THAT DAY

I'm researching a paper on ancient dreamwork for my Late Roman History professor. Open The Interpretation of Dreams and Portents in Antiquity by Naphtali Lewis. His intro's a rant about silly superstitions like belief in dreams, meditation, yoga, ESP, and health food. Health food? I better quit eating those cancer-causing vegetables!

Still, if I just ignore his constant sniping about superstitious cretins like me, he does present a lot of ancient dreams. I'm simultaneously charmed and disappointed by the dream-diary of an Egyptian priest found on papyri in a midden near the Serapeum. In his temple, the gods speak in dreams to visiting pilgrims, but this guy's on staff, and his dreams are quite mundane--work and family worries. People haven't changed.

Albrecht Oepke is even creepier than Lewis. He calls dreams themselves feminine, animal and disgusting. Straight out of the Burning Times! "What, you're into dreams? Wiiiiitch!" The idea of studying them at all offends him--proves the ancients barbarous.

Patricia Cox Miller is more tolerant than Lewis or Oepke--at least no rants--but she seems to have no personal experience of dreamwork at all. She quotes an "expert" whose knowledge seems to stop at Freud, and says ancient, shamanic or amateur dreamwork is superstitious nonsense, again.

All three assume readers will find ancient dreamwork alien, archaic--when for me, a practical dreamworker, the ancients don't seem so odd; it's these three modern scholars who seem archaic! On dream research, they're fifty years out of date.

THAT NIGHT

I'm in Golden Gate Park, in the courtyard of the De Young Museum, not the modern one but the old sandstone one it replaced, with a pseudo-Egyptian obelisk. I think "So I must be dreaming!" But I don't mess with the dream, just let it unfold; I quietly appreciate the opportunity to time-travel and see my childhood temple to the arts with adult eyes.

Slowly I realize it's not the De Young of my childhood, but decades even earlier--just that central Egyptian tower, and a square courtyard around the Pool of Enchantment; only the core of the big complex built later in the twentieth century.

To the north, a long view down an open slope, not today's rolling woods. Was the museum moved, or its ridge lowered later? Maybe the land changed on its own. Sandy, treeless and shifting with the winds, back in Gold Rush days...

All I'm sure of: I'm generations in the past.

This early De Young is more temple than museum, and I'm on staff. We're priests in the dream-art cult. And dancers, of course, in gauzy white robes. Very Isadora Duncan! But then she stole her look from ancient Greece and Egypt.

Today I'm on shift with a new dancer I like. She's mid height, strong, sexy, hair of long black ringlets. No slender ballerina waif! We double as security and hospitality, watching two guest groups enter for ritual dances in the courtyard around the fountain.

But... the first group commits a deliberate impropriety, designed to offend the dream/art gods. The other troupe's preparing to come on; they're from Cuba, very political, very controversial; and our rabidly anticommunist government (ah, but which one? I didn't know the year) barely let them in. Ironic that it's the OTHER group, from Asia or Europe, that commits art-sacrilege as a provocation.

My sexy colleague stands up and declares our formal, institutional displeasure by getting up and walking coldly out.

I follow her lead, not really offended myself (I rarely am; I either like art or just don't connect and walk away) but wanting to support her. Try to look coldly dignified, but... I never did dignified very well.

In the colonnade around the courtyard, dignity ends: gravity goes lunar-strange. We float up off the floors some times. Not quite flying, not yet.

I whisper "Let's go up to the staff lounge and talk it over with others in private--decide what line to take with these clowns." She agrees, and we float up partway. I climb higher by wedging myself between columns and walls, use my arms as much as legs; ignore the floors entirely. Help her up to the second floor, a sort of round balcony where the rotunda opens out.

We reach the staff lounge, but it's empty. Weird. It's near noon; should be full of adepts having lunch. Are they all up the sacred tower? Only one way to find out...

As we set out, half-floating, half-climbing the obelisk walls, toward the pinnacle of dreaming... I wake.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Pool of Enchantment: its real name. One of my clearest psychic dreams ever, Alp Vark, centered on this pool. So it probably means psychic & shamanic dreaming--where advanced dreamwork takes you.
• Familiar structure, but older and simpler "core version": dreamwork over the millennia! Still recognizable. And it centers on the Pool of Enchantment! Magic at its core.
• Go lucid: proving, if it needed proof, that Lewis, Oepke and Miller are just out of date; their generation called lucid dreaming a myth, theoretically impossible. Wrong!
• Go lucid but just observe: typical for me. I don't like to push my dreams around. Better to just let them tell me what they want to.
• I work in a temple in the past: that Egyptian priest's dream-journal revealed he was a bit of a worrier, but he had a nice quiet life helping people. Do I have... temple envy?!
• Muscular dancer with black ringlets: I can't think of anyone I know who looks like her.
• Dancers insult the dream-gods: Lewis, Oepke and Miller! Academics dissing a discipline they've never practiced.
• Weird gravity, halls, pools, trust the walls but not the floor: San Francisco State. A big storm left the floors wet and slick--I slipped in the hall today, nearly fell.
• Climb the temple: work to rise from basic dreamwork to higher levels.
• Empty staff lounge: ha! I think this means "academic dream "experts" are bankrupt; no one's even home."
• Climb the obelisk: aspire to some of the Egyptian achievements in dreamwork, which Lewis, Oepke and Miller call superstition or magical thinking. I know first-hand they're wrong! I'm already lucid and levitating.
• ACTION 1: in my paper, emphasize that practical dreamwork is similar in all times and cultures--it's only modern academics who are out of touch.
• ACTION 2: Keep climbing that dreamwork obelisk. It goes a lot higher than academics admit.
• ACTION 3: Keep my eyes open for that priestess. You never know.

NEXT DAY

Bike in to my Shakespeare class. I still feel shy in front of a hundred people, but I do speak up more today.

I'm not the only one. A girl who hid in back all semester speaks up for the first time: brilliant, British, muscular, black ringlets... oh, it's her. The girl from my dream. Did my unconscious spot her? Cryptomnesia's impressive but not paranormal. Except... even if it's cryptomnesia, how'd it know she'd finally speak up today after months of hiding? I didn't even see her.

But predictive dreams are just superstition! Lewis, Oepke and Miller have spoken.

Think I'll go yoga-stretch now. And eat my vegs.

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