You know what's wrong with dreams? They are too short. Many times we don't have a chance to resolve things that come up in dreams. So often we are presented with a situation and we get interrupted by some irrational or bizarre event before we can come to a satisfactory conclusion to our dream. To wrap it up and put away the tools so to speak.
And there's the element of enticing vistas that beg for exploration that we don't get a chance to follow through on. You know it occurs to me that perhaps that's what a person could do in meditation. Go back to a dream place and explore it and meditative state. I like this idea!
At home I have a dream journal that I started and kept for several months a few years back. I think I'll get it out again and start writing down my dreams.
The reason I'm thinking about this today, is that I had an amazing dream about a kind of alpine town that had outrageously shaped buildings. They were very tall, but narrow. Like there was only one room on each story and they were about five or six stories high. They were very Swiss looking with whitewashed exteriors and dark exposed beams. And beyond this town rising in breathtaking and typically improbable proportions, was a range of Everest like crags so steep that the snow was barely able to find a place to cling. I want to go there! And when my life gets back to normal, I will.
Meditation is something I intend to reintroduce into my life, soon,very soon.
Later in the day:
I am astonished at how the images from this dream are haunting me. I keep going back again and again to this one spot at the entrance of the village. The images are so vivid and detailed, I feel like I have actually visited this place. As a matter of fact, the rabbis teach that our soul does "travel” in sleep and perhaps in a manner of speaking -- I HAVE been there. It all depends on how you define the "I" in the above sentence. But this is beside the point really, the point is, I want to go back there. It's almost like an island in the mountains. There was something very awesome about the town, surprising, unusual, but not forbidding.
Do you think in the world to come, we will revisit places we have seen in our dreams? And then we will be able to say, “Oh look! I know this place, you turn right here and there's a door and I have a room in this house. Or, wait until the sun is going down the sunset will be beautiful from this spot.” Things like that. I kind of hope we will. There something that seems right about it. Like we were being given glimpses and foretastes of a whole new realm that's waiting to be explored.
I wonder what it has done to the modern psyche to know that all the physical exploring has been done on our planet? Even though you and I have never been to Antarctica, we read of people who have, and can see it on the WebCams and look at it from satellites and buy detailed maps of it, etc. I'm not saying we shouldn't travel there, it's just that it's not undiscovered anymore. Maybe that's what's the matter with us in the modern world. We need a new adventure. We need to travel in the Undiscovered Country.