In Dreams I Walk With You

‘So the next night Maralung dreamed again and it happened the same way. Again the master and the bird came into his dream and woke him and sang for him and again he fell asleep afterwards. But this time in the morning he remembered the song.’

~ The Song Finds the Singer: Maralung, PZI Miscellaneous Koans

A dreamer dreaming a dream. The above story is of an Australian aboriginal singer, meeting a song master in a dream; after a couple of tries, he remembered the song.

We have a natural urge to parse and analyze our night-time stories:Dreammoods.com says dreaming of ‘eating jam’ signifies pleasant surprises, sweet things and new discoveries. That would be my guess. But putting the analysis aside for a moment, dreams can have a primal, almost primitive, role in our lives. One that resonates as if in song.

A couple of years ago, when I first started teaching, I dreamed I was sitting in the dark, early-morning zendo at the Zen Center in Los Angeles. Taizan Maezumi, who was one of my first teachers, came into the zendo and sat next to me. Want of approval? Perhaps. Tribal joining? Absolutely. A couple of months ago, in another dream I was high on a cliff with John Tarrant and David Weinstein overlooking a small and only inches-deep lagoon fed by ocean waves. John said, ‘Let’s jump!’, and to my horror, he did. With some concern, I and then David followed, and we landed safely in the shallow water. A fear of risk overcome? Maybe. Friendship? For certain.

The point is not so much to figure out the meaning of the dream as it is to allow the song of the dream to sing. Try this one:

In dreams I walk with you

In dreams I talk to you

In dreams you’re mine all the time

We’re together in dreams, in dreams

youtube.com/watch?v=TPqZs7Vl_xg

~ In Dreams, Roy Orbison