notes from the dream place (Patreon)

audio for this post is available here.

My life keeps getting stranger and the strangeness is my birthright. In January I went to what I kept calling ‘psychic school’, which is Arthur Findlay College, a spiritualist estate in a sleepy village called Stansted Mountfitchet, about an hour outside of London. I boarded for a weekend to take a course called Trance for Beginners.

These days I know the limits of language and so don’t want to attach myself to any school of thought. Teachings are living things and language pins them down. This can be useful for study but is unhelpful if one wants to know how the teaching moves, what it sounds like, where it sleeps. Language is the BDSM of ideas. Writing can’t reach the immensity of felt experience, and a teaching will never be as perfect as its source. While at Arthur Findlay I heard gossip that there’d recently been a walk-out of lecturers protesting unreasonable working conditions. Even at spirit school, human things! All this to say I don’t think I’m a ‘Spiritualist’; the ideas of others are helpful to a point, and at that point, I’ll have to return to the only truth, my own heart, that wet red spiral balled into a fist. 

In this journey there are conflicting parts of me. One part is the lover, the mystic, who knows all of ‘this’ is true, who has been experiencing it my whole life, the bizarre ‘knowing’ that as a kid my parents called pretension. Then there is this chain link intellect piping up at every party. But maybe these aren’t ‘parts’ of me – yes, maybe the lover is me, and perhaps what I call the ‘intellect’ is the remnants of the old belief system clinging on, as if I've come up and out through the earth, and still have some dirt in my eyes and hair.

This is to say: I arrived at the college open and immensely curious but with my head attached. I didn’t necessarily think that I would find the BIG ANSWER there, but I did want to have conversations without needing to preface them with ‘okay I know this is like so weird but’. I also wanted to learn about the ‘messages’ I receive when a moment is folded up into silence, and why, when I settle down for sleep, I feel a rush of excitement to return to what I call ‘the dream place’, and how, sometimes, during meditation, my mind rounds itself, and I sense a new depth in the blackness of my vision – a space, somehow, both there and not there, between the eye and the lid, or the not eye and not lid, between the perception and the perceived, where any number of impossible and beautiful and obscene realities could play out, where there is an actual location unburdened by the formality of being made physical. 

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No one would find the college if they weren’t looking for it. I could barely find it and I was looking for it. I walked down a long drive, not sure I was going the right way, my face sharp with January, my suitcase dragging loudly across the stones. It was the afternoon now; I’d been travelling all day. Yesterday, David Lynch died. Now four horses wearing jackets stood in a field, ignoring me. Mist hung in the furthest reaches of the grounds, concealing areas I hadn’t yet unlocked. I was nearly at the manor. A woman in a puffy coat walked along the treeline. She spotted me, but we were too far apart for her to see my little smile, and I wondered if there was instead something she could ‘feel’ about me rather than see, and I nodded to her as if to say, go ahead and feel it. This was the tone of the weekend: magic, heavy, vulnerable. It really felt like anything could happen here, or that this was a place where anything had already happened. 

I turned the corner. A spooky mansion. Two enormous doors.

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My room number was 123, which was thrilling. Easy as…

I find it difficult to tell the story of what happened as actual ‘events’ were few. Most of our time was spent in class. Class was held in the library. The library had great, bright windows looking out onto the grounds, an optical illusion carpet, locked mahogany bookshelves full of hundred-year-old leatherbounds. Over the weekend my cohort and I spent most of our time in this library, in meditation. The meditation was sometimes ‘private’, and sometimes shared with a partner, one of us acting as a conduit of healing energy, and the other the recipient of it. The goal in all of this was to access a ‘trance’ state, which, to me, felt a lot like that brief suggestive time immediately preceding sleep, but with a mind awake enough to convey the messages presented there. 

We all seemed to be quite good at this. I loved when the room was filled with quiet sentences, little sobs, that cloudiness without a name.

-

Almost everyone I spoke to at Arthur Findlay hadn’t been born into these ideas of ‘spirit’ and, in fact, like me, had been hard skeptics: not just indifferent, but actively opposed. Many of them had once been ‘conventional people’, actors in society’s theater, buying coffees, paying parking tickets, without thinking much of any of it. I met an American man on a parallel-running mediumship course who used to work in IT for NASA, and then for the US Department of Defense. I asked if he felt like he lived a double life; he nodded, gravely. There were engineers, psychotherapists. Clever people. All of us were ‘sensitive’ types. More than half were autistic, I guessed.

