“It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!” — Mark Twain
I don’t mean to be a tease, but the meat of this writing is under Thoreau…
And now I present my dream…
Monday, 24th of February, 6:02AM… I awaken. I had a dream and in this dream, I got there. I got there… I reached the promised land. I don’t know how I got there. I don’t even know where it was… but I got there with nothing but the coat on my back. No bag, no wallet, no money, no ID, no phone, no pills, no computer… off the grid, if there was one where I was… no nothing. No running… no airport… I was not trying to get somewhere or away from something, including myself. I just was there.
This was not a night terror. I knew no one. I was all alone, but in a crowd… which in and of itself is not disturbing. I’m used to being alone. I always traveled alone… particularly when no one knew I was leaving the country. In reality, I never traveled with anything or so much it needed to be checked… I had no baggage when traveling, just a backpack and purposeful tactical clothing with more than 70 pockets. In this dream, I made it with nothing and remember not much but walking around in circles (so to speak)… following the flow of people, wondering what I was going to do. Thinking that whenever i get home from wherever I am I will still have nothing. I had a coat and that’s all.
More than one month of half the normal dose of that which kept the monsters from my dreams… prevented the terrors, the sweats, the panics. The intended dose reduction to bring my dreams closer than the last fifteen seconds that I could remember under the influence of a good sleeper pill. I’m different now. I’ve evolved. I’ve experienced personal and spiritual growth that I never had an opportunity to explore up to this point in my life. If last night means anything, I hope that it is that my night terrors are gone forever.
That which haunted me my entire life is no longer so haunting and not much more than an ever more distant memory. In this dream, there was a huge building and I don’t know what it was, but all others were moving towards it and going into it… and I couldn’t go into it because I had a coat. I had nothing, yet I had too much. My intended migration towards minimalism during consciousness has moved from reality to a dream. My baggage is gone. It’s been wide open for all to see into for about four years now… but now, the baggage isn’t just open… it’s gone.
This was no requiem. It was dream. I had a real dream. Am I reborn? At the point I told someone IN my dream what was happening to me… with nothing… not knowing if it was lost… gone forever… I awakened and left my bedroom to look at the clock and the time. 6:02AM
Alone
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then- in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life- was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
“It always seemed strange to me… the thing we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second”. [John Steinbeck]
Plato said it early on: “Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty”.
As you read the quote from John Steinbeck about the things we detest, there is a message that gets lost in his quote. It begins with the things we love to see in a person. Honesty. And the fact is, honesty isn’t everything it’s defined to be. Honesty can be one of the things we detest in a person as it hurts and can be excruciating and painful… The truth hurts sometimes, quite often as a matter of fact and it makes it one of the traits we detest. It leads to reading between the lines and out-front that openness that will come with honesty can reveal egotism and self-interest.
Honesty can be the most dangerous game because you can really hurt someone, and hurt them to the bone chilling core and feel as though you’ve done the right thing. The righteous thing. One of the traits we detest. And without intention… Without malice. And even with love. In the end, love hurts too and becomes a trait we detest.
