GETTING NAKED

   A while ago, I woke up from a dream that left me with a very bad feeling. The dream wasn't exactly a nightmare - it felt like a long dream, complicated, but what I remembered was struggling to get out of a jump suit that zipped up the front. I couldn't get the zipper open and I felt hemmed in, confined and I was desperate to get out of it. It was the sense of that desperation that I woke up with.
     I rolled over and stared at the ceiling. In a few minutes, the sense of desperation faded but I saw the image in the dream with sharp clarity. It didn't take much insight to understand what a perfect metaphor my dream mind had created. My sense of being trapped, unable to unbind myself. The longing to step out of my old confining skin and be naked like a baby, so I could begin again. It was all about my struggle to get free and my desperate fear that I'd never be able to.
     As I lay on the bed, I found myself wanting to go back into the dream and change it. I focused on my struggling self and then worked to let all that frustrated effort it all go. I watched how easy it became to unzip the jump suit and shrug it off my shoulders. I watched myself turning and walking out in the world naked, just as I am. 
     I did this again and again. I knew that just making the effort to rewrite this bulletin from my subconscious gave me back some power. It changed an image of myself that was all about frustration and desperation into a vision of an alternate possibility, one in which I was no longer helpless but could do the work that change required I do.
     With each attempt I made, it was as if a movie were unreeling itself before my eyes. I could stop the projection, change details, go over certain moments again and again. But then something happened. Suddenly, there was no distance between "me" and "it." I wasn't watching, wasn't an observer of the new story I was trying to tell. I didn't see it or absorb it.  I had no objectivity at all. The image was inside me; it was me. 
     When I came back from that moment of transcendence, which is what I think it was, my psyche knew something fundamental had changed. I knew there was nothing more I needed to do at that moment. Something had moved forward. 
     I've had this experience other times when an image has come to me, one that fills me with fear and despair. But no matter how many times I go over it trying to change it, nothing shifts until the moment when I and it no longer have any separation, when objectivity is gone, when consciousness is suspended for a brief instant. The loss of Self is what enables self to change.
     I've learned, though, I can't will these moments no matter how much I try. That trying mind is still the objective mind but it's the repeated trying that allows something else to take over. It paves the way so I can find myself in that place without words, where all is effortless and one, the place where real change can happen.