My de facto trance partner for the weekend was a girl I’ll call Dragonfly, from Austria. She had long dark hair and big-lidded eyes that reminded me of Shelley Duvall. She inexplicably always seemed to know what I was talking about, even though English wasn’t her native language and I have a habit of using odd English words. I liked her very much. The day we met, Dragonfly laughed while telling me about her old job: ‘I did design for a marketing agency.’ She rolled her eyes at herself. Last year Dragonfly had been reunited with a cousin she hadn’t seen since she was a child, and the cousin performed bodywork on her. The experience Dragonfly described (totally sober, accessed only through the manipulation of invisible currents) was similar to my psychedelic experiences – extreme, profound, otherworldly. She described being wrenched up into space, not believing herself as she said it. After that everything changed. One week later, Dragonfly quit her job at the marketing agency and went travelling.

Twenty years ago our course instructor, a sort of odd and soft-spoken man named Andrej, had been the owner of a successful steel company when a ‘messenger’ told him there was something waiting for him in a church. ‘Which church?’ Andrej asked. ‘Any,’ the messenger replied. There were many churches in the area. Andrej chose one at ‘random’. Like a movie, he opened the double doors to a small gathering: ‘Finally,’ one said.

Many of us seemed to be there because events had unfolded in our lives that simply had no other explanation. You don’t start at psychic school. You go to psychic school because it is the only school left. 

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So here: maybe you won’t be open to my writing about psychic school unless you, too, have encountered the inexplicable thing in the wild. My writing can allude to the inexplicable thing; I don’t know if it can get you to see it, if you haven’t seen it already. What a thing to learn to do…! For now, I can tell you, at least, what happened to me.

During our trance lessons, Dragonfly and I plucked messages about the other from the edge of the dream place. We knew things about one another that we had no way of knowing otherwise. Sometimes we weren’t sure why we said what we said, but every time it ended up making sense. Over and over we moved the other to tears. We told the other, thank you and thank you and thank you. I thought many times of that interview Jung did when he was very old, where he’s asked if he believes in God: it’s a difficult question, he says, I don’t believe: I know. Also Jung: ‘There is a mystical fool in me that proved to be stronger than all of my science.’ 

In between classes Dragonfly and I ran around the grounds together. I told her, I couldn’t remember the last time I ran at full speed, meaning, I can’t remember the last time I felt so like a child. We cooed at the horses. I told her the facts I know about European robins. At breakfast on the final morning Dragonfly revealed to me when she walked into the welcome presentation, I was the first person she saw. Before I left I wrote Dragonfly a poem. I gave her the page I wrote it on so I don’t remember how it goes – but I remember the last line, which was ‘we went into the dream to learn what we already know.’

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Three weeks before Arthur Findlay, home from that miserable Christmas, I dreamt of my parents every night, us embroiled in these enormous, obscene, painful arguments. Every night. In the dream place Dad scrunched his face at me, called me ‘wild’, preferred some other man’s daughter. Mom sobbed in my bed like a girl.

The idea to stop speaking to them came fully formed. I woke up from sleep, knowing it must be done. I said out loud to myself: ‘Oh, it’s that, isn’t it?’. This ‘style’ of decision felt exactly like my decision to move to Edinburgh, in that after the idea came, every moment I wasn’t acting on it actually itched and aggravated me. It was as though my mind had been working on the problem quietly in the background without presenting it to me, and then spat out the answer, finished, and now was saying, what on earth are you waiting for?

My life couldn’t continue the way I knew it needed to while my relationship with my parents hung over it. The act was a means to an end but a ‘test’ in itself: I would assert myself as an autonomous, decision-making agent; I would prove to myself I choose my relationships, and only those relationships which make me feel safe and big and loved; I would prove to myself I could do something once impossible. A helpful thought: I realized, if I had a child, I would not leave them alone with my parents. And so why was I leaving my child self with them again and again?

I spent the evening of the 11th drafting a message, then had another dream, then sent the message the morning of the 12th. Afterwards I performed what I called to myself a ‘ritual’ which involved burning a note my dad mailed to me many years ago. I watched the orange glow disappear the paper, and felt gentle trepidation, maybe, adrenaline, oddness – halfway through the burning I burst into tears. When the burning was over the tears were too. I cleaned up, put the ashes in a plant pot, watered it. Then I looked at myself closely in the mirror, my nose almost to the glass, and it occurred to me: I can do anything! I said it out loud. It wasn’t just words, or a joke or hyperbole, it was a new, sturdy understanding that took hold in me, that showed the cultural programming for what it was: a series of rules made of ash, or, no, ash implies something once existed that was destroyed, no, these rules had never existed. Later, as I walked to the pub, I felt as though I was radiating a power that everyone around me could sense. There was no more fear. I could do anything. My parents became two sock puppets in a drawer. I would be big forever.

