Spiritual Dreams and Visions

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On Dreams, Visions, and Reality

A sketch of my New York City East Village Vision

When I was a little kid (before I reached by seventh birthday and probably during the following years), I used to have visions while I was a in a dormant state before fully falling asleep. Therefore, I used to call my grandmother Antonia, to whom I probably owe my first name, and who was nearly blind by then, in her mid sixties, due to heavy chataracts in both eyes, and I used to ask her to accompany me. I used to sweetly tell her: “Abuelita, acompáñeme” (“Grandma, stay with me”). So my grandmother used to sit with me until I would fully fall asleep. Then, as I recall from my high-school short story “Papeles”, published before my fifteen birthday by newspaper Diario del Caribe, formerly of El Tiempo, “...solía soñar con seres extraños, muy estraños...” (“...he [ I ] used to have dreams with strange, very strange beings...” ̶ referring to the character the Cesar of the mirror in that short story ̶ , as if I immersed in a subconscious astral contact, as many science fiction stories relate. Indeed, perhaps unaware, everyone has had such visions or dreams at least once in their lifetime. The fact is that in my life I have personally had many celestial visions, for the most part good, many with celestial creatures and light beings. However, none of my chilhood dreams that I could recall today had anything to do with my personal activities beyond schoolwork, such as, building and flying kites, building and riding scooters, or playing soccer with my friends on a street near home, in school, or with my own brother on our home front terrace. Besides, the fact is that one should never relate these experiences without expecting an impact in one's social relations; the main reason why people ignore and forget these experiences is to avoid confronting why they occur. And I shall make my point: I recall that just over a decade ago, one of my girlfriends felt quite confounded after I recounted one my experiences, as were reaching intimacy. I recalled that she looked at me in the eye, and became somewhat insecure about understanding what I had related to her. Besides, I had also written a poem about that experience by the time we were essentially engaged and that made it worst, so I most likely lost that relationship because of recounting my visions to her.

During the middle of December last year, I visited the East Village in the City of New York, just to attempt to find a place where I had had dinner with a girl friend the previous week, since something was unclear or subliminal in our walking together, first. As I could not find the place after walking the entire neighborhood, I drove the next week to the area. Surprisingly, during one of my promenades, I had an unexpected and bizarre vision that flew through my eyes, a vision as described by Plato in his Allegory of the Cave: I saw a young woman being tortured by a man with a long whip, while she remained tied on her left arm with a heavy iron chain. I believed then that if this was a normal or paranormal vision, it was probably related to one fetichist shop in the area ̶ I thought ̶ , and most likely consensual. That night I had a dream with the same vision. However, in my dream the woman seemed to be quite unknown and different from my vision while the man had a significant resemblance to someone I had seen on the web later, a man who looked like a lead psychiatrist in a torture camp in the former Soviet Union. The fact is that as usual the perspective of the vision in the dream was realistically impossible in 3D, although I could clearly perceive the scene, and had seen everything nearly conscious, as in the original vision. I must say that in my dream visions do not occur with a natural geometric perspective, that could make the vision part of the real world, as I write in my French poem “L'Homme à la Table Carrée” (Alma Mater I, Xlibris, 2011), where the square table is actually a rectangular one. I recently learned that other writers think alike, as I explored the novel Géométrie d'un Rêve; by Hubert Haddad, a francophone writer.

