I sprinted into my inner professor’s office as if in hot pursuit, still nimble beyond my advancing years, and slid into the seat left empty far too long in front of his desk. He leaned back in his chair, smiling, as if he’d been expecting me all along. Outside the open beveled windows behind him, the limbs of a stately, old ash stirred in the breeze. Green leaves pulsated like an Impressionist painting, from sun to shade. You couldn’t even see or smell the spewing pollen from up here.
“What can I do for you today?” he asked, the way he does.
I felt like crying all of a sudden from the relief of that simple question, unable even to frame a pithy retort from my deflecting repertoire. Instead I sighed. Not the long-suffering variety for which I am justly famous in certain circles but one of deep release. After all, I had finally found the willingness to deliver my dark illusions to the light of his presence that could and would dispel them. And dark they were.
I had spent the afternoon having brunch at a hip local venue followed by a movie with two dear friends to celebrate my upcoming birthday, one of those benchmarks of time served in the dream about which I’ve become increasingly ambivalent with each trip around the sun, candle on the cake. We had chosen the movie The Dead Don’t Die in hopes of providing a couple hours of levity in our increasingly serious worldly and personal “realities.” But while its four or five lines of repetitive dialogue delivered initial laughs, it mostly served up a blood bath, not that unlike the movies of our lives, actually, in content at least, within which we appear so helplessly cast. Having forgotten we’re only reading the lines of the scripts we’ve secretly written and chosen to play.
In this star-studded Indie massacre, members of a small town police department attempt to combat a zombie apocalypse triggered by the earth spinning off its axis as a result of polar fracking. From the oft-repeated refrain “This is going to end badly,” uttered early on by Deputy Police Chief Adam Driver to his boss, Bill Murray, we are thrust into confronting the cartoonish consequences of life here in this imaginary world we’ve dreamed up, inhabited by living and dead zombies attended to by a Scottish mortician played by a sword-wielding, swashbuckling Tilda Swinton at her wackiest. Animated by a brain we’ve mistaken for a mind and constantly strive to destroy in mindless pursuit of fleeting pleasures that nonetheless lead to the grave. In competition all the while with other bodies, likewise mindlessly wandering the sets of their personal, garish dreamscapes, for a less guilty seeming “self” and “life.”
As I sat in my seat in the theater watching zombies throughout the burg of Centerville arise to feast on former family members, friends, and neighbors, the latter to scramble for weapons to chop or shoot off their heads (as if the brain had anything to do with animating their murderous march) while chanting “you have to kill the head,” I couldn’t help but identify with what A Course in Miracles labels the “secret dream” that actually appears to enliven both “living” and “living-dead” figures on the proverbial screen. The forgotten, false belief that the “tiny, mad idea” that we could separate from our one loving Source, Self, and Mind had real, apocalyptic consequences, casting us out of Heaven into a projected universe of guilty, aimlessly wandering bodies. Helplessly born, hopelessly striving to prove they exist at God’s expense but it’s not their fault, it’s another living or dead body’s, seeking, as we all do, over and over again, to triumph over each other in an imaginary, mindless world, even though it always ends really badly. At least until we’re willing to stop trying to kill off the decision-making mind, what the Course calls “the dreamer of the dream,” with our aggressive denial and turn instead to the inner teacher ever willing to help us find that very decision-making mind outside the dream, symbolized by the guy sitting right there across from me now.
I thought about the last year, a continuation of variations on a theme of exponentially proliferating problems accompanied by dwindling possibilities, resources, and solutions; the sense of repetitively responding, managing, compromising, editing, and adjusting scenes in a script to no real avail. And I thought about the way I felt right now sitting across from my teacher in this office far beyond the bloodbath on the screen. The way I felt every time I remembered my choice to make it to this place in our right mind that could never be destroyed. Thereby discovering I still am, in truth, completely safe, supported, and immune to imaginary predators, human and otherwise. Returned to a peace that defies the understanding of zombies of all kinds.
I thought, too, about the invitation to practice kindness that arose spontaneously lately wherever I looked around me at my fellow dream characters. Actors, really, with whom I actually had so much in common because “everyone here is fighting a hard battle,” as our beloved external Course teacher Ken Wapnick often said, quoting Philo. I’d been so focused on myself as the beleaguered “hero” of my dream for such a long time that I’d hardly noticed my costars experiencing themselves in equally threatening situations from their perspectives, struggling to make sense of similarly confounding, unexpected scripts. But now our predicaments seemed completely transparent, a realization that delivered waves of compassion, propelling me here.
I looked up at the robed wonder, still smiling patiently.
“It’s my birthday,” I said.
He nodded. “Do you want some coffee? Are we supposed to sing?”
We had a good laugh after that. We always do.
“You are the dreamer of the world of dreams. 2 No other cause it has, nor ever will. 3 Nothing more fearful than an idle dream has terrified God’s Son, and made him think that he has lost his innocence, denied his Father, and made war upon himself. 4 So fearful is the dream, so seeming real, he could not waken to reality without the sweat of terror and a scream of mortal fear, unless a gentler dream preceded his awaking, and allowed his calmer mind to welcome, not to fear, the Voice that calls with love to waken him; a gentler dream, in which his suffering was healed and where his brother was his friend. 5 God willed he waken gently and with joy, and gave him means to waken without fear.
Accept the dream He gave instead of yours. 2 It is not difficult to change a dream when once the dreamer has been recognized. 3 Rest in the Holy Spirit, and allow His gentle dreams to take the place of those you dreamed in terror and in fear of death. 4 He brings forgiving dreams, in which the choice is not who is the murderer and who shall be the victim. 5 In the dreams He brings there is no murder and there is no death. 6 The dream of guilt is fading from your sight, although your eyes are closed. 7 A smile has come to lighten up your sleeping face. 8 The sleep is peaceful now, for these are happy dreams.
Dream softly of your sinless brother, who unites with you in holy innocence. 2 And from this dream the Lord of Heaven will Himself awaken His beloved Son. 3 Dream of your brother’s kindnesses instead of dwelling in your dreams on his mistakes. 4 Select his thoughtfulness to dream about instead of counting up the hurts he gave. 5 Forgive him his illusions, and give thanks to him for all the helpfulness he gave. 6 And do not brush aside his many gifts because he is not perfect in your dreams. 7 He represents his Father, Whom you see as offering both life and death to you.” (A Course in Miracles Text, Chapter 27.VII.13-15)
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