A Living Magazine - Day 257 - Homecoming - Burlington: Fire in a Madhouse

Walking over a field near the ocean, there were no trees at all. I watched a jet plane flying far away and very high up. Then suddenly, I felt a hand on my shoulder. When I turned around there was an old man with no teeth smiling at me. His face was brown with the nicotine leathery look and deep wrinkles of a very hard life. His irises were a cloudy gray and redness covered the rest. He had a ripped up Greek sailor's hat on. He was just kind of standing there laughing.

I looked around and realized I was no longer outside anymore. It was so odd. There seemed to be no outside at all. It was an indoor world. It really felt as though it were an indoor universe. The rooms were brightly colored--painted, but also some had very elaborate tapestries, filled with complex designs. There were no ceilings; only some artificially-lit surfaces high above. 

Every room was different. I would walk into one and see a bunch of street people gathered around a trash can fire. In the next room was a bar, where a few very intoxicated folks just sat nursing their drinks--not talking. And, there were no doors at all. Every room could be entered through a doorway, but none could be closed off.

I began to get the impression that this was just too weird for any reality I'd ever been to. In one room were thousands of fortunes from fortune cookies, carefully pasted to the wall. When standing back from them, certain mosaic-like images would appear. One was like a window. It was like a photo-mosaic of the natural world, made of hundreds of paper fortunes. I leaned in to try reading some of these, but I just could not focus my eyes. I knew there were words printed, but the letters would all jumble up when I tried to read them. That's when I realized I was dreaming, and then entered the lucid awareness state!

As I have discussed many times now, lucid awareness is my term for the phenomenon of lucid dreaming.^[1,2,3,4,5]  It has evolved with each of my experiences. When I first began to enter these states I had enormous control over everything in the scene (storyline, characters, places, actions, etc...). I also realized for the first time - with an experience one Memphis morning - that the Spark was behind all of this. It made some of my dreams so weird that I would be forced to realize I was dreaming. It also has shown me that the sleeping mind is the very best arena for direct communication between the Spark and myself. When awake, most of the time, sensory input from the everyday world was simply eclipsing the very subtle messages from the Spark. I have become prone to pacing back and forth around safe sleep spots at the end of the day as a way of communing. Also, occasionally on long distance walks, I drift into a meditative state where I can understand more about what the Spark has to show me.

It has become counterintuitive that I have lost more personal control over the lucid awareness state. One might think that an evolving process of gaining a greater degree of understanding about the relationship with this spiritual entity would naturally lead to greater mind control. It seems - though I am not quite sure yet if this truly is the case - that my unconscious mind is agreeing ahead of time to relinquish some aspects of control now, so that I might more fully be led by the story line that the Spark is presenting. In this particular case, it was a bit of a drag to have made that agreement...

I kept trying to find a room in this endless maze where I could just be alone for a while and practice some of the lucid techniques I'd used in the past. But, every time I'd get to a place by myself, some poor sod would walk in and start talking or joking around. I gave up for a while, and just went back to the place where street people were around their fire.

When I arrived there were a lot more people there. I noticed there were no women at all. Every guy in this wacky world was a street person. One guy was following me around and pulled open his coat to reveal a whole bunch of different kinds of cannabis. In his broken English, he would point to each: "...dis is the 'purple schmurple,' and heeah some 'golden lion's tale,' oh and over heeah we have 'Guana grenade'..." on and on. He wasn't selling it, he was just trying to give it away. Normally, I would have been pretty interested, but I was much more interested in trying to find a way out of this place, that was now seeming more and more like a mental institution. 

The patients could wear anything they liked and do anything they wanted. They just couldn't leave. And, it appeared, I was one of them. Finally, I snuck out the doorway and down a long hall, where silk curtains hung. I tried to look behind them but there were just painted walls. Finally, I found a stairway and climbed it to a room that was high above all the other rooms. I could see that the maze was infinite in every direction. It was laid out like a grid. And, like the fortune cookie papers, it made up a photomosaic of different images. Mostly, they were images of grassy fields and ocean vistas, much like the one I had been walking in before the old man grabbed my shoulder. Everything was in low light. The surface far above seemed to be illuminated intentionally to mimic twilight--a pale bluish orange.

