how it is

This sore throat night-sweat illness

while packing all my stuff out of the construction zone-yard to move to a place where there is no space for my stuff

before going to work on a night shift the day after a morning shift at the most manic retail biz in the southwestern united states

is about right as a metaphor for my life.

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I pay the price for my arrogance every day

Friday's dream had a cross on top of a church yell to me hey mike and then turning into a white knight accelerating toward me with long pike.

I moved out of the way to watch him land in a heap.

This made no sense to me until Saturday's dream in which I was at work at some nebulous job surreptitiously yet quite unselfconsciously downloading pornography.

I realized that the first dream was quite clearly an expression of my libido as superego, and the second dream, libido as id.

This is strange for I am not a Freudian and have not gathered much meaning from that spiritless worldview.

These dreams imply the question: where is the integration of the ego-self? In doing so, they pose a direct challenge to the no-self of my waking conscious zen and gnostic pursuits.

Yet that is how it is these days--

complicated.

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Sunday's dream was very vivid, even lucid in moments.

I was racing up a staircase on some spirit quest and arriving at a landing felt extreme vertigo.

I remembered in the past I had made a leap at that point, but the leap in front of me was much too far, so i turned to see the staircase rise in an unexpected direction

I then found myself facing my recently deceased friend, Mike Brown. He was in a typical (for him) relaxed posture on the stairs, and was very radiant. He was young, even younger than when I'd originally met him, perhaps 19, strong, with a full head of curly hair.

He was speaking already as I arrived, and said that he is "continuing to profit," which as a lifelong businessman was an appropriate thing for him to say. It arrived in my mind as an expression of his zen, that he was continuing to reap benefit to his soul's journey from the years of his spiritual practice.

He said I should go visiting on the 5th. I was lucid enough to ask if he meant I should attend the services coming up for him on the 4th. He said the 4th and 5th--it would be "money well spent." He also offered some other sage advice which was promptly forgotten upon awakening.

I then heard his voice in my mind saying, "I said be gentle with yourself. And take good care." The oddness of his voice coming into my head when I was already awake, with another message, was also very typical of the offbeat humor that colored Mike's life.

Sadly, there is almost no way I can get to those services, between getting time off, expenses, energy reserves, and organizing my current move to the chaos of the land.

Again it's just how my life is: Even honoring messages from close friends from the other side get deprioritized while I try to keep life and limb together in this wage-slave waking nightmare.

I will try to be gentle with myself.