Shadow Artifice

Friday, February 4, 2011

Vaguely recall an impression of a dream:

I was working in a huge hive of a place, where people were at their specific tasks in groups like departments. A young woman I knew in the dream (but not in waking life) came running up to me, excited with good news, she said, that she had found someone else to take my place, which happened to be ‘last place’. “Two negatives make a positive,” she beamed with positivity as she said this.

So I am ‘saved’ from being in last place because two negatives make a positive? I don’t get it.

Her piece of news was rather a shock to me, I had thought I was trying for first place. Being in last place was not even in my awareness, obviously. This is a clever way of breaking bad news to someone, I’ll admit, to wait until there’s an improvement on the situation, and deliver the message all at once, kinda like a shit-sandwich.

Being in last place definitely implies failure, but, I notice now that the woman in the dream never said which place I had been ‘promoted’ to. I assumed it meant second last place. There were so many people around, competition would be fierce. Again, I assumed that.

Was she my shadow, but one that I had met before, as she was familiar to me in the dream? She was certainly the epitome of positiveness herself, almost too much so, like a salesperson who congratulates you on winning a prize, when you both knew that the ‘prize’ is just a gimick or a ploy of marketing.

Was she ‘artifice’? And was she showing me how I use artifice to deceive myself? By using cliché and blind logic like ‘two negatives make a positive’, pun on the ‘positive’? The cliché is definitely not always true, in fact I can’t think of any instance where it is true, other than the purely mathematical/logical. Perhaps it’s tellling me that much of what I hold to be true is only ‘true’ on the rational plane. I can feel the truth of that (ha!) and while I am quite capable of intuitive thinking, so often I am kidnapped by self-doubt on the way.

~~~~~~~~~~

I dreamed
the Little Mermaid had stayed
in the Piscean realm
of the ocean of boundlessness,
mutable,
fluid. I wish
I had never been told
that we are separate,
limited,
insignificant,
mortal puddles
of defenseless
tissue. Even though

I now know
that
Paradise Lost is
nothing but a man-made
smoke screen, and the
Garden of Eden is
only
a belief away, I
have yet to
penetrate
to the other
side.

The question
isn’t
whether
I have the power
to bring Heaven
to Earth, but would I
allow
Heaven on Earth to come
to me, into my life.

Heaven
is always
knocking
on our door
—do we
open the door?

Earth is
just there
outside
my door
—do I step out
now?