In this series of images, John is wrestling with bridging dual aspects of life, the higher and the lower, and the past and the present. As a conduit, humans are in the middle between the high and low, the universal and the physical. We aren’t meant to be only one or the other, we are meant to provide a flow between them. To do so, it is important that we let go of our past and stay in the moment. (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.)
John: Well, in the next dream, I’m driving off of an interstate into an exit, and up ahead of course you have to stop and then go left or right. And so you have to slow down because your on the interstate you’re maybe going 80 miles an hour, and you have to slow down to 35, 40, whatever and come to a complete stop.
But for some reason I can’t get my mind to engage to hit the brakes to stop, and I can see the stop way up ahead. I have plenty of time. In fact, you know, if I don’t do it right at this moment, I can do it at the next moment, or the next moment, but I seem frozen and out of sync. I can hit the clutch, but for some reason or another I can’t get my foot to go onto the brake.
It’s as if I can’t get my mind to respond in unison. And you comment on how fast I’m going and I say, “I know, I can’t get my mind to respond.” This is very miserable. This isn’t funny. It’s very miserable. I mean I’ve been doing my darndest, you know. I was even reaching down trying to hit the pedal with my hand, but how can you see the road and hit the pedal with your hand and stop the thing?
You know, none of it was working. Was I going to crash? And so the sensation of course is a horrible, horrible, helpless sensation. In other words, I know how one needs to be, but I’m unable to come into the body or something, or bring the focus I need in order to do something mundane in manifestation.
I freeze up. It’s as if I’m freezing up in the outer because somehow or another I’m not grounded or I’m not in body or something, therefore not properly focused. So the dream is indicating that, as a consequence, there’s a lack of acuity that happens if I don’t come properly back into the body.
So, apparently, I’m remaining a little bit too much in this other transcendent space and inner plane in which the indulgence there does nothing for conduct that needs to occur in the outer.
It’s like the dream is saying that to be responsible I need to be familiar, more familiar, in both levels simultaneously.
In other words, one level has to do with sight where I can see ahead what needs to be, I have to stop, and the other level has to do with the mundane action in the physical where you have to be able to be grounded enough to make all that happen. In other words, it comes all the way down. You can see the potentiality but it also has to be lived out.
In the next dream I’m like, I don’t know what I am, 17, 16, 18, I don’t know, maybe a young adult, anyway I’m at home visiting my dad, my folks. It’s like I’m on vacation. And for some reason the talk gets around to bird hunting, or maybe that’s just suddenly what seems to happen, because I suddenly look out the window and there are all these pheasants.
Now you rarely see pheasants, and a pheasant is kind of an exotic bird, you know, that has a whole glory about itself – in terms of its beauty, and its presence, and its demeanor. A pheasant is a little bit like a peacock, too. It can be a little strident.
So I ask, where’s the shotgun? Because I’m going to shoot one of these pheasants. And my dad says he doesn’t know where it is at, so then I ask about the 22 and get a similar response. So what about the 22 Hornet, his favorite gun? I know he knows where that’s at. I will make a head shot.
In other words, because you don’t want to shoot it with a bigger gun and blow it all to pieces so that there’s nothing there to appreciate, and he won’t get it. So, as the dream progresses, I go outside because, you know, I want to look at the pheasants more I guess, and I’m amazed how close I can get to them.
“Look how close that pheasant is.” The idea of me shooting it in the head seemed a little bit farfetched because usually you can’t get close enough, but there I am. It would be a simple, easy head shot.
Then I look closer at the pheasant. It’s a mother with a young one. Then I look at another nearby pheasant, and it too has a little one. At some point I begin talking to the magical pheasant because it suddenly has a head like a human. I’m amazed that I can rapport like this. I would’ve missed out on this connection if I had had my way.
But apparently I haven’t dropped this idea, this notion, this mannerism of how you have to be, because I mean I have these memories, wonderful memories, as a kid going out and bird hunting, but I never did much big game hunting. My dad did most of that. He never bird hunted. I was the one that liked to bird hunt. I always did these other little things.
