Illusion/Disillusion

Sussah, of angels and people/life in New Orleans, left this comment on my previous post:

Do you have sleeping dreams so sweet? I hope so.

These past few days I've been contemplating a blog entry centered around a long-recurring dream where the light in the dream matches the light in the photo below. But I know that other people's dreams are dull dull dull, and so I've prevented myself from going any further with this theme until I read Sussah's comment.

Sussah: you're in my head!

One of the (many) wonders of technology is that I've been able to reproduce, through photographic manipulation, the intense blue-green light of a dream from which I always awaken feeling exhilarated, stunned with the possibilities that life offers.

So if I haven't lost you yet, here it is:

In the dream, I arise about an hour before dawn, to a mostly-sleeping universe, except for myself and maybe one or two other people. And we are suspended -- in time & this luminous light -- for several hours. Nothing much happens other than the fact of our being present and allowing this light into our consciousness. It's a balm, a restorative, a limbo of peace with the intense awareness of everything being right coupled with a heightened sense of reality. If I could go there every night, I would.

When Jodie Foster, in the movie Contact, stands on a beach with her long-dead father, we don't know if she's in an altered state of consciousness or has successfully navigated to an alternate universe -- but -- the screen was lit up with that same light from my dream.

In Philip Pullman's book The Subtle Knife, Will Parry discovers an invisible opening into another dimension, and while there finds a knife which allows its bearer the capability of "cutting entries into countless other worlds." [Random House] Is the dream my metaphorical knife? If so, I want to hold it in my hand, honed to a keen edge.