Rupture

I woke at 4:45 am breathing heavily with the weight of an incredibly cogent and painful dream on my mind. I am not recounting that dream. This post isn't about dreams. This post is about the lines in the sand that fade in the ever returning tide.

I was shaken deeply by the dream, shivering for a few minutes after recording it, hiding under the comforter in the vague hope that my anxiety would fade. I am still anxious and shivers still run down my skin, though the worst of it has passed. The subject of this dream, well, it touches on old, scarred nerves; soft spots that were quickly made raw again. For what reason, I cannot say.

Certain people, certain events, certain episodes mark my life, not in deleterious or jubilant ways, but with an alarming, even frightening potency. I have spent a good deal of time trying to mend or shield those moments, recollections, realities. Most of the time, those methods feel like a success. Success is always measured in days or weeks or months before some sentimental sea change looses my grip, the scartissue, whatever and it starts again. I am a house built on sand.

Some repose comes in Buddhist practice and vantages. The emphasis on passing away, the impairment of attachment, and the importance of others in making a life--not exactly whole but, complete--aren't just notions to learn, but concise comments on my own experience. In a way, any rupture with myself is just a further affirmation of Buddhist doctrine. Some relief may even come knowing that the stinging nerves themselves will eventually be overwhelmed by the flowing tide. The tide itself, well, it is more a matter of perception, of perspective than something that itself might fade.

Strange, though, that it would occur with a dream. With lucid dreams, one can manifest greater control than over any other phenomenological experience. On the other hand, they generally defy any of the usual rules of causation or physical laws we expect of the world. It recalls Hume's comments and criticism on theories of natural religion: You cannot suppose that the world is so wonderfully the way it is because a deity made it so because even if everything were infinitely random (of unending space or unending time), this situation and all of its bounty or apparent perfection would eventually come about anyway. Therefore, the world may potentially be completely without rules altogether (like a dream) just as it may be sharply defined by some divinity or another.

Perhaps it is in the chaos of dreams, even the remarkably lucid ones, that we risk to lose so very much. Have you not dreamed of losing someone dear to you? Is it not in dreams that we relive the painful episodes of our lives over and again? In dreams, we explore fancy and fantasy, delve into the unexplored world of our psyches and discover unknown and unknowable depths of the abyss. So much is potentially open to us, so much unruly power that waking so violently from a dream, that losing the control over old knots of awful memory is more likely to happen there than anywhere else. It pains me to think that no matter the order I place, the boundaries and statements I assume, what lies underneath will remain tender, soft, and unwilling to outgrow me.