I knew I could wake my body up at any point, but I really wanted to solve the strange mystery of what this place really was. The Spark hardly ever speaks. And in the lucid aware state the whole idea is to navigate by meaning; skipping over the vulgar mechanics of speech and words, and going straight into beholding the meaning of concepts. 

Since I was alone now, I tried some lucid techniques. The first, and one of my favorites, was to press my hand into the surface of the wall, letting it sink through the psychic molecules. I could feel my fingers pass through the proportionately colder material, which was kind of like a muddy cardboard.

Then I pulled my hand out and the wall was unchanged. Then, all at once I heard a lot of yelling. And orange streaks of light flickered across the inside walls of this upper room. It was a fire! Somehow these characters had let their fire get out of control. And, it spread rapidly. Whole sections of the grid were choking up with black smoke and fingerlike flames. Like rats, the people were filing into the halls, running in every direction, and someone saw me above them.

Like a zombie movie they began running up the steps, crawling up the walls, and coming over the tops of the ceilingless room. Remembering that I was lucid, I simply held my hand up and thought them back defensively. But there were so many, they kept piling into the room. With my mind I was pushing them more and more densely against the walls. Yet, they would break free and run up behind me, pushing and poking at me. They wanted me to do something about the fire, but none seemed able to express that one simple thought. As I pushed them away, I tried to divide my attention toward extinguishing the flames. Not being a very good multitasker, I was unable to do both. I decided to wake up--and did.

* * * * * * *

How incredibly frustrating! It wasn't a nightmare. I knew that escape through waking was a constant option. But, that I could be lucid and not able to just have my way with the situation, baffled me. I had forgotten that I could fly within this state. I'd forgotten that I could simply remove or remake characters. It taught me that even when I have complete potential power in a situation my own choice to limit that power raised the stakes and increased the actual challenges I faced, exponentially. It occurred to me that I had entered a new phase of psychic training: Self-induced limitation. 

It is also strange to relate that even though I knew all of this took place completely within my own consciousness, everything was SO real, that I still had the lingering and bothersome worry that maybe all of those characters never put the fire out. Maybe their whole world was destroyed? Maybe I could have saved them if I'd stayed longer? The thought is ludicrous as I think about it now, just how emotionally involved I was in the story line.

Not much else would happen on this day. I packed up and returned to Starbucks, publishing a post and processing a bunch of photos which I also uploaded. A donation came in from a regular donor and it made my whole day. 

Just before sunset, I left to find a place to eat. I was very excited. I felt that I'd gained some strength just with the knowledge that I would be able to eat on this day. I saw a burger place but was still having a serious aversion to burgers. Then I saw a Hibachi Buffet. Don't know how I'd missed that on Google, but there it was. 

I went in and asked the price. The server told me it was $10.23. Good enough! I won't bore you with all of the messy details, but this was not my favorite Asian style buffet. The sushi was bland and mostly variations of imitation crabmeat California rolls. The salad bar was mostly lettuce and not much choice for other items. That left the standard fatty, salty food. I got some rice and tried to eat some other vegetables. I was filled up quickly due to having had little to nothing recently, but it was not the healthiest feeling. 

I had just this one last night to spend in Burlington and then would begin my march to Durham the next day. So, I decided not to risk looking for another sleep spot and just returned to the one near the Nissan Dealer, taking some sunset shots along the way...

Orange sky over I-85.

Lord! No wonder we have a country with so many hair-trigger fools.

There are NO THREATS folks! Take it from me. I live at the bottom, I see it all.

I am with every kind of human being just about every single day.

The above is a lie. Think about it. In all of the strange and seedy places I've been,

when have I ever faced an armed threat? Hell, besides a beer bottle thrown at me in Memphis,

when have I ever faced any threat at all? It is a non issue, dressed up,

in a size five dress, with pumps, pearls and lipstick.

Back at the sleep spot, the leaves had dried considerably. And the tent itself took very little time to dry. I excavated the surface of the ground more carefully and removed some sticks , then brushed a few leaves into the space before setting up the tent. Sleep came quickly and would be a lot less adventurous than that morning had been.