All Dressed Up With Everywhere to Go Part 1: Imaginal Entanglements

Prelude:

To begin with I'd like to explain  the genesis of the title of this new blog series.  It began with a dream, one in which a recently common theme of obstacles, frustrations, misdirections and confusions in  my dream world inhabited an apparently necessary journey I was embarked upon, a journey with uncertain intent or destination.  In other words, a mostly mundane and forgettable nocturnal adventure.  But then the scene suddenly shifted, and what had been what I sometimes term a "small dream" began to morph into its flip side, what I term a "Big Dream".  With this shift I I found myself in a large, brightly lit room, perhaps a ballroom.  To my surprise I noticed I was dressed in a white tuxedo and black bow tie.  I began wandering through the room, now peopled with a number of equally well dressed guests.  I passed close by a woman I recognized who, upon seeing me,  commented with a smile "You look like you're in love!".  This seemed rather odd on its own, yet as I passed by another female acquaintance a few steps on she repeated the same declarative, "You look like you're in love!".  This scene repeated itself exactly several times more as I wandered through the room, which confused me since I am decidedly not in love with anyone, nor have I been so since my young adulthood (unless being "in lust" is synonymous with being "in love").

And then the dream abruptly ended as I woke up to the blare of my alarm clock.  As I fumbled out of bed to make coffee I pondered over this strange string of identical comments, puzzled but mildly amused at the disconnect to my real-life amorous condition, or rather the lack thereof.  Just then a thought popped into my mind, one practically as disconcerting as the dream comments from my female dream interlocutors - I realized that what they meant was not that I looked like I was in love with someone, but that I was IN LOVE, or more precisely I was WITHIN LOVE.

I was absolutely certain of this new revelation of the meaning of the dream message, but it had a peculiar feel to it.  I have never, as far as I can remember, thought or felt or intuited that I was "within love".  This characterization of my life condition is one I've never expressed, nor is it one  I would anticipate embracing in any foreseeable future life condition evaluation.  It had the feel of a message from something outside myself, or perhaps from some strange and usually inaccessible region of my interior self.  In any case, I knew this to be the real content of the nocturnal message.

Later that afternoon I had occasion to email a friend on some matters and, knowing he appreciates the slip and slide of our dream lives, related to him the content of my dream and the sudden revelation of its interpretation.  His reply was immediate. "Knowing you as I do, Jeff, I would add another meaning implied in this dream - you are all dressed up with everywhere to go!". 

And so the title of my new blog series.  Which begs two questions.  Firstly, where does one go when everywhere is in play?  And secondly, what does one wear that qualifies as "all dressed up" when embarking on that journey?  I think these questions are closely related, though for now I will begin with a discussion of the second.

Fugue:

If one is to embark on a journey, appropriate attire is called for.  You might say a tuxedo is appropriate for a wedding, or a splashy event like the Oscars.   It is decidedly not appropriate for an exploration of the geosphere, like a hike into the Grand Canyon.  Nor for exploring the biosphere, as in a trek through a tropical rain forest.  It is apparently appropriate for a dream journey, which is by definition a journey through the noosphere, the sphere of thoughts and ideas, dreams and reveries, culture and creativity.  The noosphere is vast, yet mostly invisible.  You might call our dream life a little island in the vast landscape of the noosphere - a very special kind of island where linear causality in time is rather loosely held, where stories have a beginning, and another beginning, and another; where the middle is sometimes the end: where the end is almost never.  

Let me rephrase that.  Our dream life is an island within an island nation within the noosphere.  Recently I stumbled upon a name for that island nation, one that is derived from a Sufi notion and expanded upon quite beautifully by the author Cynthia Bourgeault.  That name is the "Imaginal Realm".

First off, I don't mean by that name, imaginary.  We don't imagine our dreams, like we might imagine what it would be like to get rich, or play professional baseball, or suddenly score a date with that hottie down the next row of cubicles at work.  Dreams happen to us, and in that sense they are real (at least when we're immersed in them).  Yet they are not real in the same way our normal everyday waking life is real.  They exist within the imaginal realm, and are real in that realm -  an island within that island nation.  And it's the contours of that island nation that I want to explore in order to figure out, at the least, what the appropriate attire is for that journey.  To begin that exploration, I'll quote from Bourgeault in her book "Eye of the Heart".

The term "Imaginal Realm" has its original provenance in Islamic mysticism, but the idea itself - if truth be told an archetype more than idea - is common to all the great sacred traditions.  It is traditionally understood to be a boundary realm between the worlds, each structured according to its own governing conventions and unfolding according to its own causality.  In traditional metaphysical language, it is the realm separating the denser corporeality of our earth plane from the progressively finer causalities which lie "above" us in the noetic and logoic realms.

I say "boundary", but the imaginal world is more of a confluence, for the word "boundary" suggests a separation while what is really at stake in the realm is an active flowing together. 

Experientially received within one's own quiet subjectivity, it appears as an allusive aliveness, a meaning presenting itself in "glimpses and visions", a  foretaste or reminder of a higher order of being to which the human heart actually belongs and to and from which it responds, with infinite tug.  The imaginal nudges us, beacons us, corrects us as we stray from our authentic unfolding, rewards us with dazzling glimpses and reassurances of that "other intensity" to which we truly belong, and in whose light the meaning of our earthly journey will ultimately be revealed, like the treasure buried in a field. 

Pretty much everything she says here does, or at least can, apply to dreams.  But like I said, dreams are one island among many in this island nation of the Imaginal Realm.  The Imaginal Ream can pop up in everyday life in the form of synchronicities, intuitions, creative epiphanies.  Just as importantly, it can show up as visions, voices, precognitions, clairvoyance.  It can appear as a dialogue from a disembodied entity as in channeling, or a message from a deceased loved one, or simply as a sculpture of the Goddess in the form of a twig at one's foot.  

I suspect all of us have experienced the Imaginal Realm in one form or another, even if we won't admit it to any but our closest loved ones (if even them).  But it's there, it's real.  I experience it almost daily in my creative work life, in those moments when something appears in the work that is decidedly not me, but of me in some strange and mysterious way that I can't rationally explain, that is somehow outside the causality of the normal world I usually inhabit.  As I've also related, I have occasionally encountered it vividly in my dream world, in the "Big Dreams". So, to get back to my original question, if I want to explore this realm further, what is the appropriate attire?

And in that, I will refer to the dream I related at the beginning of this blog post.  Dreams are saturated in symbolism, and the symbol that pops up most strongly for me in my dream attire is the black bow tie I wore.

To be continued...