Jeane: I had two very contrasting dreams. In the first, it’s almost like I’ve fallen, or I’ve traveled, somewhere and I’m going down into this kind of… It’s like going into an envelope and finding a much smaller envelope and flowing into yet a smaller envelope. Everything is white, and pretty, and delicate. It reminds me of those folded paper fortune-tellers that we played with as kids – they open up in four ways or something.
So these envelopes keep getting smaller as I travel down and in, and there’s a very pretty feeling that goes with it. It’s almost like being inside a lily or something because it’s white and flowing and it’s getting smaller and I’m kind of seeing what’s in the next envelope, or going into it.
But I don’t really see into the next one because someone distracts me by yelling out a name, and because they’ve said this name, I become a person again and I can’t continue into the next smaller envelope.
I feel like I’m somewhere in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at the university, but I don’t really see myself on campus or anything. I just have the name, but because I have the name in my head there’s a person now, so I can’t keep flowing into the envelopes. They’re pretty little white envelopes and I can’t get back there even though I really try. That’s the first dream.
John: What your dream is describing is what it’s like to go inside yourself, in a way in which you are letting go. Normally we hold onto things, even our thoughts. A principle behind meditation is that we have to bury our thoughts. The idea is to figure out how to let go of our thoughts, or bury them, within a quality of the vibration.
But it’s just like remembering a dream: as soon as a thought comes into your head, something dense that causes a distraction, that thought will obliterate whatever else is going on. Dreams are generally quiet and subtle, and they have a vibrational flow. Any sort of thought from your waking state is much denser and tends to shut off the vibrational flow of the dream, and therefore shuts off the journey itself.
So in your dream you are portraying both the journey and the interruption. It’s like an in-breath dream, because as you’re going in on the in-breath, you’re going deeper and deeper into a subtler place of emptiness.
Your limitation is when a thought comes up that’s still an issue for you. Then you suddenly find yourself in that place, based on whatever that thought or that specific issue was. You instantly step off your inner elevator, so to speak, and find yourself in Chapel Hill, representing something you still need to deal with.
You have to think what Chapel Hill signifies.
Jeane: And there was also somebody’s name, but I can’t remember it.
John: It’s almost like subtle humor with yourself, in terms of a certain persona that you’re still hanging onto.
Let me ponder this for a moment… whether this is an out-breath or an in-breath action. The image of going into smaller and smaller envelopes is like an in-breath. Yet when you flow into the outer in a vibrational way, you’re actually going into the density of things in a smaller and smaller way. So it’s like you’re going in both directions at the same time.
The vibration… that’s why this whole thing has a paradox to it. The smaller and smaller direction, then, is a letting go of things. In other words, that’s where the paradox is. It’s not a microcosmic thing. It’s the letting go of things more and more, smaller and smaller envelopes, which is why it really is more of the in-breath quality.
The in-breath takes us home, yet is stopped when there is still the need to identify with something. So you are still identifying with something – Chapel Hill – as a process of educating yourself. It’s like you haven’t grown out of it completely – it still interests you in some fashion. Otherwise things would just keep falling away and falling away, until all of a sudden you’re into an emptiness, or a nothingness.
It gets smaller and smaller until there’s just nothing tangible to put your finger on anymore. It’s interesting that you would have an inner motion dream. That’s what I would call it. I mean, I’ve had the outer motion dream, or an out-breath dream, which is like coming down an elevator but maintaining a certain focus and concentration on something as you get off the elevator – before you go zipping back up.
This is more of a dream of the in-breath, and what it’s like to go deep inside where everything falls away and the issues that you contend with get smaller and smaller, less and less, until poof!
The actual vibration of a nothingness is so great that the tendency, at some point, is to still hearken back to something that hasn’t been completely let go. And then the thing is to make a note of that subtle reflection – represented here by the Chapel Hill aspect – so that you, in noting it and feeling what it is like, can let that go, too, to travel even further, into the deeper, subtler areas within yourself.
