The Cheapest of Thrills

My class at the Zen Center is rolling along pleasantly. It will be over in December. I’m enjoying getting to know the members of my peer group better, and one day I had lunch with a couple of the other students before an afternoon session of the class.

I’ve taken to having dinner at Ananda Fuara before evening sessions of the class or meetings with my peer group, and that is a nice thing to do.

I have a new hospice visitee (I guess I'll call her B.), a 91-year-old who is very bright and positive and is interested in lots of things, and asks me a lot of questions. She confided that a lot of people are there in hospice because they’re going to die, but she personally is not going to, at least not in the foreseeable future, so she needs to figure out where she’s going to live next. She observed that her dying housemates don’t seem to do much. I said that people who are dying might be rather weary; they might want to rest.

She has tons of friends and a devoted family, and I can see why. She is a pleasure to be around.

I finally found out who my new boss will be—and then two days later, that person got laid off, so now I don’t know again, but my boss’s boss and my boss’s boss’s boss came to town and took us to lunch at Lark Creek, which was a treat. I had a Portobello mushroom sandwich on “griddled” bread and fresh-squeezed lemonade. Our boss’s boss said her boss told her, “This group is functioning very well—don’t mess it up!”

I repeated that to an officemate who said, “You mean, that’s what they said to your face,” and then he laughed uproariously.

Well, James Howard Kunstler says our way of life is going to change radically—he thinks we’ve passed the peak of oil production already.

He writes in the latest issue of The Sun: “If you’re a mortgage broker or work in the financial industry, you might consider whether there’s something else you’d rather do with your life. You won’t make as much money doing it, but maybe it will be rewarding in other ways. You might buy ten acres of land and start growing table greens, become a paramedic, or find some other focus for your energy that would make you useful to your fellow human beings during the coming crisis.”

I was reading that on the steps of the Zen Center one evening earlier this week after dinner at Ananda Fuara, and reflecting that I had heard something very similar at a conference on 9/11. I attended that conference with Sir Dave, Mr. 9/11 himself, and just as I was thinking about that, Sir Dave hove into view. I hadn’t seen him in a while. He is recently and majorly bereaved. That does not make anything easier.

My lucid dreaming practice seems to be interfering with sleep less and less, thank goodness. In fact, it hardly does at all now.

Here’s my latest lucid dream, a mere week and a half after the last one: I was either seeing hypnagogic imagery, or dreaming that I was; probably the latter. I recalled that one way of inducing a lucid dream is to follow hypnagogic imagery into sleep, and then to “step into” the dream, so I stepped into a cool evening with a deep blue sky and tried three methods of increasing the vividness of a dream: I said “Increase lucidity,” I tried to focus on a detail—my hands—and I rubbed my hands together. None worked, and the visuals completely disappeared.

But I was still lucid, so I decided to try to fly, something I have never, ever done in a dream, to my knowledge. The closest I’ve come is bounding down stairs in long leaps I wouldn’t be able to do in waking life without breaking my leg, or both legs.

I halfheartedly made as if to spring into the air, but I didn’t want to attempt something that wouldn’t work, because I didn’t want to conclude that it’s difficult for me to fly—I was thinking all of this in the dream—so instead I gently pushed off as if I were pushing off from the side of a swimming pool, and I floated along a foot or so above the grass, more like a fish in the water than a bird in the air. Maybe I was more swimming than flying, but whatever it was, I was liberated from the constraints of gravity.

Then, still without being able to see a thing, I arched my back and had the impression I was going far up, maybe as far as the cosmos, but I couldn’t be sure, because I couldn’t see. And then I woke up.

This is really a fun and interesting thing, and it’s having a good effect on my waking life. I just feel freer and more open—when I walk down the street of my own free will, going here or going there as the spirit takes me, I think what it would be like to do that in a lucid dream: it would be thrilling, and so I’m a little thrilled now just walking down the street.