Dreaming Radio Streaming Reality

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Under my pillow and facing upward on the bed a 3×5 inch plastic box brought the always-manifesting radio of sublime reality from the ethers into my rebellious 13-year-old ear. The King Biscuit Flour Hour and Roger Daltrey’s insistence, “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me . . .” (Townshend, 1969). From down the hall fading trumpets announced The Tonight Show where parents watched tv. It was 1973. I lay awake long past bedtime hearing a witch’s brew of electric blues and the wine of Dionysian surrender. The radio filled me with anticipation of life in a world where I could flip a plastic switch and feel my heart expand as big as the sky.

I tried for a clear station each night, but Sunday night meant the King Biscuit Flour Hour from Little Rock, Arkansas; it came in loudest and clearest of any good music all week. Otherwise a transistor radio in Southern Indiana could only offer overwhelming static with occasional glimpses into the world out there.

In 1975 I saw the film Tommy and then sat in a tree in my wooded back yard for three days straight except for meals and sleeping. Whatever sense I’d made about life at 13 had melted down like a clock in a Salvador Dali painting. I started to feel the reality that not only do I have a radio; I hear a grand radio intimating a larger reality. And not only do I hear this radio; I am a radio receiver. And not only am I a radio receiver, but this is the human condition.

As a teen I loved hearing music from several states away. Now I understand that what I loved about it was how it spoke to me from archetypal states away. That’s why I call it the radio of sublime reality. Its airwaves travel on poetry, art, inspiration, intuition, relationships, mythology, synchronicity, nature, mystical experiences, mind-body connections, and dreams. The whisperings of angels bring the blueprints for collaboration with greatness from the unseen world. These channels bring human life into the realm of the gods (Pressfield, 2002).

There are also internal hackers; identity thieves, the psychological equivalent of computer viruses – what we used to call static back in the day. Patañjali, who wrote the commensurate guide to yoga philosophy, described what interferes with soul life as “the wheel of desire (kama), anger (krodha), greed (lobha), infatuation (moha), pride (mada) and malice (matsara)” (Iyengar, 2002).  We become ensnared by them partly through lack of discernment.

Egos cause interference on sublime radio stations. Our stupendous potential competes with the misreading of signals. As years pass, large decisions and small ones accumulate and our identity reflects to whom we’ve listened.

I once bought a used Honda Accord with a cracked engine block that burned to toast on a rural highway, leaving me walking on the shoulder and changing a lot of plans. I’d tried to listen to my intuition when I bought the car but was seduced by statistics about the model’s longevity. I’d wanted to feel in control through logic and didn’t heed the inner voice that said, “Don’t pay five dollars for that dud.”

After that, I needed to buy a car in a day. A salesperson showed me a lightly used Geo Prizm and a few other cars. The generic style of the Prizm underwhelmed me, but I consulted my intuition and it said “Yes! That’s the one!” The car proved a plain-Jane wonder. It needed incredibly little maintenance, lasted seventeen years, and turned out to have a Toyota engine. Discernment errors cost, and discernment successes turbo-charge what can happen in life.

My own search for a loud and clear channel of the sublime led me to find that dreams are my King Biscuit Flour Hour. They stream the purest messages. The dream station comes in well because it airs while my ego sleeps. The sublimely real world speaks to us all the time. At night, when the ego’s will is turned off, there’s a special opportunity to receive a clearer message in the form of a dream.

The Oglála Lakȟóta Oyáte Chief Tȟašúŋke Witkó (Lakota: “Tȟašúŋke Witkó” in Standard Lakota Orthography,^[2] IPA: /tχaˈʃʊ̃kɛ witˈkɔ/, lit. ”His-Horse-Is-Crazy”) worked with his dreams throughout his adult life striving to live the calling of his initial vision: He returned from a quest for guidance as a youth with a waking-dream of a Rider painted with a zig-zag of lightning across his face and hailstones on his body. The rider careened toward war on a dancing ephemeral horse whose hooves never touched the ground. The Lakota people called this man His-Horse-Is-Crazy because of the horse of his vision and his calling to be the rider. He worked with dreams to actualize the reality of Rider on His Crazy Horse: bold, austere, intuitive, fierce, visionary, and invulnerable to arrows and bullets. Win Blevins (1995), an authority on early American plains life, wrote of Chief Tȟašúŋke Witkó’s life based on many interviews and witnesses’ reports. His vision informs and inspires what I imagine:

