CITY OF LIGHT

The dreamer is a man, a member of a group of spiritual seekers under the guidance of a teacher:

I am with a woman whom I do not know personally, and I make a journey in search of something. We return to the high street empty-handed, having found nothing.

I go directly to my teacher's house and enter the room which leads to her garden. She is in the room, standing by the wall at my left and wearing black.

I look into the garden. As I do so the space in which the room, the teacher, and I exist undergoes a transformation, becomes a kind of "skeletal" space, in the matrix of which another dimension is revealed.

I see a city that appears to be made of light, or permeated with light. Completely integral, the city in the distance is like a great palace, unitary, unfragmented, whole. I see the city from end to end. The light of which it is composed is fascinating but difficult to describe. There are different levels or dimensions of light. "Dimensions" not in the sense of geometric relations inherent in our experience of physical space and perspective. Rather it is light-within-light, so to speak, something I cannot explain in terms of the logic of perceptions familiar to everyday waking consciousness.

When I was forty years old I was in California on sabbatical and I dreamed that I was showing people around a beautiful house that I lived in there. I said I would want to live here forever if it were not so far away from friends who are seekers on a spiritual path. Later in the dream there appeared a man who had devised an elaborate system of wooden levers which catapulted against a wall, thus collapsing the entire house. I came running to see it, as the house collapsed and then burned, while people were still assuring one another that it could never disintegrate: the house was as solidly designed as a nuclear power plant, they said.

In the next dream sequence, I found myself on a space ship. We learned that a member of the crew had been mysteriously killed. He had been cut in half, symmetrically bisected, with each half of the body intact. No one could figure out how such a thing could happen and we were all apprehensive about it occurring again. Suddenly I saw my wife taking care of our one-year old daughter in a nearby room and the door started to open. I cried out to warn her, but the door shut again.

At this point in the dream, I "woke up" and realized that it had all been a dream. Actually, I had "woken up" into another dream, but did not realize it. The phone started ringing. When I answered it, it was someone from my office. But I cut short the conversation because a call was coming in on another line. It was my friend Gretchen, who was working as a psychotherapist in a hospital in California. She told me that the mysterious bisection process was actually taking place in the hospital where she worked, in the same town where I was living in California. At that point, I turned to my wife and asked her directly, "Is what's happening right now a dream?" She said, no, you're awake, it's not a dream. But I knew it wasn't true, so I forced myself to wake up for real at that point.