Dream Weaver

Day 2089 – Day 2108

Yesterday, I spent the day on spiritual retreat with my particular caravan of wayfaring souls.  For the past 9 months, I have been walking the line between delving deeply into the Christianity of my childhood and the mystical Sufi path that found me, later in life.

In my Sufi lineage, we use dreams as a form of ancient storytelling that reveals the transformation that is calling to be undergone in the soul.  It is also in our dreams where the Beloved does works on our hearts.  I have been reconciling my two paths and I do not believe the Sufi practices betray my Christianity because I had my first mystical experience when I was a child.  Jesus came to me in a dream and called me to the path.

I’ve been following a thread of a dream that began sometime late last summer.  I dreamed of a man I knew of but had never met.  He was with his brother and we were tentatively touching fingers like children in love.  There was an innocence to this flirtation but also an unquestionably pure love.  What a delightful dream to have had.

He’s a handsome fellow so I thought it might be simply a nocturnal expression of a bit of a crush.

I got to know this man – in a sense – through the internet.  He felt like a kindred spirit and we have an awful lot in common.  We also lead very different lives in different parts of the continent and we have different experiences of the world based on being born in different decades.  I like him, and I have an interest in knowing him, more deeply.

In the early part of this year, I started seeing repeating number sequences.  I wondered if this man, who was appearing in my intense dreams, might be linked to it.  I read about the idea of a Twin Flame and I’m not sure such a thing exists.  Maybe it does.  Maybe it doesn’t.  In this, there is a mystery that I may never solve.  But, I tend to put more stock in Jung than in new age concepts.  The thing about mysticism is that there is very little of which we are sure when we are invited to follow a thread.

Around the same time as the number patterns started to appear, I had another dream.  This time I dreamed I met the man for the first time, in person.  He had two sons with him.  They were about 8 or 9 years old.  I tried to talk with him but his children just wanted to play with me and so they grabbed my hands and pulled me away to play.  I awoke with the same feeling as I’d had in my first dream: a real innocent and pure feeling of love.  I wondered if the dream was perhaps literally telling me that I’m not going to meet this man.  Or, if I do, it won’t be for a long time – at least a decade or more – when he’s settled in his life with these two young boys.

In my waking state, the same man has pushed some buttons and triggered some wounds that originated in my childhood and I’ve had to work them through and heal those places that are still tender.  In the time he has been in the internet of my life, I’ve been quite inspired and irritated by him, at different times.

About a month ago, I dreamed that I was travelling the 101 in Oregon and I was listening to the radio.  I was not on the highway.  I was on the long, winding, remote Pacific Coast highway, where the wind whips the waves ashore and where an individual soul meets the sea.  A young Cat Stevens was also driving the same roads and talking on the radio, and I was listening.  I entered the town CLOSD, Oregon, just as he said he was arriving there, too.  The streets were empty and I called in to the radio station to say hi to him. Driving down the road, a vintage Chevy convertible caught up beside me and in the back seat was Cat, playing his guitar and singing for me.  I waved hello and as we came to a stop at a traffic light he asked me out for a coffee date.

Now, Cat Stevens was before my time and he is no longer Cat Stevens.  He is Yusuf Islam, now.  As much as it was a young Cat in the dream, in my heart, I knew it was the energy of that same man who has been in my innocent dreams filled with images of children.  I don’t think the man who appears in my dreams is even aware of such a thing as a Sufi path, but Cat Stevens latest song, I discovered after this dream, was based on Sufi poetry.  Maybe it was telling me that I’m on the right path – at least, spiritually – to follow this thread.

I wondered if the boys in my second dream were not the same two boys from my first dream, at a much younger age.  I wondered if they were he and his brother.  If they were, then I’m so glad I played with them.

This past week, I had another dream.  This time, I was walking and talking with his adult self again, meeting him for what seemed the be – again – the first time.  This time there was a girl child.  She was young – maybe 5 or 6 years old.  She jumped into an abandoned and dried up cistern.  He was about to go in and rescue her but she refused and insisted that it be me that come for her to hold her and take her home.

Yes, I know that girl child was me.

Yesterday, as is our practice, I got to share the whole series of dreams.   I can’t pretend to know the entire meaning of them but the symbolism and imagery is so lovely, pure and sweet.

There was a trauma that I experienced at that age that the little girl was, in my most recent dream.   I blocked it out – even at the time.  My very best friend in the world died of a hole in her heart.  If there is a more Sufi way to die, I don’t know what it would be.  In her death, she left a hole in my own heart and in that space, God entered.

There is some healing to be done here, for the psyche of that little girl.   But after today, I have a profound appreciation for the gift that my friend left when she went home to heaven.

I’m grateful for this man who has been walking with me and singing to me and helping to weave my dreams.  Something seems to have shifted between us in the real world, and I don’t know if our inner journey is over, or if it has just begun.   He has taken me to a scary place where I probably would not have had the courage to go, alone.  For that I am grateful. The thing about these inner journeys is one can make the mistake of assuming that they represent a waking connection that goes beyond the symbolic or that even if a connection exists, that the other person is consciously aware of it.  Awareness, it should be remembered, is no guarantee that a person is ready to embrace the mystical or spiritual.  In any case, I am grateful for what has been, on the inner.   I am thankful for his gentle companionship and sometimes direction, on this journey.

I am grateful for the companionship of the wayfarers on this caravan, who listened to my story and held the threads as my waking self wove all of these beautiful dreams together.  There is a great mystery in the middle of it all and perhaps that is the thing for which I am most grateful.

In my meditation, I asked about this living and breathing internet man who has been weaving dreams with me.  I was given something to do and it seems quite weird.  I’m going to have to wait and listen until I know how to do what I’ve been asked to do.  But do it, I shall.  The last time I was given direction by the Beloved, in a meditation, it was also about someone with whom I had been dream walking.  I second-guessed the instruction and I didn’t follow what I was told to do.

I lived and learned a very tough lesson.

I had not seen it before my dream, but Yusuf/Cat Stevens posted this video the very day I dreamed about him.  I will continue to follow this thread, not knowing why or what will happen.

For what are you most grateful, today?