Ana's Home - The Way of Dreams

The corridors of the mind

They started late in the afternoon. Lara held a notebook and a pen, instructed to take notes. Although it really looked to her like a school lesson, she was becoming curious about this sort of schooling.

“We shall learn this dreaming exercise and then you will be able to do it on your own. First of all,” started John, “never do this with nightmares. By yourself, you can work only on pleasant dreams for now. If you have difficult dreams, promise me you will tell me immediately and we shall dream them together, if it’s necessary at all.”

“Good, I promise,” Lara answered, concernedly remembering that she did have nightmares sometimes.

“Now, how did we start? From the very beginning.”

“I sat down and closed my eyes,” Lara answered eagerly.

“Yes, and you relaxed your body, part by part. Which parts did you relax first?”

“My toes. Then we went on to my soles and ankles, and then to the calves and knees, then to the buttocks and hips,” recounted Lara slowly, following John’s finger pointing out to her body when she was not sure how to continue. ”Then the belly, then the chest and the spine, then the shoulders, the elbows, the arms, wrists and fingers. Then… it was the neck, the jaws, the cheeks, the mouth, the nose, the eyelids and eyebrows, the forehead and… the top of my head?”

“Exactly. Now write down this sequence. I know it sounds senseless to write down the parts of your own body, but humour me, please.”

Lara wrote with eyebrows raised, as if working on something very important. She looked at John expectantly.

“Then, what did we do with your breath?”

“You asked me to feel my breath, and the air spreading through my nostrils,” the girl stopped until John pointed around her head, “through my head and around it, the throat and the lungs. And then flowing outside the same way.”

“Correct. And I asked you to do this while you were feeling your relaxed body. Write this down as well. Always keep your body in your mind,” John waited.

“It sounds funny, to keep the body in the mind,” bantered Lara.

“Your mind can be so extensive as to contain several bodies,” responded John half-seriously, “although you may think it is just a small mind shut down in your skull. It is as big as the meadow and the forest, perhaps even bigger.”

Lara looked at him questioningly.

“Let us go back to what we did this morning. Then, what did I ask you to do with your breath after the third breathing in?”

“Yeas, you told me to breathe three times… I don’t remember.”

“I asked you to imagine seeing how the air was filling up your relaxed bodily parts…”

“Yes, it was in the same sequence like the relaxation: air in the toes, air in the soles, in the ankles…”

“Correct, and so on. Now, what we just recounted, the sequence of the body relaxation, and the sequence of breath, we do them always in the beginning of each mental exercise. They are the basis.”

“Alright,” said Lara playing with her pen.

“After we completed these sequences, I asked you to recall what you could from your dream. You could recall only two things: the meadow and the feeling about it. One thing is enough, and you had two: an image and a feeling.”

“Yes,” Lara wrote on as John continued.

Her notes said, Sequence of the senses: Imagine to see again (what you can remember from the dream), see colour, feel scent, feel touch, hear sounds, measure size, feel thickness, weight and temperature, find limits. Look at limits, see beyond. Use all senses, same like noted before, on that which is beyond.

“John, we did not do all this.”

“True; it did not seem necessary. Do the whole sequence of the senses in every detail only if you cannot recall clearly what the dream was about. This morning you managed to enter your dream easily, so I kept to the minimum number of senses. However, when you work alone, you may find it more difficult to concentrate on your dream. It helps to have someone else lead us in our dreams, as the power of some dreams may be overwhelming and we may forget that we exist outside the dream too. In other words, when you work alone, you may forget that you work with the dream, and just fall asleep in it, and dream it all over again without chainging anything about it. Work with allsensesto keep awake when you are on your own.”

“But why do we do all these little things?”

“There is a simple rule of thumb for the awake mind: the mind seems very clever, but it can hold only up to seven things, plus or minus two, in it in the same time. Each person has a different limit how many things she can hold in the mind simultaneously. For youngsters, it is usually a lesser number. With exercise, more. When we feed the mind with more than it can take, it gives up thinking things and it takes up thinking movement, that is, relationships, co-relations – what one thing does to th other, and the other way around, meaning that the mind starts thinking in-between things and not in the things.. In this case, your mind moved through your dream after a very few ‘little things,’ as you called them.”

