Series: The Dream

A series of stories based in a dream.

The Dream

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series The Dream

A bit of fiction…

Alright, I’m going to try to describe the dream. Pretty much everyone agrees that, over the course of a day or so, we all had the same dream. Thing is, it wasn’t quite the same for everyone, and the differences keep anyone from trying to describe it. So, I’m going to try to describe it, first in as general terms as possible, then how I personally experienced it.

If you want, you can use this as a template, or starting point, to tell your own version of the dream.

The dream starts with an introduction- a being explaining that this communication was very hard to do and probably wouldn’t happen again.

The main message of the dream was a warning- something ancient was using human beings to destroy as many species as possible, and themselves in the process, in order to make things “simple” again. This is being accomplished by inducing a sense of separation, creating the drive to dominate and control.

The sense is then given that the dream itself is giving us a reminder that we’re all connected, but each experience life, like the dream, in a unique way.

The dream usually ends with something cryptically humorous.

It might have been because of what I had been reading at the time, or might have been something that I ate, but my version of the dream was microbial. The entity that spoke to me was a bacteria in my gut.

Getting into every person on the planet, at the same time, was no easy task, so, the bacteria explained, it was unlikely that this would happen again, especially if we don’t heed it’s warning.

It explained that it was communicating by tapping into my feelings and emotions- the details were made by the focus of my mind, turning the sensation into specific thoughts, ideas, words- the bacteria couldn’t understand this part, but it could read how I felt as I was thinking them.

According to the bacteria, the microbial world has diverse intelligences that are far more aware than we could possibly imagine. Some of those microbial entities worked long and hard nurturing us humans into existence. But, there was other parts of the microbial world, ancient parts, that were not happy with all this multicellular evolution stuff. They saw an opportunity with certain humans to set things back to a more unicellular world.

They realised that they could influence emotions in people, and in some people, they could induce states of isolation. This lead to a growing illusion of separateness, which the ancient ones leveraged to push some of these people towards the need for dominance.

Meanwhile, the microbes that want us to stick around keep trying to get us to reconnect and push us to create the tools that can stop and reverse the damage to the ecosphere.

So, while many humans have been engaged in wars over the last few millennia, another kind of war has been going on all around, and literally in, us.

At the end of the dream the bacteria induced a sense humorousness and the words that my mind formed from the sensation were-

“If you think this is crazy, don’t get me started about the phages.”

The Dream Part 2

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series The Dream

After reading the first person’s description of the dream, I thought I’d give it a stab myself.

The template is pretty close, so I’ll follow it, pointing out the little differences as they crop up…

The communication in the dream, for me, came from aliens/extra-terrestrials. The message was from benevolent beings, warning about malevolent ones.

They explained that there was a dimension that all consciousness through out the universe shares. Within that dimension, there is a singular, constantly advancing now- with scale and gravity influencing the speed at which an organism experiences that advancement. Most organisms in the universe are unaware of their connection to this dimension- it’s influence being as embedded and difficult to examine with deep understanding as gravity.

There are some species in the Universe, though, that have figured out how to study it. At some point there were some humans that figured it out- they managed to briefly connect with a couple of other species, but then lost connection, somewhat- there was a connection left open into a kind of collective human unconsciousness- an area of myths and dreams.

There was a group of aliens that decided to “help” humans by seeding certain ideas into our deepest dreams, to get us to “advance”- there was a couple of problems that arose though- one, was that the material conditions of humans are very different than these helpful aliens, these differences were pretty much impossible to discern through the mythic lens that the aliens were observing us through- and a lot of unforeseen consequences have started happening that put humans into danger.

These dangers would have been corrected for, but, the other issue that arose, was another group of, not so nice aliens, who, unknown to the “good” aliens, had started using humans for their amusement, and had caught on to the damage being done and were actively pushing the conditions to make the situation worse. Part of their agenda was also to keep humans from realizing the existence of the psycho-dimensional realm.

The dream came from the good aliens as an apology and warning- it was difficult for them to engineer and would probably not occur again any time soon.

At the end of the dream there was a weird interjection that the malicious aliens had figured out where the earth is and are on their way here physically. This was quickly followed up by an impression that they already arrived, but found out that they were microscopic compared to humans and initially could have no effect on us… maybe this then feeds into the first persons version of the dream…

The Dream Part 3

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series The Dream

Well, the first couple of versions by those other folks were kind of sci-fi, but for me, it was more supernatural. I experienced the ‘beings’ as the spirits of all the loved ones I’ve lost- it was both joyous and heart wrenching, to witness again, for a moment, iridescence glimpses of the deeply familiar, seeing briefly, the souls that are the shape of the holes in my heart.

