On Dreams

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ON DREAMS

“The principle of all things is the Monad; from this Monad there comes into existence the Indefinite Dyad as matter for the Monad, which is cause. From the Monad and Indefinite Dyad arise the numbers; from numbers, points; from these, lines; from these, plane figures; from plane figures, solids; from solid figures there arise sensible bodies, the elements of which are four, fire, water, earth, and air. These elements interchange and turn into one another completely and combine to produce a cosmos animate, intelligent, and spherical, with the earth at its centre, the earth itself too being spherical and inhabited round about”- from Alexander Polyhistor’s account of Pythagorean doctrines

I was looking out the window of the bedroom which I shared with my sister, onto a sable night sky. There suddenly appeared a luminous blue circle, within which, the stylised face of a bearded Viking, complete with caricatured horned helmet. Then a noise, the sound of a switch being clicked, and another glowing orb, this time orange, and within, the image of an ordinary bedside lamp. For a moment the strange visions hung together in an incongruous partnership, obscure as the sky was pitch. Then they vanished. Sometime later, I woke up....

The dream was as vivid as it was bizarre. Since I was 6 when my family moved from the (then) country town of Swords into the suburbs of Dublin, in the year 1987, it would have to have been at least 39years ago that I had this weird dream. Throughout those years that vista, opened up in my sleeping childhood mind, has been the subject of many efforts of mine to represent in drawing, painting, and attempts at symbolic exegesis.

Of course, in terms of the cornucopia of oddness roused in our heads when the senses are bound in sleep, it may seem unremarkable. It is unremarkable. But the aesthetic of the thing was impressed in my mind so that it has been a constant inspiration.

What after all do beside lamps and ahistorical depictions of Vikings have to do with one another? The line of inquiry which sees a connection between the viking element and the fact that my home city was a Norse founded viking colony in Ireland does not persuade me, given that the face looked as if it would not be out of place on a bag of crisps (there was actually a make of crisps that used cartoonish viking imagery when I was a kid).

I prefer to see it as an example of the creative incomprehensibility of this ‘thing’ we call the mind, and go about our days and nights of life, every hour and semi-second without ever leaving it’s bounds, seldom if ever questioning what those bounds and conditions through which it presents our world may be. Our mind, that entity most intimate, indeed, closer even than our idea of ourselves which is it’s product, is if anything, the first and most immediately given of our existence….

…and yet; a mystery hardly explicable in terms of the greyish pulpy mass that is the phenomenon of the human brain, although not unrelated to it.

That kind of incongruity of form, but inseparability in essence is a cornerstone of non-dualism.

The ancestors of my people were of Celtic stock. From classical authors we learn that the Celts held spiritual views akin to the Pythagoreans – unsurprising as an Indo-European people. Although not generally classified as such, and in as much as any classification is useful, I see in what remains to us of the Pythagorean doctrine(s) a very western shade of non-dualism.

DREAMS

‘Just as the mares of Macha race

around the plains of mind, there heaped

in mighty Dagda, time and space

impound and light the Will in sleep’

(I apologise for the use of an AI image; I'm a pretty hopeless artist for all my efforts and sometimes delusions. This represents the dream image better than anything I have knocked out over the years)