The Dream Trilogy
Prologue
​
For the first time in your life, you wake up, dead. You don’t know exactly how it happened, but the verdict of faint voices around you is clear. All vital signs are negative. This was not how it was supposed to end. You always thought death would make you “feel dead”, in other words void of any feeling. But now you feel alive, and in a strangely augmented way. There is a bright warm light that has enveloped you. You do not see anything in particular, but you are overwhelmed by a feeling of incommensurate joy and gratitude. You have no eyes, but are weeping profusely. There are no words, but you are in communion with what whatever else is. You remember the feeling of your beloved holding you tenderly. That serves as a faint reminder of how this mysterious embrace feels.
Like the rest of you, your ears are out of battery power, yet there are harmonious vibrations that entrain your heart’s pulsations, even though the organ has stopped pumping blood. The vibrations feel one and the same with the intense emotions you feel.
Yes, they are one and the same, now that your analytical mind has stopped making distinctions between electromagnetic and sonic waves.
At one moment, there is a voice questioning who you are, while you simultaneously see your entire life in one single sweeping flash of knowing, long enough only to utter three letters: I AM.
Yes, that is who you are, and there is no other way of saying it.
In another instant (you don’t know how long after), you are back into your body, gradually becoming aware of all the commotion around you. People are rushing back and forth. Machines are beeping. Faces are excitedly and anxiously looking down at you. Sensations, mostly unpleasant ones, are swelling up in your body.
A week later you are out of bed, walking around in your same body, seeing the same people as before the accident. But nothing feels the same. You want to tell them, but cannot find the words. It would be easier to tell a 2-year old what it’s like to experience sexual union. At least the 2-year old would not doubt what you say or write it off as a hallucination.
“Maybe it was a hallucination”, you finally think, now that your analytical mind is running full steam again.
“Even if it were a hallucination, what would that change, in the end?” you ponder.
“This hallucination came from something in me, and that something in me also came from something , et cetera. Whatever I am, that I am, is not fully contained in my body. The unspeakable beauty I beheld cannot vanish with the closing of my eyes. ”
​
Of course, the others had good cause to doubt. This was not the first time you had dreams, visions, hallucinations, or whatever else others determine to be outside the bounds of objective reality.
1/ Earth erotica
Several months prior to your near-death experience, you had a dream...or rather, you lucidly wove a dream. It happened during a time of quiet despair, when you didn’t know how to end an unhappy relationship. Like a caged bird, your mind was flapping its wings in vain.
One autumn day, in your weariness you lie down beneath an aspen tree to watch its golden leaves dance in the wind. As you gaze upwards, focused on nothing, you feel the movement of all the leaves at once. A gust of wind rises, and with it, music. Every leaf has become like a reed, sounded by the wind according to its own frequency. There is supreme harmony in this music of the wind that plays on the leaves. It cannot be reduced and fully understood, much like the form of the tree itself. Without explanation, you just know that you are somehow near to the Secret. You dance around a circle and suppose, while the secret sits in the center and knows (bless you, Robert Frost).
Entranced, you fall away into your lucid dream.
A golden leaf is falling from the aspen, and you are the size of a small spider, drifting on the back of this leaf. You land softly on the earth and make your way through the jungle of giant blades of grass.
Now you are roaming over the earth, sometimes flying, sometimes swimming. Your frame of reference keeps switching as you enter the bodies of myriad species that inhabit the earth.
​
You are a bee, burying your nose into the succulent pollen of an iris.
You are a monkey, swinging through the rain forest treetops.
You are a stallion, galloping across vast wind-blown steppes.
You are a dolphin, skipping over the surface of the sea.
You are an eagle, soaring above a mountain range.
​
Everywhere you go, and in whatever form, the earth is pristine and breathtaking in its beauty. Not a drop of water is defiled, and you stop to drink deeply wherever you find it. .
Her beauty enthralls you, endlessly.
When in this dream you regain your human form, you are of male essence, and the only feeling you can remotely compare to the feeling in your dream is the absolute rapture you have sometimes felt in the presence of your beloved’s body. She is your paradise, and you could not even conceive of anything in heaven above that would compare to her.
