Seven months before my husband
was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I was
plagued by a series of unsettling dreams;
some pointed unequivocally to his subsequent
death; others spoke as oracles did with
forked tongues. However, there was one dream
in particular that convinced me not only of
life beyond life as we know it, but also of
life beyond death.
I was awakened by my husband’s
voice: ”Who’s coming up the stairs?”
And I remembered seeing in my dream two
translucent shadows ( like wings) coming up
the stairs and standing before us at the foot
of our bed. These were strange beings without
human features, shapeless, giving the
impression of wings—translucent, elusive
wings. Yet I knew somehow they were wise and
sentient beings, deep with a knowing beyond
this world. They were coming for my husband.
I placed my hand over his body. Not now, not
yet, I said.
In retrospect, I see these
dreams as shifts in alignment, much like the
moving and sliding of plates on the outer
earth surface when a stressed fault ruptures.
Our sensory apparatus, responding to our own
psychic and emotional fault lines, tilt and
move to match the incline of new perceptual
fields. When that happens, we open floodgates
to new images and metaphors, new ways of
seeing.
If we are indeed matter
evolving towards consciousness, then dreams
have a large role in bringing us to
consciousness. The inner realm parallels the
outer realm in ways that defy logic. And the
outer world, far from being random,
reverberates with echoes of its own inner
state. In the few months preceding the
diagnosis of my husband’s illness, our
outer world was shaking with signs of our
dismantling: our youngest son developed
problems at school, appliances in the house
kept breaking down one after the other—the
fridge, washing-machine, garage door,
furnace. It seemed a major upheaval in our
lives was being announced on every level of
consciousness.
Strange as this situation may
seem to those who firmly believe in a solid-
matter world ( as I once did), the
possibility of dreams being precognitive or
prophetic is not really so far-fetched if one
considers recent developments in the field of
physics. Here the search for solid matter has
uncovered a paradox—that things are in
reality “no-thing.” The search for what
actually makes up matter has brought the
physicist face to face with empty space or
vacuum. But this vacuum is not really empty
at all; it is a bubbling sea of wave
potential—un-manifested electrons, virtual
(but not fictional) electrons that can
materialize, that is, become positive
particles when sufficient energy is made
available to them. If enough energy is added
to the zero-point field of quantum vacuum,
this empty space is capable of spontaneously
giving birth to bits of real, tangible ”stuff.”
Such is the theory behind Big Bang—the
birth of the Universe.
In effect then, according to
quantum theory, something can come out of
nothing. Yet this something is temporary at
best, for the Universe is overwhelmingly
nothing. We are nothing. We, like matter,
spontaneously bubble up and disappear; we,
like the particles, erratically dissolve into
wave functions. We are temporary states,
insubstantial as dreams.
Humbling as this notion may
be, it is the only way we can access
infinity, the only way we can understand that
we are more than our physical bodies. Might
dreams be the avenue through which we connect
to the field of global consciousness? Might
dreams be part of the brain’s ability to
access a realm beyond space and time that
embraces not only the present, but past and
future as well?
It is this ability that Joseph
Chilton Pearce so passionately argues for in
“Evolution’s End” ( Harper San
Francisco : 1992) where he points to our
innate ability to move beyond space and time.
This is the same ability he sees in the
idiot-savant ( so popularly characterized in
“Rain Man”). Pearce gives as examples the
“calendrical twins,” who have both been
institutionalized since age 7. The twins
cannot fend for themselves or add up simple
numbers; yet, they have demonstrated the most
remarkable mathematical ability. They can,
for example, give instantaneous responses to
questions like these: Which date will Easter
fall on 10,000 years from now? Assuming that
there is one grain of rice on the first of 64
squares and assuming that the grain is
doubled on each subsequent square, how many
grains of rice will there be on the final
square?
How is it that these “savants”
who can neither read nor write be capable of
such highly complex mathematical skills? asks
Pearce. His suggestion is that somehow their
brains have been able to resonate with a
narrow spectrum of field knowledge.
Intelligence exists as separate fields of
capacity and the twins have been able to
access a spectrum of these fields.
So can we - if we allow
ourselves this capacity by cultivating the
wave-form potential within us. The choice is
ours to develop this potential by nurturing
our power of connection through dream work,
meditation, brain entrainment, prayer,
through ways that allow us to be in touch
with the field beyond space and time. This we
can do by making time for Spiritwork -
silence, solitude, inwardness. Spiritwork
asks that we listen to ourselves, our bodies
and know what speaks within.
Most of all, it asks that we
surrender the self in order to find it. And
this is why the path is most fruitful because
the self that surfaces eventually is
shapeless, translucent, elusive like dreams,
yet deep with a sense that surpasses all
understanding.
Mary Desaulniers is a
retired schoolteacher and writer. You can
visit her website at
(greatbodyat50.com/SpiritWorks.php)