25. TOTAL (DREAM) RECALL

     "The only way to make your dreams come true 
       is to wake up."
                            -- Paul Valery     

     My first recurring dream, from when I was three or four years old, is a total rearing nightmare. Remote-viewing. A small child toddles to the head of a flight of stairs, leading down to a basement. Dimly lit rooms beckon along the sides of the cellar corridor. The child's mother stands there, her smiling face looking up encouragingly, arms open wide, extended in the usual game parents play with youngsters, "JUMP! JUMP INTO MY ARMS!". A joyful moment transpires, the child flings herself into dream hyperspace.......while in the air, a telling transformation of Mother takes place. I'm about to be caught by an animated skeleton, wearing a deadly grimace / grin - all teeth and jaw and empty eye sockets, skull-nodding-and-bobbing, atop jiggling, glow-in-the-dark bones........"Them Bones" 1 ("dem bones dem bones dem dry bones" 2 ). Waking reality palls behind the fright show, the stark reckoning we must submit to in dreams, alerting us of our fate.

     Ahahahahaha! "The Thrill of It All!"3. Skeletal remains of the day! The origin of the classic Freudian slip - "my Mother" - bearing a Memento Mori (Remembrance of Death). All is vanity. My inheritance, her gift - the legacy of inseparable Life and Death. The first of many "shock factors" I'd receive in dreams, the process seems to verify the Universe and my subconscious are in cahoots - making fun of my mortality.
     This astral x-ray / wake-up call proves a real Catch-22 4 : the only way to avoid being caught by the Grin Reaper (in the dream) is to WAKE UP! only to (further) AWAKEN to......the hopeless inevitability of Death.....anytime, anyplace. There's no escape - to refuse to wake up is not an option. Awakening (to the "Dream of Life"5) is the Master Game.....the only game worth playing. Lurking in the wings, leveling the playing field, Death is content to reap Destiny / manifest our Soul (thank goodness, from the great amounts of DMT the pineal gland emits in the process of dying, it promises to be psychedelic!). We've seen it all before. La Danse Macabre. Totentanz. Death plays the violin, we put on the red shoes, and dance! dance! dance! 'til we drop!

      "That it will never come again is what makes Life sweet."
                      -- Emily Dickinson

1 Alice in Chains, "Them Bones"
2 Delta Rhythm Boys, "Dem Bones Dem Bones Dem Dry Bones"
3 Roxy Music, "The Thrill of it All"
4 Heller, Joseph, Catch-22
5 Smith, Patti, "Dream of Life"
    

 

                                      section from Bernt Notke's Danse Macabre