June Twenty-Fourth, Twenty-Twenty:
Birch is shedding like never before, and its leaves are spotted with black. You were worried, and now I am. I look up yesterday and see Squirrel lying splayed on one of its highest branches. I ask if the birch is sick - if anybody will know it will be Squirrel. Usually Squirrel trots off after we stop to say hello, but just like Chipmunk last week, it is absolutely still, eyes open, frozen, and stupefied. Strange times. Perhaps the solstice affects them with much weight.
I found a psychedelic group that meets online. Why not? I’m a double-downer. Why not just go for the whole shebang since I’m already a goner - death and love and psychedelics. I already feel guilty for not looking harder for the mushrooms when you were still here, but the time was never right. Now these plant tools are within my reach, but the group doesn’t bring the subject up. I have to schedule a call with D. and ask how to actually get Psilocyben mushrooms. The dark web? Maybe you have pull in the dark web, Nick. Please advise.
In the mornings I recall more smatterings of dreams if I remember not to shift my position in bed. Not even an arm. Not even a roll over until I have caught the last fragment. If I can catch the last image, I can hold on and rewind from there. I am developing the muscles for this kind of remembering. It’s part of the practice. Also writing dream fragments down helps me to locate the places where I could have, or should have, woken up. People who appear all the time could trigger me into remembering that I am dreaming. If you see this asshole…you’re probably dreaming. Or that recurring theme of running for a train, plane, or bus. That could trigger me to look for my hand and wake up inside the dream.
Here’s what I understand now, Nick:
The only difference between my nighttime dream and my daytime dream is the constraints - mainly Time and Gravity in the waking dream. The nighttime dream and the waking dream arise from the same light material.
My mind that is furiously spinning when I open my eyes is the same mind that was spinning in my dream. I am the same dreamer at night and in the day.
In both the waking and sleeping dream I forget who I am. I black out on the way down into sleep and on the way back up, forgetting that I am the dreamer.
These little deaths between dreaming and waking are actually blank-outs. Like interstices between scenes in a film, where the screen goes black. But they are more elusive than black. Much more deceptive because they are currently invisible.
Recognizing the gaps is paramount. Recognizing my identity as the dreamer is simultaneous with recognizing the dream as an illusion. Like a flash of lightning. It’s so exciting.
Accomplished meditators can lead their waking consciousness into their dreamer’s consciousness. It’s called WILD: Wake-Initiated Lucid Dreaming. I find it impossible to achieve. As opposed to DILD: Dream-Initiated Lucid dreaming, where the dreamer wakes up to recognize they are in the middle of the dream. I have done this a few times.
If a practitioner masters waking in a dream, then a further goal waits. This is really the whole point. To visit a territory further ‘down’; the formless, dreamless state underneath the dream. The adept can master dropping out of the dream into a space that is blank, and keep their flicker of composure even in blackness. This is the super highway where you can practice for the third dream state, called The Dream At The End Of Time. This is the state that is the frequency of death.
We visit it in each night’s round of sleeping, and we don’t remember. The goal is to eventually come to know the territory of death. To practice meeting it with one’s light intact - a very small flame no doubt. Jesus talks about keeping our lamps lit, just enough of a flicker to make a conscious decision at that crucial moment. Where to send one’s irreducible essence when one enters the Dream At The End Of Time? There are so many choices apparently that can be made if death is familiar territory. If one is not bumped into an entirely new dream through fear. We are working backwards, laying a trail of breadcrumbs to our essence.
On Monday I do all the watering and mowing, even some weeding, exhausting myself, but loving it. I make a song on the spot for you, for the solstice, the longest day since you have disappeared. I sing - “Am I weeding enough? Nooooo...Am I mowing enough? Nooooo...Am I blowing enough? No, no, noo, nooooo…” - a song about my imperfection, and giving that gift to you. If I spend my time tending the garden as meticulously as you did I cannot finish your book. I will tend words instead.
I wash and fill the stone birdbath, shouting as usual like a pushcart barker to the birds: “I have the best fresh water!” The delicious sound of it gurgles against the stone basin. I set the hose nozzle on jet, flinging water deep into the newly lush shade garden under the Katsura. Flinging my liquid silver wand I think to send that essence to you. In case you are too busy to notice the light reflecting off of it. I make the spiraling mercury snake dance for you. I give it to you with my eyes, in case you can’t access the emotion. Just as I did in our everyday life - Look at this, and this, and this - I send you eyeshots of the new flowers. Hoping the coding from my retinas is transmitted on galloping fibers to whatever sense you can receive now. The beauty is painful. I cry a long time in the garden, treading your paths in my big, white floppy hat, hiding my teary cheeks and the snot running from my nose.
In my Kundalini Zoom class the teacher’s voice is not working for me. I try to match her vocals, which are often tuneless and off-pitch. Today it just won’t work. The chanting hurts my throat. I reach a bit higher. I find a placement that hooks in harmony with hers. That harmony is a trigger. Suddenly I am traveling on that knife edge of sound. Up into the Katsura tree, and underground by Taz’s grave beneath the Hydrangea. Moving all through the yard. Traveling in sound.
Ghost Chapters From The Green Books, Episode #13