Inspecting Budda Relics Dream – 22-01-2026

Here is last night’s dream which finished around 3 AM but which was subsequently revisited on going back to sleep.

The dream starts in a brightly lit room. There is a sense of subterranean of basement and of vault. The overhead light is bright like a fluorescent light but there is no hum. I am sat at a very large  lab-bench like table but which is large boardroom size. I am on the only chair in the room. The table is a work table for inspection of artefacts. It feels forensic and museum like. The air is treated for humidity and is slightly warm but dry.

The door opens and in walks a man and woman. They are younger than me and wearing a dark olive green curators uniform with trousers and short sleeve shirts. The uniforms have been immaculately pressed. They are both wearing white jeweller’s gloves. The woman has curly blonde hair held back in a clip and the man is dark haired. The man places an object in front of me. I know this to be a reliquary containing pieces of Buddha’s body or so the narrative goes. The box is the size of a tissue box. It is on four curved ornate legs which have an animal {query lion} foot finish. The whole thing is made out of an exquisite light yellow gold carved in a motif of India query Sri Lanka. The pattern is exquisite, fine. The box is surprisingly light. I know that it has a mechanism whereby the lid can be rotated to reveal two compartments. One of these is smaller than the other. Without opening the box I know that the compartments have a red “felt” lining. I inspect the box from the outside. The workmanship is impressive. The woman looks at me for permission and then picks the box up and together they leave the room.

They return. This time the woman is carrying a small cloth bundle. It is square shaped with a depth of a couple of inches. The cloth is folded over and over to make a parcel. She handles it with reverence. The cloths are heavy and exquisitely woven with a fine shiny silken thread running through it. There are layers of a purple-ish base fabric cloth and a rich red-magenta cloth. The cloth is luxury.  She places the bundle in font of me on the table. I know that it is Tibetan-Himalayan in origin and that it too contains a relic of the Buddha. I pick the bundle up and inspect it from all sides, paying particular attention to the bottom. I am holding it in both hands just above my head inspecting.

{This relic is “privately” owned and on loan.}

As I do this I see a “wall” to a room or cave. The wall is made of a grey sandy granular sedimentary rock. In my mind’s eye I touch the rock and it starts to crumble and flow away leaving a couple of small pillars about 20 cm tall. There is an opening in the wall about 40 cm wide and 20 cm tall with pillars of a few centimetres thickness and a void or opening behind. There is a sense of a store or a cache behind the wall. In the dream I know that in this space are other relics pertaining to Buddha and his corporeal. I can see that the cache extends to both the left and the right of the opening in the wall.

I return from the vision and place the unwrapped bundle back on the table. The man signals to me and I nod. He picks the bundle up and they leave the room.

They return and this time the man is carrying a clear plastic sample storage drawer. It is around 10 by 10 cm on the front face and has a depth of about 30 cm. There is a catalogue card with number and content written in German. There is an acquisition date and I understand it to be a museum piece kept under preserving conditions and attributed as a Buddha relic considered by some a part of Buddha. They place it on the table in front of me and nestled on a bed of tissue paper and with a moisture absorbing paper silica sack is a small bundle of jet black felt cloth held together with a thin golden drawstring. It is a small bundle.  

The man and the woman, the curators, stand back behind me one on either side of me and against the wall.

The dream ends.

Here am I sitting in a tin can – dreaming

For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do

Though I’m past one hundred thousand miles
I’m feeling very still

David Bowie

——

Outside it is chucking it down. We are due 15mm in the next hour or so.

The recovery from the hip hop hip op seems to be going well. At a guess I am doing slightly better than “normal” for a fat bastard of my age and previous substance intake. It seems that physically I will be more able than I have been for a couple of years.

The residual fate question remains unanswered. We could try to sell the house and move. We do need to downsize but we can afford another year here.

So far the dreaming has not pointed at any obvious option aside from doing “dreaming courses”. There has been some hint at uncovered knowledge. And I did once get a suggestion for a new book. Whilst I could write one, I doubt it would get published unless I self-published. I don’t have the kind of provenance which makes a good sales pitch. I am not airy-fairy and flaky enough. I am conservative. Nor am I in a university neuroscience or psych-ward {psychology department}.

The take home message that I have received from the world so far is , “don’t start anything, it will get complex and then go pear shaped”. 

There is an ancillary, “don’t try to get in contact with anyone it will be ignored and/or cause a massive drama.”

People have busy lives and they do not want to be disturbed by the rattling chains of ghosts from days gone by. I do not seek to inflict myself into the lives of others.

I have done zero SEO on this site. The idea being if someone finds it they were kind of meant to.

I am reasonably clear that I have very little to offer anyone who might be embarking on a meditation/soul searching journey. I might be of more use to some who has travelled a bit. It is moot.

I could easily be kidding myself.

I am not convinced that anyone needs to take refuge in a sangha. If you want to liberate, read the text meditate and get busy. A sangha could hold you back…by peer coercion and FOMO related drama.

There is a reasonable notion that I could generate around five grand in the January to June pre-exam “A” level science tutoring period in the UK {2027} . Some people are charging shit loads per hour. We could just about afford to live in the UK. In the second year with good “Trustpilot” reviews I could easily double or quadruple this. I could probably sustain this for a couple of years before I rebelled against the dogmatic marking schemes. This might take me to state pension age.

Not really any the wiser…

It is still early doors for 2026…given what orange-boi in DC is soap boxing about anything might happen…

Why do Americans keep having old men as presidents?

It is not really my business but the ill-will generated there does impinge and echo around the world.

Disharmony…selfishness and unpleasantness…

A misuse of power…

All that optimism of 1989-90 has faded…

With dread I wonder what lessons humanity is calling forth for itself… how will the world look in a decade?

America may be powerful but by no means is it great in the fullest sense and meaning of the word. The example being set is retrogressive. It is old…

Mandala – Kālacakra and Tarot

Mandala can be thought of as models or re-presentations of a reality. They are a way of arranging and making partial sense of observed phenomenon. They can be a short-form to a much wider corpus of thought forms and images. Having been a scientist I have used models to convey scientific knowledge to students. I have often wondered if the traditional setting of image collections of mandala is culture specific.

If one was bilingual one might see more commonality than difference.

The Kālacakra mandala is famous in Tibetan buddhism.

The kabbalists have the tree of life-

And the Jewels of Awareness or Tarot can be arranged according to a compass of N E S W.

These have a very mandala-like flavour.