Dreams, Nostalgia, and the Alchemical Process of Memory

 

To dream is to sort. Dreaming is a process not unlike sorting the laundry before it is washed.

In dream-sorting, the bad stuff goes first. The initial phase of sleep plunges us into the lowest part of the astral plane to which we vibrate. The lower astral plane is the level of passions, urges, and strong emotions. To be caught in the lower astral feels like hell. When I used to suffer regular night terrors in my teens, it was so scary that my experiences made me horror-movie proof. I cannot be frightened by a horror book or film. Because I have a fairly decent memory of the lower astral, I find light sleep unpleasant. I try to avoid naps if possible: they are anything but refreshing. If dreams are a day swimming at the pool, then for me naps are being splashed with puddle water by an oncoming car while fully dressed. 

The Lower Astral

All beings pass through the lower astral but it is only the nasty ones (or the foolish) who want to hang out there. Ouija boards and seances access the lower astral. Suicides are often trapped between its layers, bouncing between the middle and higher astral and the etheric planes. Demons populate the lower astral, hoping to find hosts who can be suckered into a relationship. Why 19th century Spiritualists and their modern day equivalents failed to realize this baffles me: don't they understand the grey-water function of the lower astral in the series of planes? How is it that I know better than to stay in such a polluted place, as a former atheist no less? I find it astounding that seasoned professional mediums ignore the grave danger they put themselves in every time they deliberately channel what they think is a client's dead relative, and with no banishing ritual! The lower astral is, for lack of a better word, dirty because of its function. The lower astral is meant as a pit-stop, not a final destination or an entertainment lounge.

Dreaming is returning home, and it is a glacial process. I often dream about the cottage my parents used to own on a small lake in a nearby state. In the dreams I must pack to leave the cottage, which luckily was sold some twenty years ago just as my parents became to old to handle the long drive there and back. Packing in my dreams represents getting life stuff done on the material plane. For me, this means writing, running a music lesson business, performing, and starting a subscription library. Naturally I always dream I am running late. Packing also symbolizes the preservation of things I deem important, whether that means literally learning how to pack vegetables into canning jars or hanging on to the treasure trove of written language for other people's future great-grandchildren.

That Middle Layer: The Mid-Astral

Thank goodness the mid-astral is where I remember most of my dream time.  The function of the middle astral is also to sort, however, it isn't as crude of a wash as the lower astral where the larger chunks of grime are dealt with.  The middle astral is why dreams have a reputation for being silly.  There's nonsense in it, all sorts of Jungian symbols, ice cream castles in the air, animals who speak fluent French, and whatever goofiness you're prone to imagine.  During this form of sleep, the higher self separates and goes to hang out with the highest plane of beings it is attuned to while the conscious part of the self that usually has to do the "adulting" gets to play around with the themes of the sandbox of life.  Like any form of child's play, this sport isn't necessarily relaxing or fun.  I was the sort of child who hated childhood -- I am much happier now as a middle-aged woman.  For me, play often felt too dramatic and too pregnant with possibility of where it was leading me. 

The real question is "Who is my higher self hanging out with in Mid-Sleep?"  I get brief glimpses of it if I'm lucky: a flight over the ocean, a sunlit grove, some snippets of orchestral music.

Nostalgia vs. Nihilism

Mostly I don't remember the good stuff because it is harder to remember.  Allow me to repeat myself: the good stuff is harder to remember.  That's why we need to try harder to remember it.  Yes, I am talking about nostalgia.

Nostalgia can be extremely toxic.  The playwright Tennessee Williams had a knack for capturing the toxicity of nostalgia: think Laura's mother in the Glass Menagerie, forever pattering on about gentleman callers as she tried to imprint her halcyon days upon her pale, cowering daughter.  Nostalgia often paints the good old days in a wholly unrealistic light: maybe Pleasantville wasn't so pleasant after all, all things considered.  Nostalgia siphons off all the warm fuzzies and then pretends the rest of it never happened.  Nostalgia cleanses the past, or at least it cleanses our perception of it.  Nostalgia, taken too far, is taking pessimist nihilism and spinning it around to the opposite pole, which is an equally bad thing.  Nostalgia is of vital importance because it is our window to gratitude for the past.  Without the sorting effect of nostalgia, it is extremely difficult to remember anything positive or happy because of our evolutionary tendency to remember negative events.  

The past is what it is.  When considering it, we need to take into account that it is a spectrum between two poles: nostalgia and pessimist nihilism are only useful insofar as they allow us to see the spectrum between them.  The past was the best of times and it was the worst of times.  Neither should we shed too many tears for the loveliness of what was nor should we stew in frustration for the unchangeable horror that was.  The truth was always somewhere in the middle.  All of our ideals from back then may be tarnished, but that doesn't mean we should leave them behind.

When I was a child, my grandmother and grandfather would babysit my brother and me at their house in northern Illinois so my parents could catch a break.  During those weekends, I remember playing with a toy called a Lite Brite.  The Lite Brite was a black box with a lightbulb in it.  It had plastic pegs you could stick into a grid of holes to make colorful displays.  The nostalgist in me wants to romanticize the Lite Brite, to see it as  a representation of an idyllic childhood.  In this childhood, I could paint myself as a beautiful but misunderstood genius child.  The pessimist wants me to see it as plastic landfill junk, the stupid wastefulness of a decadent age for a spoiled, miserable brat.  The truth is in the middle. 

Time flies and the events of only a second ago are already in the past, never to be re-lived.  Mistakes can and will be made.  I suppose the trick is not to overreact, to put it into perspective, and to keep plugging away.

We are all on our way back home, better late than never.