In the previous post, the quantum leap of lucid dream energy allowed me to finally leave the childhood home of my midlife dream journey. I asked a dream-incubation question, “What is my lucidity?”, and had a single dream image of a man, collapsed, with strings attached to his body, like a puppet. It was as if the strings held by the puppet master were cut. The new freedom gained on awakening from dream, separated from the puppet master, can be traumatic.

So who is the puppet master, the dreamer who dreams the dream? -- the id, the Self, the not-me, the divine? I incubated the question to see if the dreamer would identify him/her/itself and got this dream in reply. I am on a bus with my wife and others. Beside me is my office laptop computer. I am sitting up front looking out of the windshield as we descend rapidly, causing me concern. I get out at the stop at the bottom of the descent and leave my wife and laptop behind, but get concerned again, run out into the street recklessly and try to get the bus driver to stop for me, but he regards me impassively and drives on.

So who is the puppet master or dreamer? Myself, the dream ego? My wife, my feminine counterpart or anima? The bus driver, the pilot of the dream of my married and working reality? The dream ego has an infantile wish to escape his marital and work responsibilities in the descent of the second half of life. It could be his dream. His wife and anima wants to keep the karmic couple together, the yin and yang, and wants the dream ego to feel the pain and consequences of separation, like the puppet cut loose from the master. The bus driver knows the marital and working reality is only a dream and will not let the dreamer back on board once he has awakened. The driver is indifferent to the loss of reality, the descent, the impermanence of the waking of reality. It’s only a dream.

If the divine is indifferent, why does it bother to answer my questions? The indifference is to my dream, not my awakening. The divine is concerned with awakening; the dream is only a vehicle, a bus. Only play.

The world religions are about awakening. Christ awakened, and the name Buddha means “the awakened one.” But what is it to be awake? What is beyond the dream? I incubated that question also and got only one word in response -- Phoenix. The mythological Phoenix is the bird that rises from its own ashes. Life after death? Reincarnation? Rebirth? Transformation? Then I started humming the Glen Campbell song “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” The next line is “she’ll be rising.” Who will be rising? The mythological bird? The collapsed puppet? The wife I left behind on the dream bus? My anima, my soul? There’s a lot of play in a single word