One of those Dreams

About ten days ago I had one of those dreams that feels like a landmark, a significant gift from my psyche and the great beyond/within. It hasn't magically protected me from bouts of self-doubt, waning confidence, and getting stuck in my head, nor from having to wrestle with "America's most convenient bank" and more or less conceding defeat.

But perhaps it has helped. At least when I have remembered it, called on it, allowed myself to dwell in it as if it were an actual dwelling place or a way of being here. More than anything, I trust it has already offered me encouragement and will do so again and again if I let it.

It was really a two-part dream. I don't remember how the two parts were connected--you know how dreams are!--whether the first flowed effortlessly into the other (with your psyche saying to your rational mind, "Of course these two dreams are connected; why don't you see that?") or whether there was some sort of time gap or connective tissue that went missing when I woke up. It really doesn't matter.

I was in a school gymnasium somewhere, one with a full-sized basketball court. I was near one end of the court, and I was watching a student athlete shooting baskets from pretty far out. I'm not a big basketball expert or anything, but I know enough to know that he/she (sex unknown) was practicing three-pointers from well beyond the markings on the floor. The only odd thing about the scene was that the balls, that were scattered all over the floor, were smaller than basketballs and light in color. More like softballs. But in the dream I didn't find that strange.

I watched the athlete shooting again and again and again. Some of her shots went in; some did not. Some  rebounded in my general direction; some did not. Mostly, I noticed how many shots she was taking and how many balls were lying around--how many more shots she had already practiced.

And I felt something shift in my body, like a deadbolt sliding free, or some formerly stuck thing now freely moving, dropping into place.

"Ahhhh," I said (or thought loudly, I'm not sure which). "That's what it means to really aim for something."

Next I was in my own house, in David's and my bedroom, I believe. And the air was ringing with voices.

Not a chorus of blended voices, neither unison singing nor multi-part harmony. But several individual voices, children's voices, or women and children together, each of them calling out individually the same words: "I love you." "I love you." "I love you."

Could it have been just one clear treble voice repeating herself? Possibly, although I think that the chanted phrases overlapped a little. What I know for sure is that the air was resonant; and the sound seemed to come from all sides of me.

"I love you." "I love you." And one time, "I love you, Sukie."

Then came an audible, gentle but strong and steady wind or breath from behind me, and without hesitation I knew to lean back onto it and did lean back onto it to let it carry me. Which it began to do. Even though I was in our bedroom which doesn't have a whole lot of space in it. I leaned backwards onto the strong-gentle wind-breath and knew I was on my way.

I almost hesitate to tell this dream, because if I heard someone else tell me a dream like this, it might make me gag, or want to throttle them for being so holy, or so Miss Spirituality 2010.

But I guess I'm willing to take that risk. Because it seems to me that I'm in danger of forgetting the dream and not letting it work its work in me, and putting it out there is one way of doing my best to remember it and let it speak. And besides, maybe it has some encouragement for you in it, too.

What's interesting to me is that the day before, and for a few days before, I had been reading the last section of T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" (no, I don't make a habit of reading Eliot; I had gone looking for something half-remembered). These were the words I had been turning over and over:

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling


  We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time....

Encore! Encore!

I went to bed last night planning to blog this morning about Susan Boyle, the 47 year-old unemployed spinster Scotswoman who totally wowed the judges and audience on "Britain's Got Talent" last Saturday. And of course I woke to find that everyone on the planet who emails or blogs has already written about her many times over and sent the link to someone they know.

Well, just in case there's one person out there who hasn't yet bothered to click the link or to watch and listen to Susan's performance, here it is again. An encore. 

It's hard to maintain your defenses when she opens her mouth and sings. And the astonished and stunned and enraptured looks on the judges' faces only increase my utter delight and, yes, my tears, while watching and listening. And I am not alone.

As another blogger, Chris Matyszczyk on CNET, puts it:

They're crying in Calcutta. They're bawling in Brussels.

Why? Because watching someone so far removed from anyone's physical conception of a star finally get an audience for her extraordinary voice is as moving an experience as you're likely to enjoy this year.

Here all the unrealized hopes and dreams that so many harbor till their death are laid bare in an operetta of just a few minutes.

Here is a woman who suffered mild brain damage at birth, who was laughed at in school, and who has probably been laughed at for most of her 47 years because she lived with her mother, because she lives with her cat, and because she doesn't look like friends are supposed to look.

But if, on watching the YouTube clip, you do not spontaneously burst into tears (I give you at the most 30 seconds into her performance), then you are either an alien creation of Ray Kurzweil or you should pop along to your local shrink for some considerable surgery.

I've read elsewhere that Susan Boyle is a shy person who has loved singing since she was twelve, but who up until now has only sung in her church choir. (And appropriately received an ovation when she arrived at church on Sunday--Easter Day! She says most of them never knew she could sing so well, because they'd never heard her sing alone.) She even stopped singing for a while when her mother died two years ago. But now all that has changed.

So there's that possibility that she awakens, the questions she poses to each of us: What dream am I still waiting to dare to claim? What would it mean for me to "show up and sing" with that kind of unselfconscious courage and humility and abandon? What would it mean for you?