Dream Interlude

In my dream a few minutes ago I was arguing furiously with some kind of guy in a white suit or uniform, advancing on him and driving him backward, to tell me how to escape from the video on the giant screen in front of us because if I let it run through there would be dire consequences for all of us — something to do with racist messages that would inflame the audience, which was everyone on the street milling around us. He looked up at the reflective windows of the tall bank building on the street behind us and protested, “there is no screen.” I was furious at him for not realizing we were just watching a video and I began Googling to try to find the creator’s name, which was something like Israfahanim….

I woke up to my alarm with that dazed, interrupted-REM feeling, and I immediately thought (with somewhat less clarity than this), “It’s  a Buddhist lesson. You were so furious in your dream, reacting to your own mind’s stories. You should think about how often in daily life you react to something that’s all in your mind…” Then I wondered who Israfahanim was and could only think of the angel Israfel, whom I vaguely thought had something to do with death. I was deeply into angelology at one point in my life; the scraps of my research still linger.

After I stumbled out of bed and put on some tea I looked up variations on Israfahanim to see if it was a real name. Nope. But Israfel sounds the trumpet on the Day of Judgement, which has the same kind of apocalyptic feel that I had in my dream — that disaster was imminent.

They say dreams are just the brain clearing itself up, and I can easily track the strands of this dream in the variety of technothrillers I’ve been reading lately and my general fascination with questions of reality and perception, teaching film, reading the news each morning, kempo emphasizing that I must “get into your opponent’s space”, and perhaps the white suit as a symbol of God or a doctor or an insane asylum employee or something, who knows! But I think my groggy takeaway was the important point; the Buddhist understanding snapping in. I wanted to stop the false reality of the giant VR video while not realizing that I was, myself, just part of a dream. Most of my emotional reactions arise due to thoughts in my head about what I see or read or imagine, rather than from any real physical or verbal interaction. I need to wake up from my dream world and simply address reality as I live it, moment to moment.

Waking up in the Buddhist sense of the term is easier said than done. But I appreciate the reminder, even if it meant jolting out of sleep with my heart pounding, feeling unrested.