The fact is that the vision would have been real torture rather than fetichism, as in the search for my dinner place, I encountered a different restaurant displaying (visible from outside) some of the tools used in fetichist psadomasochism instead, which actually had nothing to do with the long whip and the apparent actions in my vision, as they were much smaller tools, i.e., the woman in my dream had been receiving a long whipping. These were the only times that I ever visited the Village (at night), and possibly there was some kind a magic mystic energy that flows in the area, hopefully for good, as I had lost my black hat as if a ghost had grabbed it from my gloved hands, and my hat had flown and disappear from my hands, not to be found again when I walked back. Surprisingly, my head remained unusually warm without my hat on at a temperture of about 40ᵒF. Besides, that night, even a rat, that walked right in front of me by a pile of garbage bags on the sidewalk, seemed to be staring at me as if talking to me, and had gone back to hide downstairs in a dark basement, as if enticing me to follow her... Unbelieveable... I think this was around 10^th street around Avenue B. As I learnt later, there are probably not only some fetichist shops in that area, but also probably some related or unrelated cults. From a quick web search, fetichism is big in the area with apparently many famous dominatrices. As I kept having the same vision for weeks, I prayed about the issue and that if it was a real vision for the woman to be released, as she seemed to be in severe pain in my resilient vision. I hope it had been just a vision or a day dreaming event that would have triggered literary creativity. Although all of these events may appear quite bizarre to any reader, they became a personal experience, that most people could have normally, and probably never dare to talk or write about. I only told my mother when I saw her a few days later, and asked her whether she believed me. And she said to me: “Don't tell anyone...”, as a good-will recommendation.

In literary writing, many writers, in particular, Gabriel García Márquez, the 1982 Nobel Prize winner for literature, has written about many mysterious events in his magic realism literary model. Among them some relate to insomnia and forgetfullness as in some of his short stories and in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, where he actually presents a scenario in which people have the same dreams and peers walk into each other's dream, making a unique astral multi-dimensional reality. He also presents visions of the wandering dead expressing the sense of guilt experienced by Jose Arcadio Buendía after defending his honor. In Chronicle, García Márquez refers to Santiago Nassar with trees as a regular dream rather than a premonition of his own death, as interpretred by another character, Plácida Linero. 

There are many other writers and poets writing about dreams. Spanish poet Pedro Calderón de la Barca

wrote La Vida es Sueño, while Colombian poet Jorge Zalamea Borda wrote El Sueño de las Escalinatas, a long vision of elevation and conscious dreaming conflicting with his poetic reality. Honoré de Balzac relates some of his visions in his novels, but most significantly mixes them with real description and events, as at the beginning of La Recerche de l'Absolut. As Zalamea Borda relates his dream, anyone can attain elevation but “attachment to sin”, as suggested by Christian existentialist S. Kierkegaard, is the driver that drives us away from some sort of spiritual elevation, a status of the soul and mind in which our dreams are clear. Shakespeare recounts and mixes his dreams in his poetry and drama. Jack London dreams with obsession in The Sea Wolf after the sinking of the Martínez and confronts manhood between two different man types, as the motivation. Hemingway stresses man's character, so characters, like the old man, who suffer signficant stress may dream, but as men they are, they are not made for defeat.

For others, who may have a more scientific view of dreams, like Freud, the driver and trigger for dreams are essentially the dreamer's sexuality. As such, dreams can reflect unattained desires, goals, or fantasies, i.e., experiences that we wish to have but remain in the subconscious. However, for many and at least for me, Freud's believe that a person's libido was the actually energy generating the dream is rather arguable. I personally believe that dreams reflect our spiritual and mind state, and that people who cannot dream have certainly serious issues with their subconscious and spirituality, on which Jung, Adler, Foucault and others had widely discussed over Freud's theories. Yet everone has conscious visions and dreams at least one time in their lives.

Like my grandmother, who used to accompany me during my first five or six years of life, my mother often kept a book on the Interpretation of Dreams, not the one by Freud, but one that looks like a dictionary of dreams with their semantics and interpretation. But I personally do not believe in its content.

While the mystery of my unusual East Village vision will remain in my mind for sometime, there have been other visions that gave me the energy to write about them in prose or free verse.

Also, many spiritual meditation practices using conscious breathing suggest that conscious dreaming is possible as well. Some acquaintances through my entire life who have practised those techniques for many years look healthier and signficantly younger than their age, and they have usually confronted reality without fear or anxiety, an essential state of the mind to attain happiness.