World Dream Bank: Awkward Enlightenment

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Awkward Enlightenment

Dreamed 2010/1/13 by Wayan

O clammy lecturehall! Students on folding chairs
clot like cheese. Where's an empty? There,
but a beanpole sprawls his arms. Zat scowl
for me or your no-show friends? Mangerdog!
Leave his laughable moustache, sit instead
edging a gabble-group. Two nearly men
and a woman squeeze me into their clique.
Chatterbox, chatterbox, I am penned!
Penned among men. Guy talk. But then
her leaden aura, too, groans my back:
another smothering wet-laundry sack.
Not gender then. Stupidity is pan.
(And crowding's sheer.) I loathe their souls
rubbing off on me. O astral dandruff! Yet
I let them in--hope to find a mate. As if
this mating of the minds has ever worked!
So I experiment: see a ghostly comb
card my aura-wool smoother, closer,
till the soulblending quells.
And toughen my spirit skins. Or shells.
Feel better--but how long can I sustain?
I'm squeezed between students in the cafeteria. The college cafeteria, now. Crowd-hum,
dish-clank, and ginger-scallion whiff.
One oval table's clear of chairs.
A delicate centaur girl here dines
on clam-fennel-tofu soup. She's not equine,
but a lanky dappled ocelot or pard; her face
a wedge of sharp ears and huge night-eyes.
Excited, up she rears. Suddenly she's wise!
Just attained flash-Buddhahood. And she's
just one of several cafeteers who gasp
all blest with variants of bliss.
But somehow politically this
instant enlightenment's awkward.
Do rules of academe resist?
Or is it inherent? How do you act
on godsight, in a school for flesh?
For institutional tables, chairs,
can't accomodate centaurian girls;
and institutional worlds (and friends)
can't accomodate certain
transcendent ends.

I woke with insight gone. Enlightened cat I ain't!
But the moral clung, though transcendence ebbed:
to flash is grace; to implement, divine.
Aye, there's the rub. Insight's not the vine, just seed! The fruit is deed. So I, in verse and paint,
incarnate my dream. That Cattauress clear-swept
an arc of scholars with her thrilled unwieldy tail.
I'll try to flail a little arc with mine.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

Aura: Not dream-surrealism, not a metaphor. My normal perceptual world has auras. I barely recognize you by your looks, your face. I feel your energy, your moods desires and aches directly. I always have.
Squeezed dry by crowds: also literal. Oh, I tell myself it's people's crassness or stupidity that tires me out, but really it's simpler: my aura gets bruised. Because I let it interact. I could fold my mindwings, and walk through herds and hordes unhurt. But hungry for love, I'm hunting--and that means letting in the energy of those I meet; trying y'all on, to see if you fit.
Prediction: the dream thinks the party this weekend our house is planning will be so crowded I risk aura-exhaustion. Again.
ACTION: at the party, pull in my aura tighter so I don't blend with others. Toughen my energy-skin!
The enlightened girl facing resistance: I don't know who she is, but I liked her.
Her beautiful, peculiar face looked like the catlike creatures in Shawn Tan's The Arrival--his imaginary city had several equivalents of New York's Statue of Liberty, and one was such a cat cradling small creatures; sense of peace and benevolence. But no centaurs I recall...
Centauroid: 1: refusal to give up animality, to renounce desire as Buddha urged? Instead, unity of mind & body? 2: dream and waking? Is she dreamwork itself?
The mere flash is grace; to implement, divine: tweaks an English proverb: "To err is human; to forgive, divine."
Tail/tale: my dreams are enthusiastic punsters. And I suspect a subtler but parallel pun around the meanings of "end": end of the poem, end as in tail (and probably sex), end as in purpose or goal...

THAT WEEKEND

I tried this at our house's big party celebrating our solar panels. A hundred people, and I ran around for ten hours nonstop solving problems.

I never tired out! Physically present and active, but I kept my aura in. Didn't read minds, hearts, bodies--when I wanted to connect, I talked or touched. With my other body, I mean--the meat body.

That one I forget about.

LISTS AND LINKS: school - socializing - brains - auras - self-defense - loneliness - animal people - centauroids - cat people - sexy creatures - meditation - Buddhas & Buddhism - transcendent dreams - dream puns - dream poems - paintings - round & other nonrectilinear art - Shaun Tan-inspired dream-paintings: Nocturne

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