I was an orb of consciousness floating in the scene.  Full of light.  Not human.  Not alive.  Certainly not whatever character I was before, in the airplane, I suppose.  The dream was so vivid and lucid.

First, I was high in the sky looking down at a vast stretch of pavement on a shore of some island or coastal region.  In the very next moment, I was on the island listening to a group of people talk to each other about nothing in particular, but I no longer felt human, and they did not know I was present.  I felt almost alien, and I was drawn very intensely to the water.  I wanted to go back to it so badly, so I let my awareness sail into the water, and I found myself floating about twenty yards below the surface of a dark ocean.  I looked up, and I saw the long pieces of an airplane sinking nose down into the water above me.

Despite the wreckage and the darkness, I felt so blissful.  I wanted to dwell in that spot forever.  Just being that pure awareness free of identity, so silent and untroubled.

As I was waking up, I realized that I’ve been pulled to that place for a long time.  Whenever I experience suffering, I feel pulled.  As though that spot in the ocean were a refuge.  No wonder a longing for death has always been in the back of my mind.  I have memories of how peaceful and euphoric it was.

In meditation, still in bed, I returned my mind to the dream and asked to see more, to understand where this was and how it happened and why I was there.  In a flash, rays of light shot through the scene, dissolving the airplane, dissolving the water.  Washing out the memory entirely, and it dawned on me that I didn’t have to be underwater watching a sinking airplane to experience my true nature.

Later, I searched for the symbolic meaning of dreams of death.  What I read took my breath away: “To dream of your own death indicates a transitional phase in your life.  You are becoming more enlightened or spiritual.  Alternatively, you are trying desperately to escape the demands of your daily life.”  Funny how the path to enlightment can be placed so easily alongside an ordinary desire to escape a hard life, but I think it’s no coincidence.  A hard life is a blessing–if it compels that shift of attention from apparent, external conditions to the light of awareness, which imbues those conditions anyway.

I want my life to be easier.  Sometime soon, it will be.  I will have found a good job and a home for my boys.  The whole point of this life I’m living now, I think, is to learn to bring that peace and luminosity that I found under the ocean into life, into this body.  What a beautiful assignment for the soul.

While searching for jobs, I’ve been writing a novel.  I never thought I would write a novel.  They are so long.  But my writing here has apparently trained me to put my thoughts and feelings into satisfying words, and finishing a graduate thesis conditioned me to write quickly and clearly.  And then, after graduation, a very strong story began to push its way through me, and it has me in its grip.  It is a book I cannot put down!

If you stand in a door jam and push your arms against the walls with as much strength as you can muster for a full minute, when you walk out into the room, your arms will naturally rise without effort.  That is me pouring out a novel after finishing a thesis.  I’ve written more than half of it in just a month, and I plan to finish it.  Wish me luck!