Dream walk

Mark Dohle: The other morning I got up for one of my walks. It was very early, about 1:30. The walk started off well, for one of the best moments is simply opening the door and stepping out into the darkness, embracing the feeling of expansiveness that comes from looking up at the night sky, the stars and best of all the moon, in all of it’s phases. Usually I find it easy to meditate as I slowly take my steps around the property. Or if I can’t meditate and quiet my mind, using my prayer rope helps a great deal in keeping me centered and in the moment. However this one morning this did not happen which grabbed my attention for some reason.

As I was walking I would over and over again lose myself in a ‘walking dream’, or “day dream’ if you prefer. I would lose all sense of myself as being present to the moment. I would wake up out of my meanderings and again quiet my mind, only to be swallowed up again in my walking dream. Most of my walk was done in an almost unconscious state and when it was over this experience stuck with me. I noticed this because as stated above, my mind tends to be calm in the wee hours and I can easily be present to the actual moment that I am in. This often becomes more and more difficult as the day proceeds.

Who am I? My thoughts do not make up who I am, since for the most part they are compulsive; tapes that wind and unwind most of the time. Dreaming (daydreaming) about the past, worrying about the future, or listening to inner tapes that make up scenarios about some unresolved issues played out with those I live with as the unknowing participants. It is like going through the day lost in my unconscious, lost to the present that I move through without actually being there. So yes perhaps my everyday consciousness if not checked is not much more than a dream, a world of mirrors in which I play out my inner dramas with others, who are only there for me to take on my projections and transference’s. The less inner awareness the more outer drama I guess.

Are we always dreaming, even when awake? Is enlightenment merely waking up to this reality, at least as far as living in this world is concerned? What does it mean to be awake? I am not sure I have been awake enough to really know. What would it be like to truly see the one before me? Is it even possible? If it is, what is the bridge that allows this? I don’t necessarily think it is language that leads to this, though of course to truly try to listen is a beginning. I would think that hell would be a state of eternal dreaming, where the only important character is the one having the dream, powerless to see others as something more than mere extensions of ones inner nightmare.

[Read More at Unexplained Mysteries]