Dream :: House Moved Harmlessly by Nature
I live in a house on Nesodden in Norway, and wake up early and lie in bed for a while. Suddenly, I hear a rumble and somehow realize that a strong wind is approaching the house. It lifts the house off from the ground and drops it down at another location on Nesodden. I am unharmed, the house appears unharmed as well, and no neighboring areas at either location were harmed. It was all quite undramatic, and I have the thought that I should be more impacted by it than I am. I walk outside to familiarize myself with the new neighborhood. The neighbors don't seem to notice anything unusual. I have some thoughts of letting family and friends know where I am, but don't do it right away. I want the new situation to settle first.
Nesodden is a beautiful peninsula just outside of Oslo, and the area I most likely would live if I moved back there. The nature and people are both wonderful, and it is an easy commute to Oslo on the ferry.
The most striking part of the dream is how undramatic it all was. The house was lifted with surgical precision off the ground, and placed down at another location, with no apparent damage and with neighbors oblivious to it all.
Typically in dreams, a house represents the body and/or physical identity. And in the dream, there was indeed a sense of a quite dramatic shift of identity, of finding everything I use to localize myself as new and different, yet happening in an undramatic and easy way.
This happens in a smaller way whenever I do inquiry. A belief falls away, and with it that thread in my identity. Afterwards, I need some time to become familiar with the new terrain.
In a more dramatic way, I can remember several times over the last few months where identity (any sense of identity, and/or any sense of anything to place any identity on) has fallen away for a certain period of time. During diksha in July. When I had stomachache in Seattle. When I had heat exhaustion at Crater Lake. And to some extent during the time earlier in the year when everything was experienced as space.
It has all been quite comfortable, undramatic. And when a more usual (and vague) sense of identity returns, it seems shifted and less substantial - more spacious, more as clear space.
Labels: dream
8/05/2006 11:13:00 AM
Yes - although as you know, knowing about it doesn't help much, as long as the experience of a relatively stable identity, and an I, is there.
What I have found works for me is the Byron Katie inquiries (unraveling beliefs and thus identity), the Big Mind process (getting more familiar with the mind that sees impermanence), the Headless experiments (finding myself as capacity for the world, including any identity and anything identity is placed on), and similar approaches.
And even if there is the belief in and experience of a relatively stable identity (and identification as a separate I), that seems perfectly OK as well. It may bring suffering with it, but it is still OK. It is just one of the many ways existence is exploring itself. top