Really not much.

Last night you were cornered by an assassin, whose intent it obviously was to shoot you with his handgun. You didnt know why he was in a rage. You were petrified and begged him to calm down and not to kill you. He shot and the bullet entered your neck just into the right jugular. You were still conscious looking at his face as you felt the warmth of blood seeping into your neck tissue, expecting to soon lose consciousness and die.

Where does THAT come from? The scene was too unbearable for you, and during the dream you remember deciding to wake up, which you did very anxiously. Your fight-flight system in high gear you had escaped the nightmare. This felt like a mixed blessing although you had escaped the violence of the dream state, you could not really feel relief and pretend it was just a dream. On the contrary, you felt you had been forced to distance yourself from a hotspot in your neurofirings that is still there, even though inaccessible to your waking consciousness, knowing that it will continue to cause chaos below your awareness. The intensity of the traumatic energy exceeded your window of tolerance.

You wish you could have had more observing power during the dream state to actually stay awake as you died, deeply connect with your assassin and get to the bottom of this neurofiring chaos you know little about. There is healing in shaking hands with the enemy. After all you are the assassin; you made yourself into the assassin by disowning the energy flow the assassin has come to represent. What motivates you to create this particular drama?

Sitting in meditation you settle into the great space of silent Being, massaged, decomposed, digested and transformed by the subtle strength of emptiness. You have stepped out of realitys way. You dont meditate anymore it meditates you, and you feel how its energy begins to fire up the antechambers of the crime scene, purifying everything in its path. You cannot begin to fathom the impenetrable method with which reality moves towards healing. All you can do is be really awake, trust and surrender. The meandering ways reality moves make no sense.

Did I say the crime of the dream is inaccessible to your waking consciousness? It is true that your conceptual self-awareness dominates in day-to-day living, that going back to the crime scene is aversive and furthest from your good citizen preoccupations. But you know to look closer! Your hands gripping the steering wheel too tightly as you drive to do some errands, a strangely dampened mood as you pick up a prescription, suspiciously insistent ruminations around the anticipation of seeing your friend at 2 oclock, why the memory of helping your father stack a pile of firewood at the age of about 9?, seemingly out of the blue craving an ice mocha even though you are well fed, your walking pace definitely accelerated for no reason, and as you walk you hit your heels more forcefully onto the pavement than usual.

You notice, you take a deep breath, shake your body a bit as you relax your walk. You stretch a bit and settle into the outbreath and sit down in stillness for a moment as soon as circumstances allow. You listen as you penetrate your body with awareness because you know that only embodied self-awareness can get you further. You begin to feel the insidious suffering you were not aware of a moment ago. Is it connected with the dream? Partly, but there are certainly many other influences.
You want the tension to all go away quickly and on demand; but it doesnt it lingers (you remember that the interoceptive neurofibres are not myelinated and therefore slow in neuroprocessing) and you are clear on your meditation tools. Thats all you need, knowing that you know what you are doing as you meet the immense complexity of Being, and then patience, perseverance a thousand years project! You dont understand the connection to your dream, and yet you sense it, like the hound dog following the scent of its pray. You intuit the assassin he is just good at hiding. You know that like most of us, you survived your share of wars, and you experience the scars. Now it is a matter of waiting it out in awareness, allowing the neurons to rewire in their own time.
For much of it you just dont know and have no choice but to yield to ignorance yet you are on some sort of knowing path, a different kind of knowing, a healing process.

Your journey touches me. The many unanswered questions make so much sense. We all can learn from walking with you on this adventure of discovery. We may even teach others how to walk that path. How can we teach the unknowable?

Copyright 2013 by Dr. Stphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.