So in the next dream I’m going hunting with my dad and other family members. So after driving way back into an area we get out of the vehicle and we start walking. And when we finally reach an area where there’s a snow line, that’s when I realize I’m not dressed properly. I don’t have walking shoes on. I have just regular loafers or something.
So I pause as the others go on, and I seem to get distracted because they disappear. Lots of time seems to somehow go by, and I suddenly realize there’s no way I’m going to be able to catch up, and of course they just have to keep going assuming that I’ll figure it out and catch up.
But so much time has gone by that I know that there’s no way I can catch up, plus I don’t know how to go from where I’m at back to the vehicle. But suddenly where I’m at, hanging out, there are other people, kids playing on the hillside and stuff all around, which indicates to me even more that I just don’t know where I’m at.
And then suddenly I realize, I can hear it now, my dad will be furious when I finally get out of this mess. He will probably say, I’m not going hunting with you ever again. And, given how I now feel about all of this, that would be okay with me, although when this happens I will probably act hurt. And so I wake up.
I can’t stand the condition I am in. You know, I’m lost, I don’t know how to follow out, I don’t know how to get back, it’s actually starting to cool down, it’s like 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon and the light’s starting to fade. If I were to try to go forward it would get dark on me and I’d be in real bad shape, and if I try to go back who knows where I’m going to end up, and no way they’re going to know how to find me.
So the meaning of the two dreams is, what I think I like based upon old memories of bird hunting that I enjoyed as a kid is not where I’m actually at now. When I settle back from the mannerisms, I’m able to appreciate the relationship I didn’t know I had, that has opened up inside in ways that I hadn’t realized was there, or possible.
But I still haven’t shaken certain mannerisms of the past. And, as if to get that out of the system, then I indulge in the sport by going big game hunting, something that I really don’t have a good connection with. I had the connection with bird hunting, and I can’t even do it in a sub-fashion, in other words, or as an octave, because something has changed.
I’ve lost the impulse to go forward in this mannerism. I know that others may even expect me to continue this type of pattern, but my heart just isn’t into it. I simply stop because it isn’t worth the effort. Consequently, in relationship to the mannerism or the pattern that exists, I’m lost.
In other words, I would think and seem to know where I’m at if I stayed in that pattern, but when I don’t let go of that kind of familiarity I go into kind of a condition in which I’m confused in the psyche as if, you know, I’m doing something wrong because I let go, I’m not adhering to the impulse. And so you can develop a self-consciousness, even.
Well somehow somewhere there’s a happy medium, but I’ve not found that for myself. What we are talking about in the dream is a state in which I handle the inner and outer in a way that needs to be balanced, and I haven’t found that yet. I’m still estranged from a necessary value that comes from the heart, which eludes me because I’m still caught up in preconceived ideas, and notions, and mannerisms, and habits.
So the dreaming seems to be about habits and mannerisms and whatnot trying to thread the needle, or trying to reconcile two places, and having to contend with the various peculiarities that one’s adopted over time that keeps them from being able to do that.
In other words, it’s like when you take the idea of hunting, I guess there’s a certain aspect that I’m indulged in, but not in the bigger sense that most people are indulged with their ego, which has to do with big game hunting.
I mean most people could care less about bird hunting, and yet I found that fascinating but, on a subtler level, even that had a certain absurdity because I was pushing myself off and away from an intertwinedness that one needs to see in relationship to everything being connected and alive – in terms of one’s self.
And that these birds that I was hunting were all reflective of a condition of myself, too, just like big game hunting is like that, only it has to be done with a certain level of awareness, a divine awareness, and then it can be okay. You have to have a relatability to everything in life, as opposed to just a rightfulness that you superimpose.
And of course the meaning of all of this is I’m being confronted to be more true to my heart. My abstractions are not where it is at. And so if I can hold the value, I can actually then play act in the outer, with an acuity to the inner – that’s where this is going. That’s what this dreaming is like. These are components in that direction. Whether I quite get the memo, or not, this is still a big gulp to take.
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