The subconscious mind is both a cruel and a wonderful thing.
Years ago, I experienced a period of chronic illness that lasted about two years. During that time, during deep sleep, my mind freed my spirit. While in the day, I was a compromised and fettered shell hobbling down the road of life, at night I became a liberated superhero who did things I had never done in life, like skating on ice doing salchow quads, death spins, one-arm lifts, and back flips. On rivers, I could negotiate class VI rapids with ease, and on the pull-up bar, I could do more than I could count.
That same subconscious mind still treats me to the impossible and takes me back to the once-possible, with all of its ineffable beauty and joy.
Last night, I skied the deep spring snow in the yellow and white honeycomb cliff chutes from the peaks accessed by Solitude Ski Resort. In so doing, I felt the simultaneous fear, exhilaration, and weightlessness of gliding down a slope so steep that I was almost falling off of it. I could see the sun glistening in the snowflakes on the trees and within the snow sent shushing up from my skis. I could see diamonds in icicles that had formed from the spring melt during the cold night. I could smell and see the sap starting to come in the White Pine combs. I could feel the chill on my face, in the air, and in my lungs.
I know my dreams are not anything extraordinary from anyone else's experience, and therefore, not noteworthy beyond my own childlike enchantment. But what is amazing to me is how the subconscious mind can bring up sensations and memories and make them as real as the day they were experienced.
Imagine the power we could have if we knew how to tap into that resource. The most I can often do now is marvel at its very existence, and to embrace both its gift of awakening and its melancholy, for bringing me the passing ages of time, for the recollection of seasons and experiences now beyond my reach, but still within my vision.
Loren M. Lambert © March 24, 2014
Years ago, I experienced a period of chronic illness that lasted about two years. During that time, during deep sleep, my mind freed my spirit. While in the day, I was a compromised and fettered shell hobbling down the road of life, at night I became a liberated superhero who did things I had never done in life, like skating on ice doing salchow quads, death spins, one-arm lifts, and back flips. On rivers, I could negotiate class VI rapids with ease, and on the pull-up bar, I could do more than I could count.
That same subconscious mind still treats me to the impossible and takes me back to the once-possible, with all of its ineffable beauty and joy.
Last night, I skied the deep spring snow in the yellow and white honeycomb cliff chutes from the peaks accessed by Solitude Ski Resort. In so doing, I felt the simultaneous fear, exhilaration, and weightlessness of gliding down a slope so steep that I was almost falling off of it. I could see the sun glistening in the snowflakes on the trees and within the snow sent shushing up from my skis. I could see diamonds in icicles that had formed from the spring melt during the cold night. I could smell and see the sap starting to come in the White Pine combs. I could feel the chill on my face, in the air, and in my lungs.
I know my dreams are not anything extraordinary from anyone else's experience, and therefore, not noteworthy beyond my own childlike enchantment. But what is amazing to me is how the subconscious mind can bring up sensations and memories and make them as real as the day they were experienced.
Imagine the power we could have if we knew how to tap into that resource. The most I can often do now is marvel at its very existence, and to embrace both its gift of awakening and its melancholy, for bringing me the passing ages of time, for the recollection of seasons and experiences now beyond my reach, but still within my vision.
Loren M. Lambert © March 24, 2014
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