Excerpt of email to Michelle re: The Other Night
So this is kind of an abstract way of answering your question about exploring the idea of an entire quest that takes place in the unconscious dream realm that leaves reality slightly altered, but when I read your question, I immediately thought about this thing I experienced my last night of my Asia trip. Don’t know if it will help, but perhaps it will open your mind to thought lines that will give you juice to spark off of. It’s kind of a mystical experience that requires an open mind, but bear with me. And I promise you, I haven’t gone insane.
So. I’m really into the idea of synchronicity. Murakami wrote in the Wind-Up Bird Chronicles something like, when it’s time to go up, you find the highest tower and climb. When it’s time to go down, you find the deepest well and go to the bottom. When there’s no flow, you stay still.
I feel like that has a lot to do with life. We’re taught to fight for things, to be aggressive. But so much of life is about timing, that it’s as much about the patience to wait for the right opportunities, the wisdom to recognize them, the assertiveness to jump when a door suddenly opens, and the courage to see a path through. So I pay attention to things, especially if I feel my life starts to synchronize, where things outside me tend to lead me, give me clues on things I’m working on, thinking about, where I need to be, who I need to talk to.
So one day last month, I was in the business center of my apartment building in Seattle, waiting for a computer. I had time, so I went to the bookshelf to browse books people had donated. I saw a book called Real Magic, a spirituality book by a guy named Wayne Dyer. I connected to the title right away because magic is something I’ve been exploring, what I call synchronicities–things that happen between your inner world and outer world that seem to give you proof of something greater and conscious at work around you. So I read a few pages that day, and took it with me. It’s about how to be open-minded to be able to experience miracles in daily life. To be honest, it’s stuff that I’ve been experiencing and exploring the last 3 years, so it was affirming and interesting. But I didn’t have time to read it through, so I forgot about it. But I took it with me on this trip, and it was always in my bag. I would read a few pages here and there, but I wasn’t really that dedicated.
So our last day in Taiwan, I happened to read a part in the book about being open-minded. He talks about how he read about this Brazilian guy who claims to be able to shoot light out of his hands and is a healer, and he thought the guy couldn’t be real. That just sounds crazy. But how randomly, he was in Hawaii visiting friends and they invited him to a dinner party where this healer he’d read about happened to be there. And so he and his wife had a session with the guy, and sure enough, as part of the guy’s process, light would come out of his hands as he touched their bodies, healing them. I remember thinking about how to have light come out of your hands is such a tangible proof of the supernatural. The best I’ve been able to do is remember places and people from dreams, or my bits of synchronicity that make people kind of think I’m psychic or magic. But nothing ever like light coming out of my hands.
So that night, I was laying in bed with my mom sleeping next to me. I happened to think about that story, and I remembered a dream I had, the night that everything with Curtis went down, when I showed up to Fremont and had a tormented night while he was hanging out with Sandi. Here’s my entry of it: “In my dream last night, I found a whole city covered by a thunderstorm sky and rainbow. I could walk freely in that city, as myself. The thing that people loved, was that I was their size, a normal girl, but if I reached up my hand, it would grow and touch the sky. Like a giant hand reaching out and touching the surface of water, rippling the sky and rainbow. This world was just a drop of water and we were safe in it. People would cry, hug me, instant family, so grateful, the greatest miracle they’d hoped for, to witness that the sky was not untouchable. It was just illusion. And this was everything I’d ever wanted in life. Just to give those people that.” After I had that dream, the next couple of days, I kept reaching my hand up to the sky. In my dream, my hand would grow, so it was like looking at reality through the refraction of water, where I was my size, my arm the same length, but my hand would somehow be the same proportion as the sky, despite being RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. It was this complete visual contradiction but I knew it was true. And that dream reminded me of a poem I wrote in 2003, about how the world is reduced to a puddle:
And I’m always writing about my hands. From April: “Ignore everything but the sound of my voice, it said, and trusting it, I handed over the reins to my hands.” “If she can not open herself to one person, she will pour her spirit into the ground, where it rises up around her. People are trees come to life. She has only one dream. It involves her hands. Few have seen her eyes. Few forget.”
