The New Esoterics
The new sequence involves active, standing and sitting meditations. Phase one is the Flying Tiger routine. Phase two is Holding Up Heaven with weights. I’ve started with a very easy 5 lbs. Phase three is sitting meditation.
Flying Tiger is very mild, but it is helping to work out the issues I have in my Achilles tendon. Meditation tonight was beginning to feel quite good, though I cannot pin down the source of the pleasure.
My dreaming run continued. After spending days running a pizza restaurant, I was back at university and attending classes I’d skipped for a long time. It was funny, there wasn’t any stress involved, really. I stepped right into the flow of things and instead of tough science classes and overdue papers, I was in laid back classrooms with very sociable people.
I had a little core group of my own which included a man I once traveled around the world with in real life. Our relationship (a loosely applied term) was short and went through some bizarre twists, but I was glad to see him and our conversation, shared with a third young guy, was hilarious and warm.
I went on to find them in my next class. In this room, there were a few seats and tables, but most people lined up against the long, curved wall at the back of the room. However, there was a ladder on a pivot between the chairs and the standing people. I walked over to it and stepped up and laid down on it and it tipped back so that I wasn’t quite prone, sort of in the mad scientists’ preferred experiment position.
I didn’t mind being the center of attention, but didn’t want to have to witness it, so I pulled my scarf up to cover my eyes and relaxed there. The professor entered and started class. Part of the experiment for my group was to tie me to the ladder. I was dragged to the periphery of the room and a nylon rope woven through the rungs to secure my feet, working its way up to my hips.
I don’t usually have issues with claustrophobia, but I have been having a couple of incidents per year, usually mild. I have them in dreaming occasionally when I’m forced through small spaces or I can’t breathe. This time, I lost it, though. Something set me off and I freaked out and began begging and fighting the bonds, even though my upper body was free.
And he saved me. He stepped up and pulled one of the people aside, held him by the arm, quietly spoke into his ear. Then he came over and calmed me and began to untie me from the ladder. I can’t properly express how touching, how gentle and caring the whole incident felt.
Once I was off the ladder, I was fine, perhaps a little flustered, but not ashamed. All I felt was relief and a deep gratitude to him. Far better than most of all of the other feelings I’ve had relating to him. I did something quite foreign to me. I walked up to him and laid my head on his chest–against the deep black wool of the pea coat he wore–and wrapped my arms around him and was baldly vulnerable and open. I hugged him and said thank you.
Then I walked away to my next class, remembering in the doorway that he would be there, too. That made me happy. In fact, I was so happy that I didn’t mind that I had no clothes on now, just a couple of items in my hands I was using to loosely cover myself.
I passed a couple of older men who stared and one who was probably a bit of a perv. He struck up a conversation and I chatted with him, even though I had a running dialogue in my head sizing him up. I got on the transportation to my next class and he took the seat next to me. He wasn’t dangerous, just a little weird (not in an interesting way).
My next stress came when the transport took off. It was made like a clamshell, with seats open all around the circumference. Like sitting inside a hamburger bun-shaped fair ride, with a top above and a platform below. The seats had no belts or handholds and we shot up into the air. Flying again, but not pleasantly.
I reached under my seat to discover a couple of finger or thumb grips, which I latched onto for dear life. In my head, I was calculating the chances of my being able to hold 170 lbs from falling out to my death with only two fingers and a thumb. I was slightly relieved to find that we flew fairly straight and level. Until we arrived at the destination and the pilot flipped the whole bun over.
I closed my eyes tight, tried to keep my stomach from flying out my mouth and gripped like mad, sure I was about to be flung hundreds of yards. Then I was suddenly at the disembarkation point and off. I realized we’d overshot my stop by several blocks, but remembered the map and that I needed to go west, so I began walking.
I passed through an elementary school sidewalk where someone had put up thin metal wires like spiderwebs across the stairs. I caught one in the throat, then ducked and scraped my way down to where students were arriving on buses. I figured the kids were short enough to make it without a problem, but why would anyone do this. However, I did lose my bizarro older companion (who used the ride to get a bit too close to me) in the maze, so it was worth the trip.
Obviously a healing dream, repairing old wounds, me fixing me and probably nothing at all to do with him, but it was still nice. A positive energy that extends out into real world feelings, even though nothing in that regard has changed substantially. We meet a mess, we part a mess and we damage each other in between. All we can do is try to fix ourselves and hope that’s enough.