Hudson Valley Astrologer

When I was in my twenties going on thirty, I had one of those visceral dreams that stay with you, even after many years of waking and sleeping, then waking again. The dream was so vivid I was easily convinced of the “reality” of a subtle realm to which we are all related.

In this dream a hand came out of a cloud, fingers reaching for an instrument, and then moving masterly along the frets of a guitar. The music produced was so beautiful it brought tears to my eyes, and when I woke up I felt warm tears running down my cheeks.

I didn’t own a guitar, and I had never flipped cards in a Tarot deck either. The hand did not emerge from a cloud brandishing a sword, or holding a coin, it was not waving a wand, or proffering a cup. The hand was offering me music; the music of the spheres.

I really paid little attention to this dream other than occasionally falling into a pleasant reverie every time I happened to think of it. Before I knew it, not one but three guitars came into my possession. I had in fact “dreamed” of owning my own guitar ever since as a young boy and my hopes of playing were dashed when my brother put his foot through the sound box of my small Guild guitar. As it happened, many years later, there was a luthier who had a shop across the street from my insurance office. I climbed the long staircase and entered a magical room where stringed instruments of all sorts hung indiscriminately, lying and leaning every which way. The master guitar maker was working on his craft, buffing out the elbow of an incredibly attractive instrument. We chatted a long while but the short version of the story is that he was assisted in his work by elves or gnomes, or something he wasn’t quite sure about. When I shared my desire to acquire a guitar he immediately reached back grabbed a case with a bumper sticker slapped across it the read “Birdland” and said, “this belonged to a friend of mine. I can let you have it for a very reasonable price, and I can throw in this 12 string guitar too.” I had to think about it, but had already decided before I could exit the door and turned around at the bottom of the stairs, marched back up and bought both guitars. That was the day I began teaching myself to play. My fingers eventually attained a level of mastery, finding notes to pluck up and down the fretboard at a speed I never imagined possible when I began.

Eventually, I became so obsessed that far and away the most immersive activity I have experienced has been writing and singing songs. There was of course a brief stint with network chiropractic — this was an alternative health practice that developed an approach using extremely gentle touches along the spine, which awakened spinal gateways, releasing accumulated stress and nerve energy to stimulate somatic waves that can reorganize the energy patterns in the body and brain — which was all the rage for a brief spell and helped me develop a profound sense of connection with my own body and surroundings. In the creative process, there is a similar distinct connection, or shall we say reconnection with the subtle realms that “lent me a hand” back when I initially dreamed of those long slim fingers scaling up and down the neck of the guitar like an expert lover.

This description is probably how all creative endeavors operate, and to one degree or another we are all connected to this unfolding reality. From my view, this immersive state is NOT an illusion, a simulation, or a “controlled hallucination,” — although clearly it can be all of these things as well, and especially if our consciousness is still enrapt by our egos, which is true for 99.9% of us. The immersive state is perhaps merely a baby step toward an integral and universal connection.

HVA

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