Tag Archives: dreams

The Seventh Sense (2)

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[Editor’s note: I wrote this little piece on December 12th in response to that day’s prompt from the annual poetry advent calendar by Two Sylvias Press.]

I wake to white crowned sparrows whispering together beneath the bougainvillea in the corner of my little courtyard. The light is just returning. I am wide awake in the early morning, unusual for me, no gradual coming back, no desire to turn over, sink back into sleep. I had a dream, and my body somehow knows it was big. I close my eyes again, lie still, hoping to bring it back. I am flying over a narrow market street, small shops with colorful awnings, people milling, filling the road, no cars. Morocco comes to mind. I have no idea why. It is a steep street, and I am flying low, heading downhill. I can see faces. No one seems alarmed by me. In waking life, I’ve always suspected we used to know how to fly. I think people escaped from Atlantis by flying when it sank into the sea. I believe there’s something in our heads that controls flight. Maybe the pineal gland? We used to be able to activate it at will, a lost art, like the ability to wiggle our ears. When I wake up I think, oh, flying is the seventh sense. And I wonder if there might be more.

Swallowing the Moon (52)

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I’ve been going through a rough patch. I notice I want myself to be “better” before I am. Now I’m wanting to trust myself more. I do always turn the corner, always come back to being whole and well again. It’s happening already. But I tend to try to make it happen before its time. I try to rush myself. Maybe now I’m learning to let myself be, to have more faith. I remind myself it will pass. I’ll “return” when I am ready. For three weeks I dream busy dreams where I’m working with a repetitive task throughout the night. I don’t remember them in the morning, only the feeling of them. At first I think they are stress dreams, the kind I get when I work too hard. Years ago when I worked in catering in Los Angeles, there would be long stretches of prep for big parties. When I slept I’d dream about 12-gallon stainless steel stock pots at the foot of my bed. All night I would stir them with big wooden spoons. But then I remember two of my current dreams, and I know I’ve been doing healing work. In one dream there’s a kind of mind map I am building. I have a memory of rows of dark shapes and small bits of text with straight lines leading from one to the other. On the top layer are drawings of envelopes. They’re lit up like neon signs, green envelopes with pink hearts at their centers like seals. I check on them during the night. Sometimes there are two envelopes waiting, sometimes three. Their lights wink off and on. I think I am sending myself love letters. In the second dream, the moon is hanging in the western sky above the mountains. I wake up to it sometimes like this in the night, a beacon shining through the sliding glass door. On this night I drift in and out of sleep, the moon waning but still almost full. In the dream it’s almost dawn, and I’m taking sips of this luminous disc, again and again at regular intervals, like medicine.