Archive for the ‘lucid dreaming’ tag
An Agitation Of The Collective Unconscious
At the last minute I decided to make this a black and white image. In the process, with the green of the background leaves now lost to deep grays, I found what had been hidden by the noise of colour. This was a scene I found in HongMei Park in ChangZhou, China just a week ago. Well, it is a version of the scene, one that perhaps is less factual with the colour removed. However, what remains is deeper, more attuned to an inner universe. For me, it has taken on a numinous quality as if I am dreaming with my eyes-wide-open.
It’s strange how noisy the world is for me though I need to wear hearing aids. And the noise isn’t necessarily measured in decibels. The noise is as much internal as it is external. It makes it hard for me to focus and to sit still with myself, within myself. Now, as I write these words, I do notice that I am writing them in silence. No television, radio or mp3 player is turned on – silence reigns as I sit alone for a few hours in the apartment at the keyboard. However, that silence is a fiction in terms of what I am sensing, a loud and constant chatter from the depths, personal depths and collective depths. I sit here alone at the keyboard yet feel the crowds jostling leaving little space for me. The crowd doesn’t go in one direction, rather it is busy going nowhere, busy just being there and moving.
Yes, like a dream. These are the opening sensations of the dream images that flood out of the photo. There is more.
I feel myself as the only anchor in a fuzzy, indistinct world, clutching a child, a new life. I know that the child is the essence of who I am, my own promise. I don’t back down from the challenge, the dare to be present and take the new version, the transformed nascent self into my arms with a promise to go forward rather than disappear into the shadows with so many others.
Where does this come from? Feeling the darkness, the shadows of a larger world as though a threat? I have sat with this question and have wondered. I know that I am resonating with events outside of my self, events that beyond the scope of an individual. I see democracy threatened, security threatened, human sanctity threatened all over the planet as the power of darkness takes so many human lives in Mexico, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Bahrain, China and Japan; a darkness that threatens places where one should least expect threats such as Canada, America, and Europe. It seems that humans are caught in an agitation of unconsciousness, the collective unconscious. This is what the photo signifies for me.
