Dream

I have a rare opportunity to tell about the dreams I had last night. Usually, I don't remember, or they are only fragments.

In one dream, my husband, younger son, and I were finding bombs and planning to detonate them so they would not hurt other people. The only problem was that we would have to sacrifice ourselves to do so (kind of like a suicide bomber, but we would be the only ones to die). Our dog, Mimi, was with us, and she would die, too, because she always wanted to be right with us. We found about three or four small, black, square, unimpressive-looking plastic little devices around a house (not ours) that would explode easily when triggered. We were hurrying to go outside and lie down with them and set them off before Dwaine's sister arrived. If anyone else got there, they wouldn't understand why we were doing this and would try to talk us out of it or prevent us from doing it.

I was imagining what the end would be like. We would all lie down together, next to each other on a grassy pasture, and place these little devices on our bodies. Mimi would lie down on top of one of us. We would not be able to survive, and death would be instantaneous. Not too shabby, really. It wasn't a horrifying thought.

Frankly, I'm with the rest of the people here -- I have no idea what we were up to, either. Austin probably was absent because he's absent so much from our actual lives, being a 16-year-old with transportation.

In the next dream, the Dalai Lama visited me at  a house that was my house, but it was not this one. He stayed for quite a while, and I was rushing around to prepare a meal for him, and burning parts of it, feeling very frustrated because I didn't have enough help. (Totally the Martha story from the Bible!) His amazing presence lingered long after he left, and I was sitting where he had sat on the sofa, longing for him. In fact, I was becoming very upset because he was gone, and realized I was engaging in unhealthy clinging.

Then in another part of the dream, I was feeling this deep sense of loss. It dawned on me that it was because my dad had died -- or was going to die. I was searching for a letter he had written to me.

Then in the dream, I was able to visit with my dad while he was still alive (which he is), and treat him as the precious treasure he is, before he died and left me. He was out on the porch of the house, watching a beautiful slow rain that was pouring down outside and blowing and misting in on the porch, too, so that everything was wet. It was the most amazing sight, watching the rain. Here at the brink of another drought, I long for rain and new life. I don't remember me and Dad talking about anything in particular, just being together and watching the rain.

I think all these threads are about death and impermanence. I'm no suicide bomber. I have no crazy visions of saving the world by dying myself, and if I did, I know my family would definitely not go along with it! I think the dreams were ways of imagining losing the ones closest to me, and how that would be.

Of course, we are all heading toward our death. Or perhaps I should say, birth and death are inevitable and will take place, are taking place, and have taken place in the lives of all sentient beings. The Buddhists think the moment of death can be a moment of enormous spiritual significance and transformation. I don't fully understand their beliefs, but they are interested in scientifically monitoring the time of death of some of the great spiritual masters, who have already in a sense mastered the movement into death.