Ominous dreams

When I finished the Katha Upanishad, I had the strange thought, "I need to sleep on this in order to process it properly, and should do so before proceeding." So, putting a pillow on the floor of my study, I lay down and did just that. I entered the dreaming state almost immediately, and it was a strange dream: a hyper-realistic view of a city from a few hundred feet above it. Everything was red -- the people, the buildings, the streets, the ceiling (yes, this city had a ceiling) -- and I had the impression that I was looking at the subterranean City of Dis, inhabited by the damned dead. It seemed simultaneously extremely realistic and extremely schematic, like a complicated diagram brought to life. The perspective seemed supernaturally complex, as if there were four or five vanishing points, and I heard the voice of my artist sister confirming that that was indeed the case. I moved up and down, trying to process this all by varying the angle from which I viewed it.

Shortly thereafter, I swam back up into waking consciousness but did not fully attain it immediately. On the threshold of waking -- eyes open, still not entirely not-dreaming -- I became aware of music. Like the view of Dis, it was a combination of things that it shouldn't be possible to combine: the melodic motif from the Verve's "Bitter Sweet Symphony"; the chorus from Nicki Minaj's "Pills and Potions," "I still love, I still love, I still love, I still love, I still love you"; and a clear-voiced Sanskrit chant, "Om shanti shanti shanti, Om shanti shanti shanti." Looking up at the bookcases that surrounded me, I saw two words from the spines of my books sparkle like gold in the dark room: Eco (from the spine of The Name of the Rose) and Judgement (from Kant's Critique of the same).

And then I was fully awake. The room was optically normal, the music continued only "in my head," and discursive thinking took over. Eco-Judgement -- an environmental apocalypse? Or no, waking and rising go together, so the Rose is equivalent to the Woke, and the name of the Woke is Umberto Eco, meaning Humbert echoed, i.e. Humbert Humbert, i.e. pedophiles. Which fits because rose is literally "disordered" (anagrammed) eros. Even as I was thinking it, though, I knew that this whole line of thought was false and that the true message was the simplicity of the half-waking state: Eco. Judgement. I'm angry, but I still love you. Om shanti shanti shanti.

I stayed up very late reading several more Upanishads. Then I went to bed and dreamed again.

When my REM eyes opened, I was alone in a grove of trees -- recognizable as the Sacred Grove in upstate New York, where Joseph Smith had his first vision. I was sitting at the foot of a young beech tree -- too young, I thought, to have been there in Joseph Smith's day. At the same time that I was sitting there under the tree, I was having a conversation with Bruce Charlton. (He was not present; these were disembodied voices, his and mine.)

"What I keep coming back to, William," he said, "is, What was the point of your March experience? What the hell was the point?"

"My March experience -- you mean -- ?" It took me a minute to figure out what he was talking about, and then I remembered that I had had on March 15 an experience that replicated the visit of Moroni to Joseph Smith. I had mostly forgotten about it.

"Yes, you know what I mean," said Bruce. "Did it change anything?" (No, obviously.) "What the hell was the point?"

There was silence for a time, and then I heard the voice of one of my young students: "Teacher is dead. Teacher is dead."

These kids! I thought. I can't even sit under a beech tree for a few minutes without them joking about my being dead. But I didn't say anything, and I didn't get up.

Upon waking, I tried to think of anything out of the ordinary that had ever happened to me on March 15, but nothing came to mind. Finally, I thought that perhaps my "March experience" was the experience of being born, and the question was what had been the point of my whole life. I thought of the tree in the Upanishads, with its roots in heaven, and realized that sitting at the foot of a tree might symbolize being in heaven.

Googling beech etymology, I was informed that "People also ask: What does beech symbolize?" Clicking on that, I was told (boldface in original), "Beech can signify the death or end of something, but also stand for the changes that rise through realisation. Since its gift is the revelation of experience, Beech suggest you should cross the threshold that is challenging you, gain experience from the unknown, seek revelation and increase your knowledge."