Pyrex dreams

last night i dreamed of a giant rectangle, subdivided into twenty smaller rectangles. the rectangles were equidistant apart, four columns across and five rows deep. the proportions of height to width of the smaller rectangles matched the proportion of the larger rectangle holding them all.

this isn't entirely accurate.

i didn't dream of these rectangles but rather i dreamed them. in other words, these rectangles were not the content of my dream but rather its form. inside the dreaming, each small rectangle would fill with substance of the dreamscape, and once that individual rectangular cell was full, i would wake from the dream. this did not make for a restful night's sleep.

the rectangles were made of Pyrex, but i'm certain about the substance of the dreamscape. the nature of the dream's movement implies a certain viscosity, but beyond this i know nothing. likewise i do not know how many cells filled during the night, nor how it is i know there were twenty of them because i did not count them. i wonder about the arrangement of cells, and if the gaps between them would have eventually filled if only i had stayed awake longer. i wonder if this dream is measure of portent or promise.

upon each waking i would consider time, and speculate if perhaps it had stopped altogether. it was before sunrise, but it seems the same distance from sunrise upon each waking. perhaps they were separated by mere seconds, but it seemed longer. maybe the gaps between the rectangles correspond to the time i spent waking. if this is the case, then what is the larger rectangle – a diagram of my consciousness itself?

if the large rectangle comprises the extent of my being, then i have come face to face with some clue regarding how much i am sleeping and how much i wake. there was nothing outside the large rectangle, only voidness, but what about the border regions? it was the waking regions that touched the edges of the large rectangle, not the dream.

i was reading a book before bed about various bodhisattva. (how does one pluralize bodhisattva? bodhisattvas? bodhisattvi?) perhaps that has something to do with my dream. maybe Avalokiteshvara was trying to tell me something, maybe Shakyamuni is fluent in Pyrex. maybe it was a stranger knocking at my door, maybe the stranger is me.

clay statue of Bhairava, seen this summer in New York