But your lucid dream is of the earth, in which you are now taking sublime erotic delight.
You are suddenly dumbfounded as you remember how so many religions promised something better than the perfection of the earth, the most splendid of blue-green gems suspended in the blackness of space. Under the reign of these same religions, the quest to dominate nature has been served by science and industry. Several flash-forward images jolt you.
Images of massive deforestation, wastelands, and landfills.
Images of vast islands of trash and dead fish floating in the oceans.
Images of your fellow man subsisting like vermin in cities of squalor.
Images of coal mines sending black soot into the sky that defile rain and snow.
​
The image of your very own mother dying from a modern disease.
​
You emerge from this dream knowing
three things in the depth of your being.
​
You now know
that mankind has raped the earth. He has objectified, dominated, and defiled her just as man has done to woman.
​
You now know
that enduring change will only come when those who defile the earth become aware of their relationship with it. It is love and not law that will usher in a sustainable human civilization.
​
You now know
that the earth itself is the most precious of treasures, superior in every sense to the things you have often called "luxury" without any consideration given to their consequences.
​
You, the lucid dreamer, have the vision of what can and will manifest as a new reality called LUX. You are not alone, but your mastery is limited to you own life, now and in every moment and every movement. You know this is not impotence, but an awareness of how the small can overcome the large, how the invisible can overtake the visible, how liquid can dissolve the solid.
​
2/ Judgment Day
​
It is your day of judgment. The pressure to do the right thing has now taken on epic proportions. A sea of humanity is gathered together in a great arena, and you are on the center stage. There is an electric sense of nervous expectancy in the crowd.
To your right are seated a council of five elders, representing the highest moral authority. You cannot not name a single one, but their grave faces all seem familiar to you. Some wear dark navy suits with red ties. Others adorn entirely red priestly attire, with a black neck cuff.
To your left, on the ground, sit twelve children in a miserable state. Their clothes are tattered. Some of their faces are grimy. They look hungry and despondent. This sight you had already seen in your travels to India.
A voice speaks your name from behind. You turn to see the tall white-bearded man dressed in a white gown, holding a chalice in his right hand. Its fluid content was captivating, like a liquid gem refracting brilliant light.
You inquire: “Who are you”?
“I am the Judge, he who calls things by their name.”
“Why am I here”? you ask.
“Here is nowhere else than where you always are. You should rather ask why I am here. I am here because you have called me.
All of your life has prepared you for this moment, has it not?”
He pauses to allow the weight of every word sink upon you.
“You have received a good moral education and cannot claim ignorance of those supreme laws that distinguish what is good from what is evil.”
“Moreover” he beckons you with his arm to consider the twelve miserable children near your feet, “you have lived a good life, lacking nothing, isn’t that so?”
Following this remark, the crowd began to stir in expectation.
“Now, I set before you a final choice. Upon your judgment will fall the great judgment.
Let all those present bear witness.
Behold these miserable children, all of them hungry. You have the power to feed them.
He turned to show you a copiously prepared table for twelve, set behind him. You notice how all the children now have their eyes riveted on the feast.
Now, behold this chalice. He lifted it up for all to see its sparkling contents. This is the essence of what you have sought, your entire life. It is the elixir, the ultimate alchemy to which mystic initiates have referred since the dawn of time. If you drink of it, your body will feel electrified. It will bring you vitality such as you have never known nor imagined. From this vitality will flow an overwhelming sense of joy, as if you were dancing across fields of daffodils. Next, great clarity will arise in your mind, dissipating all of the clouds of confusion and conflict. The underlying meaning of all things will become apparent to you. From this knowing, you will become fearless, and once fearless you will feel unlimited. This is what it means to be magnificent. It is what the ancients called a god or a goddess. It is what you will become if you take the chalice.
He raised his voice now such that the great multitude would be sure to hear, and spoke with sober declamation:
“Take for yourself this chalice, and become divine.
