Akashic Records And Salt Pork

I wasn't getting very far in recalling details of my dream about The Ideal Woman from Redfield. My memories are very shallow. This would be a good time to remember what I said a few weeks about about the Interior Castle, but I'm not really recalling that either. I could look it up. But let me try to restate it on the fly. There's stuff up here, meaning what I can visualize, like a car, the picture of a car. Then there's stuff up there, also visualized but without entirely conscious thought. It just is. Getting there can be tricky. But the basic move is to do what Elvis advised in Speedway: "Let Yourself Go."

Yesterday afternoon I decided to try for some lucid dreams. I remember reading in a magazine once, along with invoking other spiritual experiences, that there are techniques to make lucid dreams more likely. Some are more strenuous than others. Endurance stuff, like staying awake a couple of days. Standing on your head for several hours, that kind of thing. Another way is the same as sympathetic magic techniques. Such as if I wanted to dream of the girl from Redfield, let's say, I might surround myself with red things and pictures of girls. Another way is to eat strange foods or unnatural portions of foods, anything to get your body out of its normal rut. It's a matter of purposely throwing your digestive metabolism out of whack, knowing you'll have a restless night, but also assuming you will sleep soundly for an hour or so, and in that brief time your dreams will be as lucid as can be.

[Let me pause here to give a legal disclaimer. The techniques described in this blog are "for entertainment purposes only." Do not try this at home or in any other bed outside your home. Consult your doctor before any medical or dietary changes. Like me. I phone my doctor a dozen times a day. "Hi, it's me again. I just saw an ad for Vagisil on TV. And they said to call you and see if it's right for me." No? OK, I'll talk to you after the next commercial break."]

I decided to go with this last technique -- dietary havoc -- which required a quick trip to the grocery store to get some navy beans, salt pork, and johnny cake. With some quick soaking and boiling the beans were softened up enough to eat by 9:30 p.m. A couple big bowls and it was time for bed.

Around midnight I was still awake. The discomfort of being so full was the biggest problem. But you know how it is with this kind of meal, a few hours in and you feel like a pressure cooker. The churning is bad. It's like the song "Locomotion," with the chugga chugga motion. The train's on your digestive track, speeding downhill, saying, "I knew I could, I knew I could!" This is no way to sleep; your midsection alternates between feeling constricted and about to blow. I was sweating through my clothes in agony, discomfort, pain. I felt contorted, twisted in knots. There's a kind of rotting away feeling, a gnawing that doesn't quit. It was exactly what I wanted.

Then it happened. I must have gone into an alternate realm of sleep. I was in a very cloudy place, clouds stretched out everywhere, like looking out a plane's window. There was a palace ahead. I entered the palace and was informed it was where the akashic records are stored. I knew about this place from reading Levi's "Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ." I mentioned this to the gatekeeper and he said he didn't remember ever seeing him. So I'm like "Hmmm, that pious old fraud!" Anyway, I checked the digital card catalog and got about 35 million hits on "dreams about women." I was just about to narrow my search to "anima" and more specifically "ideal women" and, I hoped, more narrowly yet, to "Redfield, Iowa," when I suddenly woke up with a most severe biological function in the offing.

The digestive impulse angered me in a terrible way! But with a full belly of navy beans, salt pork, and johnny cake, and the churning that always goes with it, even more than "She," this impulse is something "that must be obeyed."

The Ideal Woman's Home

My dream, revelatory many years ago, probably 30-some years ago, that The Ideal Woman lived in Redfield, Iowa, is surely a bust by now. It seems there has to be a shelf life on these kinds of dreams.

One, maybe it wasn't actually revelatory, but just something like this, a combination of "sumthin' ah et" and the randomness of words, sounds, and pictures in dreams. Maybe at some point back then I heard a TV news story that had something to do with Redfield, or a newspaper article, or saw the red sun going down over a field. The more I think about it -- especially after all this time -- the more I'm thinking it has to be a bust.

And yet... not so fast... don't they say in church this thing about prophecy, that it comes in dreams and visions? And if the word is the word, there's no shelf life on that. It might have been a dream for the future, not for The Ideal Woman existing 30-some years ago. In fact, it might have been that I was the first, or among the first, to glimpse the prophecy all those years ago as something even now to be fulfilled. It's an interesting nugget, isn't it?, that it suddenly pops back into my consciousness after all this time.

The obvious temptation is to go to Redfield, like the Magi, looking for The Ideal Woman. Maybe somewhere along the way I can find the Little Drummer Boy, and with him keeping a steady beat for our travels, we'll get there just in time to behold her in her glory. What if she's just now being born, She who will be The Ideal Woman? I could be like with Tony Randall or Paul McCartney. Just because I'm an old guy, I might yet live to fall in love with The Ideal Woman, if she hurries up and gets born. Or perhaps the Little Drummer Boy, being "little" and a "boy" will have a better chance of hooking up with her.

I say "hooking up," but that's just a joke. Kind of puts it at a crass level, something that seems essentially holy and is not really any laughing matter.

I have several -- I wouldn't call them "fears" exactly. Some trepidation, hesitancy; I'm thinking of some cautionary flags. I've been out on a limb before. I won't bore you with the details. Except to say at the very least, it's an embarrassment to come slinking back home after you've been massively wrong about something. They never really forgive you till you make an honest effort at counseling. So I'm a little reluctant to follow this new star.

The Tibetans -- or whoever it is -- those ones who are always looking for a white buffalo or red heifer -- they've got it easy; their heads are so far in the clouds everyone forgives them for traipsing over hell's half acre for the latest fulfillment of prophecy. It's curious you never hear how it turned out. That buffalo's always right over the next hill! Lucky dogs.