A Lover-haunted Dream
O Lover,
Last week, during my first night following a brief hospitalization, I had a dream. The experience was unique and arresting, both before and after waking.
In the dream I was a participant in some kind of group activity, perhaps akin to a religious commune or association, perhaps located in England or the European continent. My cohort’s geography seemed to be divided into four expansive squares together comprising a single block. There were broken and decayed artifacts on the margins of one of these sections hinting at centuries of elapsed history. I traversed the quadrants which on the far side opened up to a variegated valley of foliage, one which reminded me of a stadium: organic, vast and tiered. That each band or portion of this elliptical valley had a distinctive texture and hue of green seemed at the time to hint at Hildegard’s multifaceted term veríditas (“greening”). The beauty and majesty of the valley’s macro vista defied description.
Suddenly I saw a column of uniquely green vegetation emerging from the right rim of the valley. It descended steadily toward the center, and then bore left along the keel in the direction in which I was standing. As I came to see the column more clearly, marching trees as it were, I was intuitively aware that what was emerging was the Christ, the core and culmination of all of the bio-reaches of the valley. Rimming the valley and its Christ I continued to see centuries-old remains of human habitation and civilization. As all of this was pressing in upon me I became powerfully conscious that the entire valley, having been epiphanized via Your Christ, was immanent of and permeated by You, O Lover, and that for one of the first times in my life I was actually dreaming You! Your entangled indistinctiónis amidst the botanical creation seemed to signal a seismic paradigm shift from separation to Unítas, from enumeration to Oneing, from a proliferation of beings to Being Itself.
In the week since waking from this dream I have kept returning to its larger meaning. While it seemed to have begun parabolically, mediatedly via a landscape, it quickly moved beyond the kataphatic (“with image”) into the apophatic (“sans image”). It was as if my eyes were increasingly looking through the arborscape directly and immediately into You, O Lover. Rather than two spheres of reality, Creator (subject) acting upon creation (object), there was just the flow of You, neither-two-nor-one You. The dream skewered this seamless reciprocity of interdwellingness, what John of Damascus (675-749) termed circumincéssion, a term partially overlapping with pan-én-theism, and enveloped ta pánta (“all things”) without exception.
Furthermore there was the self-evidency of the dream’s impact. However, rather than waging an argument, forging an apologetic, or marshaling empirical evidence, the dream was inexorably unfolding into an ever-expanding aura, an ambience, a felt experience, which was increasingly depositing me far beyond assessment and persuasion. The dream’s momentum was toward an awareness, a consciousness, which transcended cognitive knowledge.
And finally, while the column, flowing and foliaged, was the Christic key, the entire vista was You in your encompassing immanency. The valley was a massive garden of Your heílsgeschichte, a translucent botanical rendering of You as Tabernacler, Enfleshment, intimator of what Eckhart referred to as the singular Grunt (“Ground”) transcending distinction and separation. In a word, the dream was You, O Lover.
My final response, at least so far?The thrice-fold words of the Glória of Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741): Tu sólus . . . Tu sólus . . . Tu sólus . . . . (“You alone”)!
