Sunday, January 11, 2009

NIGHTMARE SYNCHRONICITY

In the early hours of 9th December 2008 I awoke from a nightmare. I had dreamed that I was being shown around a large empty house. My guide advised me to stay away from a certain floor where a murder had been committed long ago and which had been haunted ever since.
At some point I lost my guide and made my way to the haunted floor. Strange noises, bangings, overpowering sense of dread... I awoke in a panic and put the light on for a few minutes until I dared try to sleep again.

Later I made a brief note of the dream in a notebook before I left for work and thought no more of it

I met a friend for lunch who told me that he’d had an “awful” dream in the early hours of the morning. He’d dreamed that he was visiting a house where a murder had just been committed and he awoke as he saw the axe-wielding murderess watching him through a doorway. He awoke in a cold sweat.

SYNCHRONICITY

As I sat down to finish reading Kenneth Grant’s influential occult classic Outside the Circles of Time (Muller 1980 , Starfire 2008) I chose Arvo Part's 'Arbos' lp, more or less at random, as relaxing background music.
One of the the many themes of Grant’s book is that “time is a tricky commodity” and that some can see the “succession of aeons or cycles of times, not as a sequential process but a simultaneous phenomena”.

One piece in particular on the LP caught my attention and so I put the book aside and reached for the lp sleeve notes where I read: "not so much musical communication as musical fiesta, wherein we are released from chronolgical time and re-enter mythological time, in which (as Octavio Paz has put it) "time is not succession and transition but the perpetual sound of the fixed present in which all times, past and future, are contained"..... The music does not modulate and has no development, though pitch and tempo are in proportional relationships, creating 'moments' outside Time in which, momentarily, we live..... Here pitch relationships aurally 'incarnate' the Moment outside time...."