu) is sleeping on the coil of a naga (snake). He dreams that a lotus grows out of his navel (see the Buddha's dream below) from which arises all that exists. From this dream, our reality. Wendy O'Flaherty's Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities which traverses a wide South Indian terrain (1984) indicates that the dreams of Buddha and their interpretations shift interpretation from a Brahmanical context in which they had negative meaning to new positive angles. From these dreams emerges a Buddhist dream theory, thin in Theravada, but rich in Mahayana. They come to one from a repository that transcends time. From birth to birth, the dreams show up as replays in the next-born Buddha. Because these dreams are repeated in different texts, Young (1999, 31) argues that Buddha's dreams offer a map to the dream world of potential buddhas - signs to leave home. They can point the direction towards enlightenment. Most importantly, significant dreams that signal the presence of other realms need to be interpreted and understood within a Buddhist context. Thus, spiritual adepts can pass back and forth between realms.

Since the dreamers I'm following in Cambodia follow the Theravadan tradition, I am less focused on the Vajrayana tradition of dream yoga, which is intimidating in its authority over our dream life. The Cambodian dream worlds intersect at two points: at rebirth when the returning one asks to inhabit a woman's womb, and after death, when a loved one has instructions early after death, on an unfinished task or is unable to complete the transition to rebirth. There doesn't seem to be much literature on this arc of dreaming, a fascinating continuity.

References
O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities, University of Chicago Press, 1984
Shaw, Miranda, Blessed are Birth-Givers, Parabola 1998.
________Buddhist Goddesses of India. Princeton University Press. 2006, p. 51
Thundy, Zacharias P., Buddha and Christ: Nativity Stories and Indian Traditions, Brill Academic Pub, 1993
Young, Serenity, Dreams, In South Asian Folklore: An Encyclopedia : Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka edited by Peter J. Claus, Sarah Diamond, Margaret Ann Mills, Taylor & Francis, 2003, 166-169
____________Dreaming the Lotus. Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery and Practice, Wisdom Publications, 1999

<<Previous