In 1876 Chief Tȟašúŋke Witkó epitomized his name when warriors and soldiers formed opposing lines at the start of the Battle of the Greasy Grass (also called The Little Bighorn). He rode out of the line of warriors toward the line of U.S. soldiers. As a solitary dancer in the field between the conflict, he and his horse whirled like a mercurial storm as he taunted the soldiers. They sent a hail of bullets, and none hit him. After enticing the soldiers to waste a lot of ammunition, he rode back to his group, asked them to wait, and rode back into the zen frontier swaying and flourishing. He heckled the soldiers while bullets roared around him and his long hair sculpted the air in arcs. He veered back to the warriors and asked them to wait just a little longer. Then he rode again into the fury of soldiers’ gunfire as the Rider on His Crazy Horse, manifesting a living, timeless dream infusing its light in the circumstances of life and death. Uninjured, he rejoined his group and they charged into battle.

I’ve come to understand by working with dreams that a daytime mode itself doesn’t create reality. During sleep, the ego disengages, relinquishes the driver’s seat, doesn’t make decisions. At night dreams broadcast symbolic stories to help the dreamer pierce through murkiness and make sharp decisions about daytime experiences. Dreams often speak in symbols with culturally diverse, ancient roots. If someone remembers a dream and works with it skillfully, the dream can help sort errant ideas from accurate perceptions.

In my work as a Jungian dream therapist I sometimes hear comparisons between what happened in a dream to the situation in someone’s waking life. The dreamer may say, “In the dream, I’m walking to work on the sidewalk downtown but the sidewalk is blue – not like real life. The front door opens into a river and now I’m swimming in it . . .” The comment about “real life” suggests the dreamer assumes reality happens during waking experiences not non-waking hours. That viewpoint presumes that the ego is the only part of the psyche able to know the truth. Most Westerners see life that way.

But consider this: The ego’s daytime mode is as real as the ego is conscious. Delusions, compulsions, confusion and misinterpretations; or inspiration, relationship, vision and acuity. These often mingle in complex ways during waking hours. At night, truth streams in from the dream world.

In 1840 the Transcendental writer Ralph Waldo Emerson (1960) reported this dream:

I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said “This must thou eat.” And I ate the world.

Eating the world-apple can mean digesting the fruit of the tree of discernment, learning how to hear, on inner frequencies, the difference between what’s generative and what’s phony or destructive.

Introspection supports the sorting process between constructive and destructive. In dreams this process of becoming more conscious can be symbolized as eating an apple. The meaning stems from folklore and mythology (Snow White, The Golden Bird), but most notably from the story of the Garden of Eden and the tree with the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. From a Jungian perspective Adam and Eve were inexperienced. When they ate the apple, they came down to Earth, lived more fully, and had a chance to learn about themselves. That was how they became more aware.

In Sūtra IV.23, Patañjali describes how to attune to soul life: “Consciousness is the bridge between nature and soul, and its conjunction is either illumined by the seer or tainted by the seen. The wise yogi frees consciousness from the qualities of nature; he keeps it clean so that it is reflected without distortion both by the seer and the seen” (Iyengar, p. 272).

We’re equipped to do that. We are radio receivers. We’re dreamers. We have visions. We either choose the wheel of desire, pride, greed, and other destructive broadcasts inside, or we act on the still small voice, the inner muse, our wildest dreams, or angels with blueprints.

Life continually presents these options. Dreams continually clarify choices and catalyze change. The Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible shares the dreams and visions of its author from about 1,900 years ago. That was then. We dream today. The radio of sublime reality breathes fire all day and all night. It speaks to each of us, and we’re not identical people seeking achievement of a general perfection. We each have our own zen frontier to enter and our own mission to dare. All the while, we’re streaming live. We don’t need someone else’s revelation or a satellite to show us what’s real. We are already dreaming.

Radio Poem

My radio speaks in tongues

about the remnants of the answer

floating on the wind

like dried leaves in revelry

My radio hums like bees

building a prismatic nectar palace

in devotion to a mission, a queen

and flowers of vibration so stirring

that when I hear this revelation

about the evaporation of the answer

I myself am spoken, and sung

and I become the radio.

 

References

Blevins, W. (1995). Stone Song: A novel of the life of Crazy Horse. New York, NY: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Emerson, R. W. (1960). The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by W.H. Gilman et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press.

Iyengar, B.K.S. (2002). Light on the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali. London, England: Thorsons.

Pressfield, S. (2002). The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. New York, NY:  Black Irish Entertainment LLC.

Townshend, P. (1969). Tommy. London, England: Decca/MCA.

Wikipedia. “Crazy Horse” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse. Accessed May 25, 2020.