A middle aged mulatto walks down by a river, and goes into the remains of a large wooden ship there. He is blind, but is somehow able to see perfectly well, and even better and more clearly than many seeing people.

He meets someone in the ship, they ask him a question, and he tells them about experiments that can reveal their connection with God. They are curious, and also surprised that experiments can lead in that way. They are also curious about this mulatto man, and invites him along with their buddies.

As the story unfolds, they give him several tests to see if he really can see as, or more, clearly than many seeing people. At one point, they give him a cigar and he has to mirror the sequence of one or two puffs of a man several feet away. He is somehow so intimately familiar with the terrain that seeing people are familiar with, and beyond, that the tests are no problem for him at all.

They gradually grow to trust him, and invite him to join their judo club. He learns the rules, and is about to do a match, which also is part of the landscape he is intimately familiar with.

There is a sense of clarity, solidity & emptiness, and a simple confidence and ease about him and throughout the dream. A sense of intimate familiarity with a vast terrain, including and beyond what most seeing people are familiar with.

The dream seems to be set in the early 1900s, in a simple working class neighborhood. The group of people the mulatto man befriends is a group of neighbors, but also almost like a gang (although friendly when they accept someone into their group.) The dream was very much like a movie: very coherent, clear, seen from the outside as in a movie, and going from one scene to the next moving the story line along. The temporary climax was going to be the judo match, although I woke up as they prepared.

The sense of being intimately familiar with a vast terrain, including and beyond what most people are familiar with, is one that has come up in waking life for me more recently, as a taste, a sense of how it can be. The seeing people in the dream represent familiarity with the human life only, and the blind man sees that and far beyond.

The mulatto in the dream was very similar to someone I met on the bus yesterday, a friend of the "green" friend on mine I mentioned in a previous post. He struck me as open, clear and grounded, with a sense of ease and confidence.

Labels: dream, familiarity with the terrain