DreamTime – It is a pleasure communicating with you.
I have written about duality – a little – here is a small piece
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/what-we-need-to-remember-about-us-3/#DualBeing But it is a huge subject, and I barely hinted at it in this piece, for it is everywhere, in the difference between the sexes, the poles of birth and death, the outer world and the inner world – on and on.
But more directly about what you were mentioning, here is a series of lucid dreams.
I had been exploring my dreams as fully as I could, and also trying to get under the surface of my mind, so to speak. Then one night I had the following dream. In it I was looking at a plant, rather like a fern. As I watched it unfolded rapidly, its leaves growing before me. At that point I suddenly became aware that there was an unfolding process in my body as long held tensions dropped away, and the dream image of the plant was an expression of this. Waking up like this while I was at the same time fully asleep was incredibly exciting. It enabled me, as it were, to look around and see what was going on. So I could be acutely aware that the dream image of the plant was not a random mental activity. The process and the image were one thing, perhaps like an electrical spark creating light. The light isn’t the electricity, but at the same time it wouldn’t be there without electrical power, and it is a visual experience of what would otherwise be invisible or unknown. The dream plant was a visual and feeling way of knowing what was occurring inside myself.
Not very long afterwards I had another dream of a similar nature. This time as I dreamt I woke up again, and because of the previous dream, realised that the things I could see around me in the dream, were projections of my own inner processes.
Once again I felt incredibly excited because it was a totally different situation to what I had ever been before. I wanted to make use of it, so I pursued the question of what of myself were the images portraying. Straight away I seemed to burst through a surface and there were no longer dream images. Instead I was directly perceiving activities in my body.
It is quite difficult to describe, but I could see that all the time the processes were on the move, like flowing streams, many of them, meeting and interacting. In particular I noticed two things. I had a chest infection at the time, probably a virus, and I could ‘see’ the processes of my body - not seen as blood flow, or nerves, but almost like flows of energy manifesting as forms - dealing with the infection. It reminded me of something quite plant like as the healing process or action circulated or flowed along delicate channels.
Then my attention turned to the area of my body corresponding with my neck. I describe it this way because my sense of my body was quite different to what it is normally. It appeared to me more, as I have said, like flows of interacting energy. In my neck there was a problem due, as I could see to an emotional attitude that was causing muscular tension. The tension was interfering with the healthy movement of activities and energy between trunk and head. It was obvious that if the blockage remained, it would gradually lead to actual physical illness. The offending emotion was what one might call pride, self righteousness or stiff necked.
Still later this was followed by a third dream that was a sort of culmination. Once more I woke up in sleep and dreams. I broke through the dream imagery to the realm of constant movement and activity which underlie the dreaming process. Once established there, recalling the previous two dreams, I wondered if there were other levels still. Perhaps this level was itself an expression of something still unmet. I immediately felt the world of change dissolve, as did my sense of self. What was left was existence but without focus, without differentiation. It wasn’t as if ‘I’ didn’t exist, but any focus had gone and ‘I’ had melted into a vast ocean or universe of awareness in which there were no opposites. It simply was, perpetual, unmoving, yet the source of all the changing world I thought of as reality.
Yet somehow, although I did not have a focused self to carry on thinking, my question was still apparently working, for there was a level beyond that which I now awoke in - still in the sleep state. ‘I’ along with the world of change existed, but at the same time as the world of change, ‘I’ was involved, merged, inextricable at one with the changeless. In this state I realised that in everyday life my mind slaughtered this wonder and presented the world to me as if everything were divided, and there was only change and death. Or that my normal self was a long way off from this changeless self, giving the feeling that one had to do something extraordinary to get to it. The fact I now saw was that in the midst of the changing and dying – my everyday body self – the changeless and deathless abides. The rational mind finds it hard to accept such a contradiction. But I think this is because we usually see only our surface self, which lives and dies.
Tony