Sunny, still unseasonably warm, fat cumulus means change -- doesn't it? We'll see.
Walked
my usual route late afternoon and noticed a pair of fighter jets taking
off from military installation nearby. Don't know which type, but
stopped and watched as they gained altitude, banked hard left, made a
generous curve to gain speed and then ascended rapidly as their jets'
roar became harder to place -- and then they were just gone. I saw their
vapor trails a few minutes later, as they came from an entirely
different direction and way, way up. It gave me a feeling of this gentle
time warp that goes on all the time, and we're not aware of it. Space
and time just bend constantly, and we go our way, completely (at least I
am) unaware of the continuing flux. Those jets reminded me of how much
power we humans (or a few of us) have in this world. Yes, the jets were
beautiful, but they are warplanes, after all. I couldn't help but feel
impressed, awed and a little oddly warped-out myself.
Listening
to something on AOL called "Pilot Speed" (album into the west) -- had
no idea of the coincidence until I just typed it. I like to listen to
music as I type these things, and it truly just didn't occur to me. This
happens a lot to me. I'll be thinking of something, utterly random, and
a bit later there it is -- on the radio, TV, Internet. How did I know I
would be looking at that particular object a few minutes before I
actually did? It used to weird me out something awful, until I just
settled into it once I realized this stuff happens all the time to
probably lots of people, maybe everybody, but I just began noticing it
about ten years ago or so. That's about when I began reading (actually
re-reading) Carl Jung's "Memories Dreams Reflections" as part of some
therapy I was doing at the time. I had been turned on to Jung in high
school by an English teacher who thought it would interest me. I
borrowed his big picture book on archetypes from the local library, then
I got "Memories ..." later. I only related to the stories of his early
life then, because mine was just starting too -- and the grown-up parts
(most of the book) floated over my head. Fast forward almost thirty
years and I'm reading it again, in very close detail. My dreams did
begin opening up some, but I just really began noticing structure and
symbolism in them with the help of the therapist I was seeing at the
time. He got me to see that an archetype means the same basic thing in
many cultures, but an archetype means something individual to each of us
based on the context of what's happening in our lives, and what the
dreams infer about it. Getting feedback from somebody you trust is kind
of key in realizing what dreams mean, what they mean for us as
individuals. Someone who is an expert in them certainly helps even more.
I think that life just got better, in the sense of feeling more
meaningful, when I began to see dreams as a part of my life, not some
random brain artifact I should just ignore. Part of the key to
interpreting them is honesty, part of it is creativity, and part of it
is a "sensitivity" to context and archetype. By "sensitivity" I don't
mean, like, getting all emotionally carried away -- but sensitivity like
in your fingers. I think it's developing an intuitive "touch" that
tells you a lot about yourself, about your connection to all kinds of
stuff going on around you, and why you need to pay attention to it to
find that unique meaning to life that's original to you. I was a
reflective kid at 21, walking everywhere with my head in the clouds and
not knowing why -- I just did it. Now I feel I know -- it's an essential
part of what I was born to do and be.
I
happened to look up "plasma" in an on-line resource a week ago. I
thought space was a vacuum -- but it's not. The universe is now thought
to contain some kind of interstellar plasma, with the stars themselves
being mostly plasma (ionized gas). It's supposedly thick in parts like
nebulae, really thin in others, but it's nearly 99 percent of the
universe! I kind of feel our brains are wired like that -- the
collective unconscious that Jung wrote about (but did not discover --
I'll let you guys look that one up) is a part of this psychic "plasma"
that's everywhere and nowhere at once. I don't mean to freak people out
with the word "psychic" -- like it's levitating stuff and predicting the
future, the Hollywood stereotypes. To me, "psychic" just means part of
our brain activity natural to everyone, but maybe we're just not able to
measure yet. (By the way, the Pilot Speed album sounds way too much
like U2 at first, but it's gets kind of dreamy/spacey as it goes on. You
can hear it affecting my writing -- you are listening while you're
reading, aren't you?)
Wow, I really went on, didn't I? Like I was in a dream ... .
___
*My blog's persona was still in some development when I originally posted this. I would now take this post's cosmology with a scientist's grain of salt, and I would not now blame Hollywood for all our culture's stereotypical ideas about "parapsychology" and the like.
LJ orig.: 11/28/06
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