Or, feed the hungry children, before they die.
Which will you choose, o son of man!”
Upon this declaration, the crowd breaks into a great clamor, as if divided by the horrendous dilemma.
​
You think at first that it is all a hoax, that the elixir is a trick. Your scientific mind throws up its force field of doubt. But then you realize that such doubts are irrelevant in the current situation. You are stuck in the middle of an archetypical moment, so the choice being imposed upon you cannot be invalidated. No, it is of the utmost metaphorical significance. Now you know that you cannot escape. The weight of the dilemma is upon you, and your desperate mind goes bezerk, much like the crowd. It becomes the Armageddon of good and evil, but as both forces are within, you don’t which is which. One can be called Guilt, and the other Yearning. The internal battle unfolds between them as follows:
Guilt:
How can you possibly know joy if you choose to let the children starve?
Yearning: But if you feed them now, will they not be starving again in a week? What a grotesque construct, bringing the miserable children on stage to make it appear as if you were somehow responsible! As you know, misery is more than just a state of material want. Man shall not live by bread alone.
Guilt: But what if they were your own children?
You look at them again. They are looking at you as if you were their father. This is unbearable to you, so you turn away, and shudder in the shame of this realization.
And again, what did you do to deserve this chalice? Are you righteous like Abraham, to whom God gave nothing more than in-fighting descendants as numerous as the stars?
Yearning: If it is being offered to you, doesn’t that mean it is yours to take? Would it not be an act of supreme ingratitude to refuse this extraordinary gift being lavished upon you? Who are you to question your being chosen?
Guilt: But of what worth is the world, full of your own bliss, if innocent children must suffer? It is an insufferable injustice. Yes, of course, that is what this judgment day is about: it’s for you to prove you will sacrifice yourself for others. Inasmuch as you have done it for one of these little ones, you have done it for me.
​
Yearning: But what if their judgment day falls on the same day as yours? You can’t sacrifice yourself for someone if that someone is simultaneously sacrificing him or herself for you.
Oh, how you deeply yearn for that elixir. You want to know what it feels like to be alive in that way. You want the direct experience of exquisiteness.
Enough!
Your mind cannot find its way out of this dichotomy. It is already a form of hell, and could go on forever. The clamor of the crowd is becoming unbearable. Dark clouds are gathering in the sky above. You can’t think straight anymore. You fix your eyes upon the glorious golden draught. Then you close them, hoping to wake up from this judgment day nightmare. The light of the elixir fills the darkness behind your eyes, and you let yourself be mesmerized by it. You imagine yourself approaching it. Closer and closer, so that now you smell delicious waves of floral fragrance. You are looking down upon what you thought was a chalice, but it is bubbling up like a spring within a small pool. You see yourself reflected on the surface, and this unexpected sight brings tears to your eyes, just as a feeling of immense gratitude wells up from within you. Now, the pool begins to overflow into a stream. You follow its faint glow as it loses itself in the mists. Beyond that veil, you know that it flows on and on, feeding rivers and lakes and boundless seas. You know that it flows within you.
You open your eyes and find yourself again in the great arena. The man in white addresses you:
“The time allotted has expired. Now, speak your choice.”
There is a total silence in the arena, as all await your word.
​
The 12 children are also motionless, but suddenly a little girl seated closest to the chalice stands up, and turns toward you.
Finally, the words come:
“Little girl, take this chalice, that the children may drink of it.”
Upon these words, the entire scene freezes like a computer screen when an unexpected program error occurs. The image dissolves into pixels and vanishes.
Now all you see is the little girl walking towards you, chalice in hand.
The three shall set us free.
Duality is the prison of the material world. This or that, either/or, good or evil, dark or light.
Three is the escape hatch from the binary trap. It is like a window in the prison cell, but only of use to those who believe there is something outside.
The Judgment Day is the climax of your world of duality. It is of your own imagining. Hell just wouldn’t be the same without you.
Now, if you can create your own hell, why can’t you create your own paradise?
​
​
3/ AMBROSIA
​
soon to come