DAO DREAMING
Recently I had a little comment-dialogue with one of my Taoist blogger/corrrespondents about sleeping dreams (in one of his several posts for Dec. 9, you'll have to search for the specific entry).  He says doesn't have any, a pity.  I have an active dream life, and this morning's was most interesting to me.

I've never been one to wake up to an alarm to jump out of bed into a shower (unless forced by circumstances---getting up at an early (unnatural, for me)  time to meditate was very difficult for me in Wudang). An alarm clock;  my mother throwing on the overhead light before dawn to get me up to go to school;  a cat poking me for food; a partner poking me for sex: all these abrupt awakenings are rude interruptions of a vital mental process, one of the purposes of sleep. I value a more gentle transition from the dream state to wakefulness, my body irrelevant while I review the dream and contemplate what it was telling me.  Maybe it is a kind of meditation.  A contemplation of meditation.

In this morning's dream, clearly derivative of my recent holiday in Hana, I was visiting a beach house with friends, and exploring a cliff down to a beach.  It was exquisitely beautiful, the vegetation, the water, the sea, stones and rocks, but very dangerous.  Obviously inspired by places I have been, but also with a unique but consistent geography, there is a country in my dreams, there are places I revisit and remember, just like the various places I visit in wake-time.  After exploring this beautiful spot, I wanted to go back and get my camera to record all these beautiful things (maybe for my blog)...I did, but by the time I assembled all the paraphenalia I needed to record those images (which now have the same reality in my memory--my brain-- as waking ones),  it was too late.  The light was gone, the opportunity was past.

As I was realizing this, another person (clearly modeled on someone from the current TVB DVDs I'm watching now, a con man in 1930s Guangzhou)  was raiding my friend's fridge to make a sandwich. "That's not your food, " I said.  "It's not yours either," he replied.

Then I was wandering in the dream garden where the surf was washing up over a dike lined with...tulips (I'd gone from the tropics to Holland?)... as I drifted up into my bed, waking up.

What were these dream images telling me?  Live in the moment.  Mind your own business.  Nothing is permanent.  A dao dream indeed.