“But why, what is moving?” asked Lara, now utterly confused.

“Because we are actually using dreams to train the mind. The mind is made of many different rooms, loosely connected to each other by corridors, tunnels, passages and doors. In the meantime, the awake mind believes that it cannot move and it usually lives in only one room. In dreams, on the other hand, the mind moves from one room into another, but it can hardly remember that when it wakes up. In order to make the mind really move from one place to another when it is not asleep, we have to make it forget that it believes it cannot move.”

“To make it forget that it cannot move?” Lara repeated John’s words without comprehension.

“Yes, somehow, we cheat the mind into forgetting its false belief in immobility, stability and solidity. We cheat it by feeding it too many physical sensations. It cannot hold more than seven, so it does not have the strength anymore to defend itself against movement. You see, movement is the true nature of the mind, something it has forgotten.”

“But why does the mind think that it can’t move?”

“If you have ten bedrooms, in how many would you sleep?”

“In one, of course, I cannot sleep in many rooms at once! But I would try out each room at different nights and choose which one is the best. And then I will always sleep in the best room.”

“Exactly. Neither can the mind sleep in many rooms; it also chooses the best room to sleep in always. And if you had ten rooms to clean, how many would you tidy up every day?”

“Ten rooms? That’s too much! Boring, and I’d get tired, and I would’t do anything but tidying up all day long. I do not want to have ten rooms!”

“Correct again, and neither does the mind. It has to deal with one room, one world, if it wants to do other things besides cleaning up. But the mind does have many rooms, although it may not be too happy about it.

Just as you said, the mind at first tries out different rooms, and finds out which one is the most comfortable. The most comfortable bedroom becomes the drawing room of the mind. Then, the mind becomes used to this single room, and as years pass, it forgets about the other rooms, and it even forgets that it can go in and out at all. At night, the mind can briefly peek in its adjoint rooms, but it rarely dares step far away through the corridors. At daytime, it usually forgets what it has seen during its night wanderings.

However, other things from distant rooms can move, and sometimes they stumble into the mind’s bedroom. Then the mind has to deal with them. It has to welcome them,” John dropped his voice and looked behind Lara’s eyes. He made a motion with his fingers as if inscribing something in the air behind her back. “And it has to ask them kindly what they want, to respond most kindly and see them off.” John stopped here, seeing Lara’s eyes opening as wide as possible and she stopped breathing, with her eyes fixed at his. He relaxed and gently touched her shoulder.

“Breathe,” he told her.

Lara shivered and then bursted into laughter. “You’re weird!”

“I’m weird through and through and you are no less so,” he sweetly replied. “Back to this morning. What we had this morning was a simple dream, and we did only the basis of this dreaming sequence. You did not have animals or people or other things to talk to in your dream. We shall do that with another dream. For now, let us go back to the part about cheating the mind away from its false belief that it cannot move. First, your mind believed that it could not recall anything beyond the meadow and feeling beautiful. That was your drawing room. We fed your mind with sensations, sights, scents, and feelings; thus we invited your mind to look around itself. Then we prompted it to walk around, to enter another room, with the meadow and the forest. Who lived there?”

“Only me,” answered Lara.

“You as a three-year old,” emphasized John. “Some of these mind-rooms were made in our past…”

“John, how many rooms are there?” Lara interrupted him.

“How many different dreams have you had?”

“I can’t remember, many.”

“That many rooms, and add forgotten dreams, the dreams you will or can ever have. That many rooms are in the mind.”

Lara was overwhelmed by the image of rooms and corridors going into all directions from her head.

“And there is the basement, balconies and an attic on top of that,” John followed her thoughts. “And then there are the large gates of the mind.”

“A lot,” blinked Lara.

