The Awakening-

The Awakening

Three faces in a crowd dressed in white and brown.

I struggled to make out the features; the feelings attached were one of peace and happiness.
One woman stood steadily alongside a solid man, another man with a brown robe was looking around with a knowing smile on his face. They were all adorned with golden tresses down the front of their gowns: some sort of rimmed material hung on either side of their respective shoulders and slid down like a shining waterfall down to the hem of their robes.

It was an effort to see their enlightened faces, but the voices were clear.
I had the sense of discussions taking place and of important words being exchanged.
Plans for the future perhaps, or a glance into the unknown? All I was certain of was that this had somehow something to do with me.

I walked amongst them and at the same time felt a distance from them.
I knew this was not my own family, since their own familiar loved faces were engrained in me, but these other adorned figures seemed familiar too, somehow and close enough to be family too.

In between hearing bits and pieces of essential dialogue between them, I strangely felt a presence near me; a much loved form holding my hand as though from a lingering memory.

My heart expanded as I held that somehow treasured hand tighter, and an emotion of well-being overtook my senses. It was like a numbing sensation tickling my mind and easing my body’s tension, all the way down from the back of my neck to my feet.

‘Her thoughts are telling me she can hear us’, two soft voices whispered gently in my ear. I knew those mysterious figures were discussing me; I just didn’t understand why.

Sudden realisation hit me like a bucket of cooling water; I awoke to a sticky feeling.
My chest was soaked, the pyjama top drenched. Was it a dream then, were they figments of my imagination, and what of the hand holding my hand so tightly?

I replayed the scene in my mind’s eye and thought better of trying to explain this too much.

The words: forgiveness and generous heights kept replaying themselves in my head over and over until I pulled the covers off me abruptly and went into my cosy little ‘boudoir’ to splash water on my face and black rimmed eyes.

This was day ten or was it day twenty, I had lost count.

I knew it was December, there was no way of forgetting that, with the scent of chestnuts and mulled wine in the misty brisk wind.

Ten or twenty consecutive days of waking up with unusual phrases and fleeting images in mind.

The voices were the most prominent part of these powerful dreams, speaking to me somehow and taking me places I could never have imagined, a world of unity and transparency, where all things were equal, balanced, and foreseeable.

The dreams brought to mind books I had read about magic and mystery, where wands changed objects and spells altered feelings.

That hand in mine brought me back to life from my state of seeming lifelessness. I looked at the right side of my pillow and saw nothing, but the strong fingers still felt intertwined in my own.

That day at work was like walking through a hazy world of one dimensional paper thin characters. I heard half of what was being said and said half of what I needed to say.

The pull of my other life, this life of dreams and visions that had overtaken me for the last month or so was very strong. It was worrying to me that it had started to become more real than reality itself.

The advantage was feeling that somehow, something extraordinary was happening and that I was at the centre of it.

The dreams continued like a flowing tap of liquid pictures, sometimes more fluid than others, often taking me to unchartered territories, where reality merged with fiction.

They were mostly about these somehow incredible figures that I had never met, who were speaking to my mind about my future, my destiny, my life.

Self-discovery became a footnote to trying to decipher these night time messages, which overflowed into day time visions.

The next dream was a little more telling; the same three in unison pointing at other same minded people with smiles and open minds, showing me a map of the future; things to come, scenes of harmony, love and legacies, a world of healing and peace.

The signals became clearer in time.

I became anxious and keen on the next episode of the nightly images.

Mostly I started feeling a stronger connection to my invisible nightly visitor with the warm strong hand constantly in mine, as I dreamt or jumped up startled from one of my visions.

Then one night, the hand in mine took form in my dreams as a shadow of a man I felt I knew.

My memories of Tony came back fast and strong. He had never left my thoughts of course, but I had shielded those snippets of love in a golden box at the back of my mind, locking it when he left, but still hoping deep down in my heart that I could open that sunlit chest of treasures once more.

The last time we were together was the day before he left and couldn’t tell me why. The tiny shards of glass he had broken in anger had spread around us like a halo of sharp icons, painful but somehow beautiful in their intensity. They mirrored the stabbing pulsations of my heart, as I tried to imagine a life without him by my side.

The key at my neck touching the top of my chest brought me back to the present and burnt through my skin as I woke up from the dream of that eventful night.
I had seen him or the shadow of him in a circle with his father, son, and a beautiful young child holding his son’s hand.

This dream had brought it all back; the recognition of the hand in mine, the knowledge that it had been his fingers intertwined in mine all along and throughout my month of visions.

The next day at work, I walked on clouds. His image wouldn’t leave me. It was like having him come back into my life but better than before, a constant companion everywhere I went, invisible to others but very real to me, like a living memory come to life or an embodiment of emotions, dormant and waiting to be unleashed once more.

This realisation took me to the final phase of my enlightened state; I felt it at the pit of my stomach and in the depths of my heart; he would be back in my life soon and it was just a matter of time. What was time in relation to how long we had been apart and how strongly we felt about each other. In that moment I knew that he still felt the same and that my instincts had always been right. Our union was inevitable but I just couldn’t see how or when this would take place.

They were all there this time, the friendly now very familiar faces, their strange but powerful voices almost singing in my ears. I still couldn’t fathom the implications of all that was being communicated to me, but I did know it was massively important and life defining.
He was there too this time and I touched his mind with mine as I held his invisible hand in bed. It was a merging of our hearts, red at their centre, turning into pink and then white towards their rim. Our two souls merged and our skin cells glowed together in unison.

The minute I felt my heart beat against his physically, I blindly gripped at the hand in mine in the darkness of my bedroom. Another dream, I thought, as I awoke bewildered and unfocused. As soon as the feeling of being disoriented had passed and my realisation of being fully awake had dawned on me, I switched on the light near my bed side table.

The book thumped to the floor, the alarm rang in my ears noisily. I shuddered in discomfort.

‘Turn off the lights would you ‘monamour’’.

I had a strange sensation of déjà vu mingled with an overwhelming sense of relief and joy.
It was like nothing I had experienced before; more than the sum of the dreams and the visions put together; a sense of rightness and belonging. He was back in my life of course; I had had those intense and strange nightly visions over such a long period of time whilst we were apart that it had made me lose touch with reality. But the dreams had also guided me back to him in my mind’s eye, and this was my reality now: Tony, here in my bed, back in my life at long last, safe from the daily danger that had been his past.

As I switched off the lights and held him to me so tightly my lungs would explode and my heart would overflow, I whispered:

‘As you wish ‘monamour’’. ‘As you wish my nirvana’, I thought to myself, as I lay my head on the soft hard pillow of his chest.


Here Begins The Dream