Tuesday, June 10,2003
At 2 a.m. I get up to record a dream. “Tagging along with Bill Hughes [the Congessman I used to work for, in my twenties], who says he was enjoying watching me on television, as part of my job working for him. I said `uh-’ [because this caught me off guard] and wanted to know how it looked on TV, as I had not seen it, and everything would depend on how it was cut. Then he’s talking to Mary [his assistant], who seemed like a difficult employee we had had at Hampton Roads. She said she would be trotting around to talk about a raise later, and they referred to something they weren’t going to buy for her successors. This while I waited to continue a conversation because I had an idea for him acquiring staff from someone I knew who was retiring. Tangled now, and I only remembered to record this at all because I had to get up to go to the bathroom. I must get back into the habit of recording dreams.”
After that first dream, I give up on trying to write them in my journal at the time. It’s too hard. Too much movement, plus the act of turning on the light floods the brain with beta waves, which of course change one’s mental state, making it very hard to bring back or hold onto dreams, which seem to be very state-specific. Instead, I begin using my hand-held tape recorder, and I bring back several more as they occur.
1) John Lennon had retired and was living in a flimsy house by the side of this shallow water – or maybe it was an ocean. His friend who visited there realized that although Lennon was filling his time with things, he wasn’t really doing anything. He had a litigious friend who spent time writing and re-writing his letter to the editor about some controversy (they never publish it), without ever getting any fresh data. And the narrator of the dream wondered, “Why doesn’t he ever go out and get fresh data, go back to the swamp that he’s writing about, and get more data about it?” But the guy doesn’t. And John Lennon is living in this house that’s quite flammable – it’s made of reeds or something – and he lives quite casually with fire. And the guy can’t figure out why he hasn’t burned the place down. I as narrator am going out to the beach early in the morning and coming to this place where there’s a spigot in a shelter. I’m trying to wash the sand off my hands, and realize that sand has nearly covered the spigot, so I dig it out a little bit for people, and a kid with a dog comes by and wants to know where I’m sleeping – the idea being am I sleeping on the beach. I say, “No, I’m not sleeping on the beach,” but I don’t tell him where I am; I tell him where I’m not.
[Thinking about it. John Lennon is dead. A very creative artist, dead. Fooling around: not working. The question would be, what kind of work? The answer would be that Lennon was a creative individual and anything he set his creativity to would have been valid work.]
2) The mantle of authority on Columba was always very, very heavy, like a very heavy cape, and I have proceeded with that kind of mantle on me, and people have always responded to it as very inappropriate, because there was no external reason for it. I agree with that, but that’s what I’ve always seen. A sense of mounting a bus, like a town bus, where before an image of him walking in that heavy cloak. Lying in bed on my stomach, I have a sense of that heavy cloak pressing down on me, whereas once before, lying on my stomach, I had a sense of a bird lying and relying on the wind, on the spirit. Perhaps the two are connected.
3) I’m walking in the road. Someone says from a high platform, to my left, behind me, walking the other way, “Hi, Fronk” [pronounced in a Scot accent, as Michael would say it]. I’ve actually had this happen before, but I’ve never noticed it.
4) Those documents that Columba was involved with have something to do with the number 532. At first I thought it was 522, but it wasn’t. By virtue of something or other, Columba had access to all the prime numbers.
5) My old friend Dennis was visiting my house, and had a whole bunch of photos to show me. I was so upset with my wife being in another world entirely, I went outside to mow the lawn (my mother’s mother’s house’s lawn) and was pushing the lawnmower up and down, before I realized that it wasn’t even turned on. I put down the mower and went back inside. Dennis said, “why did you take them off, I thought they looked good.” He was talking about sunglasses that I had forgotten about. He has a whole package of photographs he’s going to show me, and he says, “up or down?” meaning on the floor or on a chair. We got down on the floor, and the very first photo led to the next dream.
6) It’s some kind of day school. An autistic boy is lying on a bookshelf with the meal he’s supposed to be eating. There’s an interruption of some kind and when it’s over I encourage him to start again. He has a fish stick with tomato sauce on it, and he sort of hits his head with it accidentally instead of his mouth. I smile. I go over to this other guy and say, “It’s so touching to see these autistic children taking care of themselves.”
Busy night. I suspect we get series of dreams like this frequently – every night, for all I know – but I lose all memory of most of them. I look forward to discussing these with Robert, for although I think I see some of the meaning of some of them, clearly I can read this language only haltingly. The fourth dream, for instance. It has something to do with Columba’s access to information unavailable to common consciousness, but that is only the tip of the iceberg.
[Robert’s interpretation of some of these symbols came in a long email which I will reproduce in “Iona (16).”]
At 7 or so I am up and about. I walk as far as the ruins of the old nunnery – not very far. The iron gate is open, and no one else is around. I look around, and of course it begins to rain. The only hat I have brought is my baseball cap with The Monroe Institute logo on it. It functions to keep rain off, but only barely. I stay for a while within the one enclosed area with a roof, absorbing the vibes, so to speak. Then I walk back to the B&B for breakfast. I sit opposite my fellow American, whose name it turns out is Matthew, and I wind up talking to him about dreams and the use of dreams, citing Michael’s dream and how it affected his life.
After breakfast I go walking to the south, following one road, then another, dead-ending a couple of times until I wind up on the western side of the island, passing through a gate to a common grazing area that is open to the sea. Rocks, sea, sky (and lots of opportunities for wet feet, maneuvering through the heather or whatever it is, and often enough finding water instead of ground underfoot). Open space and no one around.
After a couple of hours I make my way back to the B&B, arrange for my laundry to be done, buy a couple of chocolate chip shortbread cookies, and go walking again. Just as I get to the pier I see that it is nearly noon, the time when the boat leaves for Staffa, a small uninhabited island a few miles north of Iona, well within sight of it. I had told Michael I’d see Fingall’s Cave, so why not today while the weather is good? Who knows what the rest of the week will be like? While waiting, I chat with an Aussie, born in 1939. He remembers that VE Day in Australia did bring some celebration, because it meant the men they’d sent to Europe would be coming home. But on VJ Day, they went wild.
Fingall’s Cave, Staffa