As I lay in bed this morning, I made the conscious decision to engage  Dreaming - a task that is increasingly difficult as our busy season gets busier and I tend to fall in bed exhausted and ready for sleep.  But this morning, it would be different, I told myself.  I would Dream.

And so I lay there gazing at the rock wall above the fireplace, shifting the assemblage point from the world of ordinary awareness to a dreamer's, allowing the mind/body/spirit to align with Intent.

What surprised me was that almost immediately I found myself deep into Dreaming - yet I was still awake.  I have never quite experienced this position of the assemblage point previously.  Full dreaming, including visuals, lucidity, etc., yet at the same time a dual perception that I was still very much awake and still gazing at that rock wall.  At first, the awareness of this unusual state brought me back to ordinary awareness, but with very little effort, I once again sank down into the state of dreaming-awake - or some manifestation of it.

It wasn't long before I encountered a man in my Dreaming - one I knew to be a teacher.  Without allowing my mind to drift, I said to the man, "Tell me about time."  In the past, I have had dream guides tell me that humans simply do not comprehend the nature of time, and so we are stuck in it.  So I made it my task to at least try for a better understanding.

The man - who was standing somewhere between the fireplace and third attention, in the terrain of dreaming yet the awareness of waking - regarded me briefly as if attemptiung to decide what to do with me.  Finally, he said, "You humans need time and so you create it as a milieu or a platform, a stage on which events play out in such a fashion that they can be planned, experienced and then examined."  He hesitated for a moment, and I could tell he wasn't satisfied with that explanation.  "The problem, you realize, is that I am attempting to tell you about time while on that very platform, and so the explanation is rooted in words and symbols which add to the creation of time rather than doing anything to aid in its disenfranchisement."

I drifted in and out of dreaming.  The man left me after that, and I saw an old woman who appeared haggard, old, and tired.  No one I recognized, yet every woman, perhaps.  The crone in her final days.  Wise and yet a prisoner of her body.  She did not speak, but I saw that she was also a passenger on the timetrain.

Other visions came and went, too brief or fleeting to bring back.  But what seemed to matter was that I Dreamed while awake.

Definitely a position of the AP that is going to get more attention, because the result seems to be that I am able to experience the true depth of dreaming, and at the same time record it in detail with the preceptors of ordinary awareness.  Curiouser... and curiouser...

***

I've had experiences, particularly on the mushroom ally, wherein time is perceived altogether differently than it is in ordinary awareness.  We're still attached to the meat suit, and the only thing that has altered is perception - so I have to conclude that it is really only our perception that creates time and "governs" it to a certain extent.  As children, time is also very different than it is as we grow older.  As a child, for example, it seemed to be an eternity from one Christmas to the next, yet as an adult, I honestly cannot account for the time that has passed from January 1 until the present.  Literally, it seems no more than a couple of weeks ago that I was sitting here at my desk, wrapped in a blanket, shivering from the cold.  Now, with very little sense of time passing, I sit here in front of a fan in my undies (a frightening sight), overwhelmed by the summer heat.  The earth has tilted and the quail have hatched their young, but other than that, nothing appears to have changed.  Where is "time"?  In the tilt of the earth?  In a bird's egg?  In the force of gravity, as one of "the little voices" once suggested?

A few strange facts I've gathered with regard to "time".  People living in colder climates have longer lifespans.  All lifeforce is suspended at absolute zero (about -432 degrees Fahrenheit).  As an object accelerates to near the speed of light, relative time slows down or stops altogether.

So... if I put all of that in a blender and swirl it around, it still comes down to perception, yet it may also have to do with being "earthbound" - because the conditions which seem to be required to slow down or stop "time" exist naturally in outer space, in the absence of gravity and light.  In the void, in other words...

No conclusions, just ingredients in the mix.  Just not sure yet if the mix is a cake, a pie, or a meatloaf.

And - yes - absolutely, those moments of being outside of time do indeed reveal to the warrior that it is possible (and indeed desirable) to transcend the prison of time.  I do sometimes wonder if the whole reason we climb inside these meat suits to begin with is to motivate ourselves to evolve beyond the need for them.  Sounds trite, but I mean it with absolute sincerity.  We may have to come into "matter" before we can inhabit the totality of ourselves through the double.  Without the powerful motivation which is the awareness of our own mortality, there might not be sufficient cohesion.  It is through mortal life that we find the reasons and the means to transcend even time.