I’m thinking about all this while laying in bed, and so I hold up my hands, willing them to grow like in my dream. Now the room was dark and I could see the outlines of my hands like thick black shadows. I stared at them, but the more intensely I looked, the more relaxed I seemed to become, like that intensity and will was being produced only be my complete state of relaxation and openness. My eyes swam a little as I stared, and while I still recognized the room and my hands, but things seemed to be recognizable, but also something…else. I started chanting something in my head I didn’t recognize and never heard before. It was like “Onya tanconsah…tonsila tonsila,” and it started getting louder and with more resonance. And the weirdest thing, Michelle, my hands began to grow. I can’t say that they literally grew, because I was aware of my human hands held above me, I was aware of the room, I was fully aware of my mom sleeping next to me, her breathing, this plane of reality. But it was like a simultaneous PERCEPTION just as real and present as my physical reality, not exactly overlapping, but just as there. My hands started getting bigger, and the chanting became more resonate, and space and proportion seemed to fold onto itself so when I touched the air, it rippled. I could feel tingling between my hands, and I saw them as being so big, they collected the world in a ball between my hands, and I could feel it, both nothing and something completely tangible. Like a giant cotton ball but which contained energy. I would try to expand this ball of energy, and every time I made it bigger, my mom next to me would gasp in her sleep! It felt like the sky was just within reach and I could reach up with my giant hands, grab the rim and climb out. And all of this felt familiar, like I’d been here before and had just forgotten. I put my hands up and pulled myself up, and as I did, I felt myself as a bigger being, one who these giant hands belonged to, beginning to wake up. I realized that while I was fully awake, though maybe in some kind of trance, this me in bed, this world, while real, was also just a dream to this bigger me that was stirring, and that world was as familiar to me as when I wake up here and look around and see the familiarity of my bedroom. I knew that if I kept pulling myself up, I would awake in that bigger me, to that world that I knew was real while this world was dream (I even knew that where that me lay sleeping, there was an upstairs connected by a set of stairs to the left of the room). I could do it. It would require a commitment to stirring awake, the way you commit to leaving a dream and waking up, but I was scared that for me to commit to seeing that world, to being conscious in it, I would die here, or I would never be able to find my way back. I’m not ready to leave this world yet. But to be honest, I felt like I’ve come this far before, I’ve come to this realization and this level of awakedness before, but I also knew that while that world and that bigger me was real and when it is real, this world and this me is a dream, I wasn’t convinced I could still come back. Like losing a dream and its unique world when you wake.
So I moved away from that world, let my hands grow small again until my own hands were all I perceived, though I could still feel the energy around me. Then my hands starting doing their own things, strange gestures over my torso, like they were scanning it, moving energy around above it, gathering it while I watched them. The chanting in my mind came from both me and as though my mind had picked up a radio signal, because it felt like it was happening whether or not I was willing the words. When my hands were hot and tingly with energy, I put them over my heart and felt it all flow in in an intense beam (more felt than seen as light), and my mother exclaimed loudly in my sleep. That scared me enough to sit up and check her breathing. She had been laying with her back to me. She was fast asleep. And dawn was breaking now, even though all this had felt like maybe an hour. All in all very, strange. I’ve never experienced anything like it, and perhaps I had somehow put myself into a lucid dream state, but I was also so aware of my body and this world, and so aware of my mom making sounds that synchronized with what I was doing with the energy between my hands. Yet there was a world even more real than this one that I almost climbed into, and I knew, as I was in that moment, that I’d come this far before. Except this time I was conscious.
Now this is the reason I wrote you this long story, and forgive me for taking up so much of your time. I woke up the next morning so exhausted I could barely open my eyes. I felt like I’d been drugged, I was so tired. In fact, I’d slept 4 hours past when I usually get up. I went out to the living room and was just wandering around when my brother came out of his room.
“My necklace turned into a string,” he said. I was out of it and he was talking to my mom, but he sounded really confused. I heard her say, “That’s really strange.” He came up to me and said, “I don’t know how this happened. My necklace turned into a string.” I looked over at him and this is crazy. He wears a dolphin necklace on a thick black string. But it had somehow unraveled in the night, though staying in tact, so that part of the string had unraveled into a single thread, with the dolphin now hanging at his shins. It almost looked like he’d become a giant in the middle of the night and had shrunk back to regular size, but the transformation had stretched out his necklace. Of course I immediately thought about how big I had perceived my hands that night. Was it possible, that somehow, some part of us, had grown to giants in the night, or that we had allowed some kind of other plane in which we are bigger, slip in?
Take this story for what it’s worth. It’s probably the strangest thing that I’ve ever experienced. It could very well be a matter of random coincidence–from my mom making sounds in her sleep that coincided with what I was doing with my hands being just random, perhaps I was actually in a dream state while believing I was conscious, to the book’s presence just being another coincidence (though the strangest thing was, I went to look for the book that day and it was gone. I called the airline and it wasn’t on the plane, though that was the last place I’d read it, the day before, the part about keeping an open mind. Strange because my having come into possession of the book had also been random. I hope that perhaps someone else found that book at the right time that it could open up some magic for them).
Regardless, I kind of felt like, you asked me about why I recommended the change in your script to the adventure being a dream with a tangible change in reality upon waking, and I felt like it would bring the story full circle not just on a 2 dimensional plane (story), 3 dimensional plane (reality) but on a 4th dimension, this circle of where it is we go when we are not HERE, and if it’s the same person that returns. But as you can see, it could also be influenced by things I’m experiencing lately and it may not work for your story, but it just seems like my life has been so synchronized, and your question made me feel like I should tell you about these strange events that have occurred lately, so maybe I was meant to tell you. Again, please take it for what it’s worth, and I don’t want to muddle your train of thought about your script, so if you don’t see any relevance, I apologize.
I’m reading this book that starts off with this question. You kill a man with an ax, and in doing so, break the handle, so you buy a new handle and attach it to the blade. And then in chopping wood, you break the blade, so you replace the blade. If that man you killed should come back to life and say, “Hey, that’s the ax that killed me,” is he right?
Alright Michelle. Will write with more notes. Good luck with everything!
Take care,
Julia