The spirits told me that, while it’s almost impossible now, it used to be easy for them to speak to us, just as most ghosts don’t know what or where to be once they’re dead, we’ve forgotten how to see them, we don’t make the spaces for them to be in anymore. Traditions rooted in the ‘natural’ world, the animals, plants and soil- that we’re very much a part of, is where ghosts, our ancestors, used to find the spaces to be in, in a way that they could help guide and nurture us in the cycles of our lives.

We built ancient earthworks as the bones of living structures for spirits to be in, allowing us to have a deep relationship with them. They worked in harmony with the land they occupied to provide the space for spirit to grow into living matter and express itself in the plants and animals (including the human ones).

The problem started, the spirits said, when some of the ancient ones got tired of things constantly changing and started to instill a fear of death in some of the living. This lead to the creation of symbols on paper and the abstraction of head from body, and spirit from the context of being.

I could feel the collective excitement, in these spirits communicating with me, they had, for the moment of the Dream, a purpose, otherwise, most ghosts had no where to be anymore- there was a lining up of numerous factors to allow the Dream to happen in this modern world- with it’s obsession with not seeing the spiritual, unless it’s locked into a reductive dogma that silences the voice it’s claiming to listen to- and there wasn’t likely to be a repeat any time soon.

They left me with a request, though- to make spaces in my life for them to be, even if I can’t hear or see them- to spend time reflecting quietly in places of significance. Allow time for those I’ve lost to touch my heart so that they will have a place to be. And, to nurture the creation of places of life for them, and eventually me, to grow into. To bring life back to death and reconnect with the cycles of living and dying.

They didn’t leave me with a joke- but something does strike me as kind of funny- am I making this better or worse by committing this story to words?

The Dream Part 4

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series The Dream

My experience of the Dream came from the imaginal realm, I suppose- what communicated with me was all the lesser known and forgotten stories. The place of Dreams isn’t far from the space created between the story teller and the listener, and the membrane can become porous at times.

It’s really hard to get everything that isn’t something, to come together to be something cohesive, so the Dream was a bit of a fluke, and isn’t likely to happen again, the stories managed to say, in unity, through the magic of the Dream. These were all the stories with nuance, ambiguity and raw situational clarity. Deeply personal and specific (in-jokes and asides with a crowd of one), to draw that into a single declarative voice was definitely a one shot deal.

The Dream was a warning about the story of the conquering hero, and how it was absorbing and erasing all the other stories. A while ago, the conquering hero got the impression that if enough people believed in it, it would become “real and immortal”, and so, it set about to make itself the only story told- to turn all tales into a simplistic battle of good versus evil, the world reduced to binary black and white, with itself at the centre as saviour.

There was a mounting crisis that had brought about the need for the Dream- as the conquering hero has been realizing that it will never be ‘real’, that nothing based on life is immortal, in the physical sense, all the stories are turning bleak and lifeless. The realization of it’s own inevitable end has lead the conquering hero’s story into a destructive arc of dominance and annihilation.

The Dream, for me, was a plee to get us to see past the centre and realize there’s more to the world than this flattened Earth.

The trick, it would seem, is how to dis-empower the conquering hero without turning them into a villain and repeating the same story, yet again.

The Dream Part 5

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series The Dream

The people that communicated with me in the Dream were from the future. It was difficult for them to pull off affecting all the people in the world at the same time, but they also let me know that they would not be contacting people of the past again because it was making the future… complicated.

For a long time, they were only able to observe the past, without being able to affect it. What they discovered, was that people from our time period in particular, had little to no psychic defences. Part of it seemed due to individuals being psychically isolated from each other, our environment and even to ourselves internally- we “live in our heads”, relating to everything through constructed abstractions. This allowed the people from the future to influence us without us realizing we were being affected by something outside of ourselves- our obsession with being autonomous rational actors preventing us from examining, and questioning, the roots of our ration, giving them the opportunity to implant ideas that we assumed were our own. This, however, lead to unintended consequences.

Those consequences were not initially apparent. At first, it seemed like their actions had no real affect whatsoever, but they slowly started to realize what they had done. What they did didn’t affect their timeline, but rather, it created new timelines that started to grow in parallel to their own. Some of those timelines developed the ability to influence, and compete, with their own, a complicated turn, to say the least.

So the Dream was an attempt to nip the problem in the bud. To give us the heads up on how we may be being influenced and maybe develop some psychic defences against such influences.

As the Dream was ending, however, I got another impression entirely. I got the sense that the Dream was actually coming from one of the parallel timelines as an attempt to weaken the original one, so who knows where we’ll end up.