dream yoga and social yoga

I woke up for the first time in a long time today full of energy and ready to face the world. So I put on Squarepusher and did some intense yoga to get my body moving with my soul. Last night [info]kritusi_vuki and I had another of our intense conversations, the ones where we have intense psychic connections that invariably lead to peculiar instences of telepathy and remote viewing (and that in itself beyond being overwhelmingly enjoyable, points to the potential for using the internet to reach some sort of cybergnosis, a topic I may soon have to explore further). At some point while we talked the question was jokingly raised as to whether we could have flat dreams. So I decided to take on that challenge and intended to dream myself to flatland as I was drifting off to sleep. The night before I had a peculiar dream in which each scene appeared as if it had been filmed and then animated over, much like the movie waking life, except done in multicolored scribbled spirals (based off fibonacci's sequence of course, as it is very deep in my consciousness right now). Last night I returned to that place, but now it was not just animated over the appearences; the dream presented itself as if the world was divided into infinitely thin layers like paper that could each be written on or folded in order to arrive at the multidimensional mode that reality normally presents itself in. The spirals were still there of course, but now seemed much more coherently meaningful as they detailed the manner in which the sheets or planes furled and unfurled around each other.

My words probably don't do so much justice to the experience, but it was quite intense, and reminded me of a certain dream I had a year and a half ago. This was around the time when I kept dreaming that all the radicals I know, including myself, were locked up in concentration style camps by the Bush administration, and coincided with one of my worse downspells of mental instability and apocalyptic anxiety. In this dream I was rotting in a prison cell when it occured to me that I was dreaming and that it would be possible to get out in a very different manner then I got in. I felt like some force was trying to teach me this manner, and suggested that if I folded myself along my main axis and then rolled along it I could move through extra dimensions of space. Now this reminded me of several things, various techniques Castaneda talks about for accessing the astral plane, the teseract method of astral travel in "a wrinkle in time", the scene in Donnie Darko where Donnie discovers he can see his will/ intention and follow it through space-time, and of course yoga, which is all about folding the body in peculiar ways. This dream was actually one of the main reasons I learned yoga in the first place, and have tried to practice it daily. Not that I have yet learned how to project myself astrally, but doing yoga has changed my life drastically for the better and points to a host of "secret powers" that humans can be capable of accessing if they take the practice to change their perceptions of what is possible. And I stopped having the prison dreams, so perhaps I did learn how to escape after all.

Now, I'm not so sure what exactly I could learn from this dream of breaking the world down to its constituent planes, besides the fact that it looks really cool and it is nececssary to pay attention to the planes when spinning a staff or poi or dancing. I suspect though that one could follow their curves like waves and learn how to read the future from its movements. I've had some experiences of that in the past, and perhaps it's time to experiment with them further. The only limits are in our imaginations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted. I did have dreams of being able to disintegrate my consciousness into that of all things long before I acquired the skills and mental stability required to actually do it.

While eating breakfast, Grace showed up to talk about the new radical mental health collective that is forming, which seems a good deal more organized than when Eleena and I tried to start one a couple years ago. Grace is mostly concerned with identifying issues that are prevelent in the community and then determining what the social factors are that might cause them, which seems a good approach to the whole subject, especially if it is addressed through drawing and roleplaying to balance out the more linguistically oriented therapy techniques. Madness is a social disease after all. At this point I am mostly concerned with how mental, physical and emotional health are tied in to our spiritual well-being. If people do not find their lives to be fulfilling and meaningful they are less likely to be healthy. I haven't given much thought to how this issue can be positively addressed, but I imagine encouraging yoga could help. As well as hosting social situations that do not revolve around drinking or listening to music so that we can actually get honest and positive feedback from each other in the community. The next meeting is on the 6th at yardsale books, so I've got over a week to get some clearer ideas together as to what I intend to bring to the group.