Inner Life

One of the great things about getting old, is that while my short-term memory fades, my long-term memory sharpens. This makes memory odysseys like today’s all that more compelling. 

I find myself wondering about ‘inner life.’ I feel compelled, and interested in my own, and in the phenomenon, in general. I once asked an acquaintance, “When did you first feel whole?” Now, I’m asking myself, about the whole experience of having something going on within me — that I thought of, as my internal life. It seems that the internal life I have, has become what I identify as me. How did that happen?

When I get to thinking about how it all started, I realize several things. It’s hard to believe that something I so clearly identify myself by today, was so seemingly absent then. I recall that my first experience of any kind of psychic phenomena was when I was 5. I still recall the shadowy hand that appeared on the wall in the dim light that came from the hall. It seemed to be reaching out for me. I was terrified, and I knew I was going to be gotten. I forced myself to turn around in my bed, and look at what was coming for me, only to discover there was nothing there. I didn’t sleep well that night, nor many nights later.

When I was eight, with a friend who could draw peanuts really well, we created a comic book of peanut adventures, stuffing it with whatever humor our 8 year-old imaginations could muster. During that time I had a dream, where I told a band of Indians, who were intent on killing me with arrows, that they couldn’t kill me, because this was only a dream. I woke up laughing, and dreaming has been an interesting playground for me ever since.

I remember that as a child I often thought my dream life was more interesting than my real life. I didn’t know it at the time, but dreams would become one of my chief navigational tools later in life. I don’t recall any adult ever telling me that what went on within me was important, but somehow I knew.  

My mother was Catholic, so I was raised Catholic. She made sure I went to parochial schools, and catechism— so I got a big dose of religious dogma in my childhood years. It was only later when asked about what I was proud of in my life, that I surprised myself, and said, “that I escaped from the church when I was 13.” There was something inside me, even then, that ran from the ways the church wanted to direct my inner life.

Later, in college, I was fascinated with dreaming, researched, and had lucid and shared dreams. The war in Vietnam raged on, and I was happiest, when I could escape into sleep, and dream of another life. I believed that dreams were primarily wish fulfillment then, yet I had the sense they were something more too. Dreaming, it would turn out, was the doorway into an inner realm, that I now think of, as what my life is actually composed of. Dreaming dominated that phase of my life, and introduced me, to an unknown self.

It wasn’t until the end of my second marriage, and the ravages of my stroke, and its aftermath, that I really came to see, that what is within me, is the most important part of me. I am a dream, I’ve been dreaming-up for a long time. I come to this stage of my life with such a rich internal life, florid with Don Juan-like heightened experiences, so much so, that I now realize I was lucky long before I called myself “Lucky.”

I don’t know to what extent my experience is like, or different, from anybody else’s. I don’t know if any of what I share will have any meaning for you. But it is clear to me, now in the waning years of my life, that what stirs within me, is what is most real — and that all the rest — the jobs, moves, relationships, and other achievements, have been the real dreams — bound to slip into oblivion.

I am a figment of an on-going dream. I have an inner life that is both dream-like and real. This — these stirrings within — are who I am. I suspect these stirrings are what will continue, even when this dream is finished.