We want to be more literalist about
dreams and more symbolist about waking life. Dreams often show us events that
are manifesting, or will manifest in the future, in the external world. Big
dreams may be experiences of another reality – for example, a past or parallel
life, a neighborhood in the afterlife, or a place of healing, instruction or
initiation in the imaginal realm – that is as real, or arguably even more real,
than the physical world.

 

At the same time, the waking world will speak to us in the
manner of a dream if we are paying attention. Wind and rain, leaf and mountain,
whisper and cry to us in their many voices. Through the play of meaningful
coincidence, forces of the world behind the veil of our consensual
hallucinations come to bring us awake. The active, awakened dreamer senses
himself walking, every day, in the forest of living symbols that Charles Baudelaire
evoked, with poetic clarity, in this poem:

Correspondances

 

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens.

 

My rough translation:

Correspondences

 

Nature
is a temple whose living columns

sometimes
let slip mysterious words.

We walk
through a forest of symbols

that
watch us with knowing eyes.

 

Like
echoes that mingle far away

in a
deep and shadowy oneness

vast as
the night and as awakening

fragrances,
colors and sounds correspond.

 

There
are perfumes fresh as children’s bodies

sweet
as oboes, green as meadows

– and
others rich, corrupt and triumphal

 

with
the power to grow towards the infinite

like
amber, musk, resin and incense
that sing the soul’s ecstasy, and the body’s joy.

 

This is the way to live as an active
dreamer in the daylight world, with poetic consciousness of what rhymes in a
day, of how inner and outer correspond, knowing (with goosebumps) that we are
surrounded by living symbols that are looking at us.

Heron Wizard photo by Carol Blackbird