I often remember a series of dreams after waking. After a long night of dreaming especially, but also during shorter bursts. The dreams I was having during the days around Stephen’s services were getting extremely vivid – emotionally and spiritually charged in a way I don’t often experience. I believe those qualities are always present while dreaming on some level, but everything intensified during that time.
I’ve been thinking about what may have led to this specifically. Grief is too broad a word for it. I think the fundamental thing that happened in that time was that I gave myself a pause – to sit with my feelings, to feel them, to be with friends, and more deeply to be with love. Losing Stephen cracked me open. It opened me to loving my friends more consciously, to trying to love him – which then means loving something without an obvious physical form. And perhaps loving something greater than any one person. Something eternal. Or something simpler. Right now eternity feels quite simple to me. I was feeling the timeless quality of the present moment – not something vast and distant, but something immediate and close.
The night after the viewing I had one of the most vivid dreams of my life.
In the dream, from the point I could remember, I was at a house party. It felt like LA. I felt a bit anxious and out of place, so I was quietly making my way out when I bumped into a guy while passing through a doorway. I apologized immediately and politely, but he was angry and had violence in his eyes. He would hear nothing of what I spoke. He and his friends pursued me as I tried to make my way out.
I could feel many eyes upon me. I was clearly an outsider in this place. I could sense how badly they all intended to stop me – these men intended to hurt me. With growing intensity I tried to escape, outside and inside, and they followed. Then when I was cornered, a stranger showed me the way out, showed me the way to safety.
I found myself in another house with a couple of old friends. I felt much safer, but not at ease. I could sense these men were still looking for me. Still in pursuit.
With some intention I walked through a doorway – and suddenly I was standing inside what looked like an observation deck. A round structure built of what looked like bronze or brass, possibly copper. Roughly 30 feet across, with large windows all around.
I was scared at first. I felt trapped. And then I realized – there is no time here. I had never been without the burden of past and future. But this was a place outside of time. And with that realization I no longer sensed that burden. No past, no present, no future. It felt eternal.
I was no longer scared. I felt a deep contentment as I looked around and saw an environment unlike anything I had ever seen or imagined. In every direction – a vast expanse of what looked like mountains made of clouds, or clouds made of mountains. I didn’t recognize what I was seeing as purely solid, liquid, or gas. Whatever it was, it was also colorful – like sunsets, like all the colors of sky mixed together, all around me in every direction.
I didn’t want to leave this place. I didn’t want to wake up. So I thought – I must take this in. Make the most of this.
Some grand question came to mind. Without speaking, I asked this question directly to the timeless expanse.
The response was immediate. A rumbling like thunder’s roar burst and tore through the atmosphere. It was like no sound I have ever heard, yet I could understand it in words right away.
I remember everything about that experience – the fear and the contentment, the colorful clouds of mountains, the rumbling, the sense that I was not in one place, that there was no gravity, that I couldn’t tell whether there was glass in the windows or only open air. I remember being overwhelmed. I remember being humbled.
I don’t remember what I asked. And I don’t remember the words that sounded in my head when the answer came.
I seemed to wake up.
Outside now. Bird songs and wind in the grass. Deeper gusts and the tree chimes. The grass dances before me. I sway with it, moving with it, dancing in the wind.
Deeper still – in the distance – the sounds of people, my brothers and sisters in this world, ripping and roaring and cruising along their way.
Funny sounds of chickens and frogs
And dog barks here and there all around me
Closer to my heart — Loki rustles in the grass
Om is chewing rubber
Streams of wind, like strings, crescendo from every direction
An interruption. A motorcycle ripping down the road. Taken out of it.
I held on to the moment for some time. I was talking about dreams, but the music of the moment overwhelmed me. So I wrote it down. I spoke it.
I took something inside me – a feeling, an image in motion, a thought, an intangible idea – and I wrote it down, and I spoke it, and with that gave it a tangible place in this world.
ericprincessdragon 
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