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A Lost Soul Dreams

It wasn’t long after I slipped into the sheets last night that my eyes became very heavy, fighting to stay open. Eventually they began to lose sight of the moon’s glow that beamed through the cracks of the mini-blinds. Drifting, sliding, sinking . . . moving deeper into the dream. The weight of my skull finally gave in to the white, goose feather pillow that held me like I would imagine a cloud would.

A still and peaceful black space begins to eat away at my consciousness and I drift even deeper into a state of relaxation. A bright, white light suddenly flashes before me and the image of a dead boy burns through my eyelids. This startles me and my eyes flash wide open to meet the eyes of the dead boy who came to visit me while I was sleeping.

I could feel the weight of his body sinking into the edge of my bed. His eyes expressed a sense of confusion immediately followed by a look of wonderment. "You can see me?" he asked. I lifted my hand from the pillow, placing it on his shoulder and calmly watched as it passed through his pale body until it found its way onto the bed again. I touched him two more times like this, convinced that I was dreaming. The echoes of my grandfather began to sound in my head, "Nothing is real until you touch it with the senses." At this point I realized that I was in either one of two spaces—asleep and dreaming or awake and facing a lost soul.

It was time to test my grandfather’s words. I fixed my eyes upon the boy’s eyes and extended one hand toward the wall and the other toward him. One of my hands passed through the boy again and the soft kiss of the air touched my hand. The other hand reached toward the wall and met its cold, hard surface. It was then that I realized the solid world of my human existence intersected a moment in time where a boy made of light found himself in my bedroom. "Awake and facing a lost soul," I said to myself. An old witch once told me I had the sight, the ability to see the dead walking amongst the living. When I found myself in situations like these she indicated the importance of saying the magickal phrase, "Follow the white light." So I did just this. I told the dead boy, "Follow the white light."

"But don’t you see?" he said. "I am the light. I came to tell you that you are dreaming dead." I looked at him confused. "You are dead," the boy said.

"That’s crazy! It is you who are dead. Now go to the white light," I told him.

He began to laugh. "Yes, it is true that I am dead . . . but so are you. Don’t you see?"

Fear began to set in. The witch’s words of magick had no power at all; they didn’t work. I was stuck, frozen in an unfamiliar space full of darkness with a ghostly boy who would’t vanish.

The boy replied, "Don’t be afraid. This happens to all of us when we die. Just after it happens you black out and begin to dream about your life once again. You dream so hard and for so long that the dream begins to feel real, as if you are living a life in solid body. That wall feels real because your mind is operating in a body that thinks it is solid. Touch me again. Go ahead and touch me, see what happens now...”

I looked down at my hand, fearing the result this time. I had to know. I slowly drew my hand toward him, pausing from just a few inches away and reflecting on everything I thought I had known about in this moment. I pushed toward him again and my hand went right through him as it had done all those time before.

"Now touch the wall again," he said.

I pushed my hand toward the wall again, but this time it began to penetrate through the surface I had once thought solid. I shut my eyes tightly and whispered softly, "I am dead." The bright, white light began to burn through my eyes, eating away at my consciousness. My eyes flickered open to meet the rays of the morning sun shining through the windows of my room once again. My mother stood beside them holding the string of the mini-blinds in one hand and saying, "It’s time to wake up! Yesterday may be about loss, but today is a day to dream and live."

I called my mother to my bedside and as she neared I told her, "I am dead. Touch me..."

 Chuparrosa is a Dreaming Woman who inherited the sacred art of the ensueño (Dreaming) from the Yaqui Queen of Dreams, Heather Valencia. She has also been training and closely working with Koyote, a Toltec Man of Knowledge, integrating the art of invocation with her academic training in psychology. Chuparrosa works her dream weaving by unifying worlds and mystical visions, using her body and words to sensually integrate, rearrange, and transform.

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