“Yes, and isn’t that wonderful? How many meadows and forests we usually forget, if we do not recall them in the morning? Think about this: if you had not made this exercise this morning, your life would have been stripped off a beautiful meadow and a forest which seemed scary at first, and then it became exiting. Imagine how many more unknown things and landscapes there are in your rooms, and you can recall them all.”

Lara nodded, thinking now of beautiful and exciting rooms, instead of tidying up and wariness.

“Let us go back to your meadow one last time,” continued John. “You found out the colour and the scent of the meadow, and then, you looked at your feet. You felt your body, in other words, you felt the body your mind dreams it has in that meadow-room. Note that it is rarely that the mind would wear the same body in different rooms, but this is the first thing not to perceive when we recall dreams. It is quite normal, for example, to find the mind wearing bodies of different ages, of different people and even of different animals.”

“That is right! I had a dream once where I was an animal, a she-wolf,” exclaimed Lara.

“A she-wolf?” John put the pieces together. “We must exercise with that dream sometimes. It may be a beautiful story.”

“Good,” the girl clapped her hands. “Can we do that tomorrow?”

“Not so quickly, first you must learn to talk with your dreams.”

“Alright,” Lara’s enthusiasm deflated.

“Back to your dream. You were not comfortable in the position you first remembered yourself in: you were standing on the edge of the forest, wary of it. That is why I asked you to step onto a place where you felt safe and by stepping onto the meadow you could feel at ease.”

“I understand. Thanks.”

“Then, however, I asked you to turn toward the forest.”

“I was afraid of that first.”

“And if we listened to that fear, you would still walk barefoot and dislike forests.”

“Yes, and it was not the forest’s fault anyhow.”

“Well noted. So, by facing the forest, you strengthened it and that enabled you to discover the real cause of wariness: your mind and its body in that dream is were three. Next time, you can look into your body in the same sequence: from the toes to the tip. Then the feeling inside that body is the key, or at least the keyhole, to that dream, the reason for dreaming it at all.

This is very important. Feelings inside a dream may seem to come from an object within the dream; however, after you recall your dreaming body, you may find that all feelings in the dream have roots inside your body, they come from you and are about you.

When you have thus understood your dream-feelings better, you can find out what cause them and how to resolve them. In your dream, you found out that your feet were bare and cold, and you were wary of hurting yourself. Then, you used your present mind, the mind of a nine-year old Lara, to help the three-year old, wary Lara - and you made shoes out of bark and leaves of grass. Remember: what you do in the dream must be from within the dream. You did not imagine, for example, buying shoes in a shop – there were no shops in the dream. Only knowledge, awareness, strength, courage and similar, never objects or beings, can come from the outside, and that must come only from you and from no-one else. I did not tell you what to do, I just asked you to think up a solution and you found one yourself. Does this make sense?”

“It does, somehow. It felt… somehow, hm…” Lara could not find the right words.

“Proper? Natural? Like the right thing?” John tried to help her.

“Yes! That and good on top... But weird… changing my dreams.”

“That is real comprehension, when it feels proper, right, natural and good. And yes, it’s always a weird feeling to create something new. Please remember this: do not allow anyone, not even me, to tell you what to do with your dreams. Even if you care very much for the person who is with you in that dream. Even if she or he cares about you very much. No one, no one should change your dreams accordint to their mind, alright?”

“Alright,” nodded Lara, although she did not completely understand why.

“And that is the end of today’s lesson. We can finish with an epilogue: when you find a solution to the dream, enjoy trying it out until you get used to it and become bored with it. Stay with your dream and see how things will have changed. Now, I will ask you to do this Recall Exercise tomorrow morning by yourself, with the next dream you have.”

Lara wrote down her last notes. The lesson had ended abruptly and images were drifting through her mind. She looked at the clock on the wall. Only two hours had passed since they started.

“Dinner time?” called John gently.

Ï’m hungry…” Lara didn’t finish her enthusiastic sentence.

“… like a wolf, I know .Me too,” he finished the sentence instead of her with a strange smile.