Anyway, the day after I sent the message, the dreams about my parents stopped, and I haven’t had one since. 

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Everything is getting better. Still, this block between myself and the words! This dread related to the page! Patreon’s notification tab makes sure to tell me who has cancelled their subscription, and when – there are moments of money anxiety, and time anxiety: that I’m taking too long, that my insights aren’t good enough to justify the stretches it takes me to have them. I promised you essays, stories, book lists – what is this, that I’m writing now? OK: I am waking up in the dream of my shame. Ten deep breaths:

one…waste of time–

two…blue water–

three…heart stasis–

four…pulling from the gold thing–

five…birthright–-

six…silence–

seven…perfect timing–

eight…silence–

nine…

ten…

Hm.

Look: ‘linear time’ is a prank. It's all happening right now. Einstein said this.

There is this |              |. We live in it. That’s all.

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I feel I’ve been keeping this from you: since September I’ve known I’m in love with somebody who I can't be with – who won’t be with me – for reasons. My love for them was and is connected, somehow, to my 'spiritual awakening'; the love developed alongside my awakening, or because of it, or created it. Because of this, this person is more important to me than any person has ever been before, and now I’m finally experiencing the texture that has been missing from every other iteration of what I called ‘love’. Now there’s the eternal, unconditional feeling. This is someone who I couldn’t properly ‘see’ before, so there’s a feeling of having had to find them in both space and time. 

We've not spoken since November. After that last contact I had a brief but heavy-feeling intuition about them reaching out (what a phrase) in February, the February which is happening now, to tell me about some resolution. I decided then – and I decide now – that if I don’t hear from them this month, it will be my cue to move my heart on, as much as it is possible to get my heart to do anything. 

The waiting for this juncture has been, in moments, excruciating. I wake up with him on top of me. Again and again I meet him in the dream place. I’m watching tarot readings on Instagram and taking them seriously. After psychic school I went into London briefly to run an errand and I looked for him on every train. I have no way of ‘knowing’ if he is having a similar experience and so in the worst moments I worry I’ve actually lost my mind. I’m finding new ways of being to transform suffering. It’s possible, I see, to love every part of my experience. If I can love him, I can also love his absence, and I can love the distance between us; I can love the desire, perfect in its ever-reaching, its inability to be fulfilled; I can love my intuition, its success or its failure, which is another kind of success; I can even love myself the same way I love him, and this love I have for myself can also be transformative, tender, cosmic, sexual – it can be as real towards myself as it is towards him, and can give me a feeling of companionship. 

And I can know that everything, all of this – this keyboard I use to write to you, the white chalk smudges of cloud, the magpie on the sill – is an expression of me, and so is also an expression of him, and so in that way he is always everywhere and everything and is never apart from me. Everything I’ve ever wanted is already happening.

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[post credits]

Rapid fire Arthur Findlay moments:

1) The first night, a buttoned snout moth came from nowhere while I was showering and, despite my best efforts, slipped into the drain, where it paddled in standing water four inches below an unopenable grate that I finally, in a panic, naked and wet, after trying many other tools, managed to wrench apart with tweezers. I then fished out the moth, who was still alive. This event was notable, because I almost gave up trying to save the moth – I even sat down at one point, totally defeated, wondering how I’d ever get to sleep knowing it was there – but then I tried one more time, and that was the time. The moth dried off on my collarbone. I turned the room’s wicker bin into a little night home and took the moth outside in the morning.

2) At one point I felt compelled to show a friend, who I’ll call Tooth, my journal, inside of which I have written the most intimate details from the last six months of my life. I wasn’t sure why I felt compelled to show the journal to her. I said to Tooth, look at my journal! Look at how I have some of my hair taped inside the front cover! Five hours after this, after I'd left Arthur Findlay, on the train to London, Tooth messaged me a photo, of my journal. I’d left it at the college. I couldn’t believe it. I thanked her profusely. ‘For sure!’ she messaged. ‘I’m glad you explicitly showed it to me!’ Tooth, in addition to being the only one who knew what my journal looked like, was also the only one I was going to meet again any time soon. Six days after, Tooth gave the journal back to me in Edinburgh, where she already had plans to travel to.

3) After one of our meditations – the first ‘trance speaking’ one – the instructor remarked on the energy in the room, which is something I had also shyly noticed before he said it. It felt similar to fog. Later, Dragonfly, without knowing I’d felt it as fog, called it ‘cloudy’. There was something there. What is its name?

4-6) Some other things, but I want to keep them to myself, for now.