Or "History Repeating Itself in Factalian Patterns"

This picture was on the template for this page, but I liked it, so I thought I'd keep it. It features Venice, a city surrounded and permeated by water. Water is often a symbol of the subconscious in dreams, a representation of that which is hidden below the surface, out of view. It is also an archetype for change, growth, death and rebirth. It swirls and ripples, always in motion but never the same--the waves creating familiar, fractal patterns as unique as snowflakes and fingerprints. And yes, water destroys as much as it creates; it washes away as well as washes clean. Amy and I were in Venice last spring. It was beautiful but cold.

Last night I dreamt I was at a peace rally. It should be noted that in the waking life, there was a peace march in the city yesterday against the impending second war with Iraq. I did not attend, but Amy's mom did. Aside from the war, things are about as depressing as they have ever been, both in our personal lives and the world at large. There is economic, social and political turmoil that seems to be an amalgamation of the worst parts of the 1930's and 40's--as dark a vision as Orwell dared to dream.

And Amy has been diagnosed with breast cancer at the tender age of thirty.

To compound things, I've gotten a new position that demands much time that I find I do not have and am not particularly willing to give. I find myself wondering if I give a damn, but then working long and late just in case I do. Perhaps I am hiding in work, just as I hid by playing pool every night when our kitty Buddy was sick with cancer--something I know I'll forever regret, but I just didn't know how to deal with it, and I thought I needed the levity--though work is anything but levity. We don't know what will happen, but continue to hope for the best. Suffice it to say, it is a dark time that has come in the midst of a lapse of faith for me. Though I consider myself a disciple of Dr. Jung, I can't deny the human, psychological need for a belief in something--if not a Hereafter, then a Whomafter or a Whatafter or a Great Whatever--the Collective Unconscious, the Tao. I see the patterns, the supposed evidence of It's being, in the rings in trees and in seashells and the swirls and swells of sea water reflected in the spinning dance of galaxies, in the day turning to night in hushed hues, in the same crimson and auburn of a leaf curling like a fetus for a long winter's nap, in the ebb and flow, in the death and rebirth, in fecundity and decay--and I can't help but breathe the beauty, the poignant and pungent beauty that brings me to tears like an autumnal allergy.

And yet. . .

The mythology that occurs in cultures across humanity is uncanny, but does it really point to anything more than a common need to fill an emptiness? It boils down to the question: Did God create us or did we create Him? Then there is the Other Pertinent Question: Maybe it is all silence when we go. Maybe it is peaceful, big sleep. This is not so bad. Or even scary. I've acclimated to the idea. I like to sleep in. This could be the Great Saturday Morning. And, to sleep, as, Hamlet says, then perchance to dream, which brings us in short order to the point of this ranting preface. Maybe, like dream time, those last moments can take us to a place, a kind of theta state, that seems to last forever--before forever ends. Maybe this is the mechanism of Paradise. Some of my previous dreams seemed bent on telling me that was the case--that they themselves were a mere glimpse of the Hereafter. I still don't know, but I've been talking to Whomever as much as always, and sometimes, none-too-politely. I have quarreled with God in the most hateful of ways of late, in a way you can only fight with a member of your own family, or a friend you love dearly.

Anyhow, as I was saying, I was at a peace rally. It was being held in some kind of shopping mall. I think it was partly the enclosed and fragrant Coddingtown Mall in Santa Rosa, only it was much brighter. The floors were white and flat. There was no landscaping or stairs obstructing anything, and there were tall windows in the background--windows that stretched above the entrance/exit doors in the distance--giving the place a soft-focus glow like a Cathedral in a . . . well, in a dream sequence, or a heaven sequence from some commercial or sitcom. The windows had a kind of shape as they pointed upward, too. How would I describe it? Like two-by-four boards of different lengths laid next to each other, but pointing up to the center, like the pipes on one of those organs upon which Bach composed. Was there music? There may have been Muzak. It was still a mall, after all. But it was full of all these Buddhists. In the dream, I knew they were monks, but most of them were children. They may have been Tibetan, but I think in the dream they were Thai. They looked a bit too colorful to be Therevada, and the costumes weren't quite right for Tibetans either, but they were definitely Tantric. They wore robes of gold with purple sleeves. There may have been green and red as well. There were designs in white and maybe, again, red and green on the sleeves that at times looked like vines and at times looked like something else more intricate and familiar, but I didn't know what--kind of paisley, fractalian. They were the demonstrators against the war. They arranged themselves on the floor in a similar shape as the one reflected on their robes. This was the whole of the dream, really. It didn't last very long, but it was just the most beautiful picture, to see them arranged so symmetrically and intricately against that shimmering backdrop of the window, perfectly centered. There were three rows of them, and now I realize that the shape they were arranged into was at times a double helix. I stood in front of them. I put my hands together in a kind of upright lotus-prayer and began to skate towards them on the whitened and waxed floor in my stocking feet, just like I used to slide down the hardwood floors of my childhood house. Only, I seemed to have infinite momentum, as I was propelled effortlessly towards the shimmering, glimmering glass door. One of the young, bald boys watched me with a serene face as a skated joyfully toward them. I did I kind of half-splits and straddled the middle row, my hands still locked in prayer. I felt the fabric of their robes brush my legs. I don't remember ever reaching the door, but I was so happy and surprised to be moving toward it. I knew that they were Tantric because they had assembled themselves into these three double-helixes which they would dissolve like a mandala wheel when the protest was through.