BUY THE BOOK ABOUT THE BOOK CHAPTER EXCERPTS REVIEWS TOUR SCHEDULE MEDIA APPEARANCES PRESS KIT JOIN DREAM LIST AUTHOR BIO AUTHOR INTERVIEW READERS' COMMENTS DREAM FORUM CONTACT   Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Epilogue

Chapter 11 (Excerpt): THE HOUSE OF DREAMS Healing the Rift Between the Worlds "I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?" ----Thoreau "They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?" ---Doestoevsky There came a time in my life---several months, perhaps, though it felt interminable---when dreams and reality seemed closer, more covalent, than I could ever have imagined. The images, moods, and imperatives of the psyche pushed brusquely into waking life. Ordinary events glowed with occult significance. The literal became symbolic, the symbolic literal: I felt like the proverbial man who sees a stick in the road at dusk, mistakes it for a snake, and, persuaded by his own mental projections, keels over from a heart attack. I no longer knew if I was haunted by my own phantasms, or glimpsing another sort of reality altogether. It seemed as if I had, as in faerie legends, eaten the food of the invisible world, and was now in thrall to it. I talk to my Cree friend Sylvia about this whenever I have the chance. Given how little such issues are discussed in mainstream Western culture, it has been a comfort. "Indians don't make a big distinction between what's real and what's a dream," she said to me once as we were having a cup of coffee. "It's all real." Her "grandfathers" not only appear in her dreams, she confided, but when she is awake. One in particular "just shows up, in daylight. I can see through him. Like a shadow with color." "Translucent," I suggested. She nodded, then was suddenly caught by how absurd our conversation must have sounded, a taxonomy of angels on a pinhead: "Someone once told me I was a borderline schizophrenic," she pronounced gravely, then erupted into peals of merriment. I laughed, too, a little uncertainly. My own less dramatic experiences had sometimes scared me witless. She took my napkin and with her Bic pen drew a circle on it."Say this is the waking world." She superimposed another circle intersecting the first. "And this is dreaming." Then she shaded the shared area of their intersection with a crosshatch of lines. "Just like this space is in both circles at the same time," she explained, "our elders knew you can be in many dimensions at once." "These ideas are hard to translate," she added with a small frown. She pondered for a moment, then brightened. "It's like this---" and she interlaced her fingers, gazing down at them placidly. "Reality and the dream just...overlap." I was fascinated at this view of an existence beyond our rigid dualisms of waking and dreaming. Our linguistic forms allow for only two cases----the subjective ("in here") or the objective ("out there"); but here was something in between. The diagram on Sylvia's napkin was familiar from the so-called Venn diagrams taught in geometry class, where the shaded area, belonging to both domains and to neither, is known rather poetically as a "null set," belonging to two domains and to neither. In the medieval world, this same figure was known as a mandorla, a doorway into the sacred representing the union of heaven and earth. The more I've looked, the more I've noted how many societies have recognized a realm of awareness between waking and dreaming---not only recognized it, but deliberately sought it... Epilogue