John: The beauty in this dream is that you’re really, really close to catching up with something (the dream being discussed is The Manuscript). The theme of the dream has to do with something that belongs to you, that’s embedded inside of you as a huge reservoir, that at some point was taken away or shut off from you. The time has arrived to come back to that after having been gone from it for a long, long time.
Whenever it was that this reservoir became veiled from you, it was veiled with a type of heaviness, a certain fear or reservation about coming back to it because of the way it was mishandled previously. Now that you’ve become lighter about it, you’re beginning to pick up some initial leakage of its energy. It’s shown in the quality of bending space like you do in the dream.
So you show this dexterity and joy in two ways: in the exuberance and playfulness with the rifles, and with the secretary pretending to be a common secretary, with an important manuscript lying out in the open. A part of you still carries the hiddenness, while another part of you has recognized that leaving everything out in the open is the best course of action. So when something is coming at you as a problem – that would be perceived by others as a problem – to you it can be exhilarating.
Jeane: You would have loved that energy.
John: That’s a tremendous space to be in, to be able to welcome the upheavals and everything that happens, as opposed to sitting there all jittery and scared, or panicky, or whatever characteristic surfaces when faced with problems. Instead, you embrace it: It’s wow! This is incredible! It’s like seeing the whole potentiality of something, the whole opportunity to open up something else.
And so the very best way to open things up, in the most dynamic and expansive sense, is to be able to have this exuberance and joy at the moments when other people would be freaking out at the unfolding scenario. You are actually quickened by the whole thing. When that happens, there is even the natural humor built into it – waving in the SWAT team and basically saying “He went thataway!”
The ability to do that is the same sense of humor, slightly denser, of just hiding the manuscript in plain sight. Now, the subterfuge that that shows is still the problem. The idea that something has to be guarded and protected and can’t just exist in such a way that it’s naturally invisible. So you still feel you have to encapsulate it within an element of creative hiding.
In other words, you know how the dense world thinks, so you ratchet it up a little bit so you can out-maneuver the density with a little dexterity. The thread of that still originates from the idea that there’s something to safeguard. You want to get to the point where there’s nothing to safeguard. That’s what’s being shown with the guy running out there on the porch, but even in that there’s a part of you that can’t quite accept it so you end up with the guns pointed at him.
So there is a little flicker that still stands in the road to this, but it looks kind of small in comparison to the whole action. The whole action is a letting go. It’s a freedom. It’s a joy. There’s no tone or heavy mood that’s in the way. So, what opens up underneath is a huge, much fuller dimension in oneself, and that’s what you’re trying to get to. That’s what’s sitting there, just waiting to emerge, and it doesn’t take much.
We continue this discussion in: The Fall.
