Anaesthetic Recovery Room – Tibetan Temple Dream 21-11-2025

Here is Friday’s dream had around 14:00 – 15:00 hours CET time as I transferred out of operating theatre after hip replacement surgery and into the post operative recovery room.

I had the distinct sensation of being in a Tibetan style temple at a monastery or other religious centre. The inside of the building consists of a main chamber and a smaller “sanctum” or “sanctuary” at the back. The main building has mats on either side of and aisle leading up towards the sanctum. The floor level in the sanctum is higher than the main building. The ceiling is lower. The “wall” going down from the higher main building ceiling to that of the sanctum is very white. It is decorated in whirling relief design top and bottom. The designs form a row at the top and bottom of the partition. There is a sense that they are or have been golden. The craftsmanship is exquisite. For a Tibetan themed place, it is surprisingly light and airy.

Sat in rows either side of the aisle in the main building are monks in largely magenta robes. There are around twenty of them all special invitees. They are roughly equally spaced either side of the aisle.

In the sanctum there are two raised boxes / benches aligned perpendicular to the monk’s rows. These boxes are higher and decorated in fancy cloths or hangings. Looking into the sanctum are three monastics sat to the left and three people to the right. The one on the right furthest from the main room is me. Everyone else is wearing Buddhist ceremonial hats, yellow. I alone have no headgear. I understand the others to be high lamas. I am dressed in magenta robes.

At the back of the sanctum facing out into the main building is an even higher box / throne upon which is sat a chunky Tibetan man in more yellow / gold robes with the yellow ceremonial Gelug hat. He is younger than me. His robes are brocade and he is Karmapa. I am closest to Karmapa.

There is incense in the air and chanting. I know it to be of Tibetan flavour because of “benza” as in “om benza pani hung”  the chanting also has heart sutra, guru Rinpoche and medicine buddha to go with the Vajrapani. The “Benza” is very distinctive. The medicine buddha is for me.

As I come to, I expect to find myself in the temple but am actually in a high specification operating theatre recovery room with lots of kit and women younger than me in blue scrubs. I am disoriented and genuinely surprised. It takes a while to adjust.

The experience fades into normal post operative routines.

Luxuriously Lost – Dreaming Colour – Vajra Bell – Huge Serpent – Dream 03-09-2025

Here is last night’s dreaming sequence, which on waking seemed very significant.

The dream starts with me arriving at a brand spanking new London Underground station which I exit onto the street in front. The tube station on a standard tube sign is called “DOCTO BEN”. In the plaza outside are a number of food outlets, a news agents and a Timpson’s key place. The buildings are modern and white, a reproduction of period buildings suitable to the area which I know to be due West of the South Kensington campus. The reproduction has been done very well. Although I know roughly where I am, I am lost. I do not recognise any of the streets nor the street names which are on plaques in keeping with the area. In the dream I rationalise that it must be an Elizabeth line, new tube station.

I decide that I need to get a green district line tube home and venture northwards towards the park to look for one. I estimate I may find one there. I am unhurried and thoroughly enjoying my time being luxuriously lost with no fear therefrom. I head north. I cross a main road onto the outskirts of the park and cross the road which I know heads over the Serpentine. I wait for the little green man on the traffic lights. I start to cross. As I am crossing my mind, its visual eye, is filled with the phrase “OXO BEST”. I know this and the previous word are numerology.

The dream changes and I am upstairs in bed. Somehow the cat has gotten onto the upstairs landing and is playing with marbles. I get up to investigate she is chasing a green cat’s eye marble back and forth along the hall. I imagine the door to the upstairs to be open so that she can go back for food and toilet. I close the bedroom door so that she cannot get in.

I wake up and recall the words. I go to the loo and make a note of the words on a cardboard box in the kitchen. It is a little after six AM.

I get back to bed thinking that my dreaming is perhaps over for the night and will generally calm down now after my birthday. I don’t think that I will go back to sleep.

Slowly my visual field fills with my dreaming colour, forming, swirling and forming in its indigo-blue Rorschach blot like way. The colours form among “clouds”. The dreaming colour fills the dream landscape. I note that this is highly unusual, spontaneous dreaming colour. I allow myself to relax fully into it and let the landscape fill and the colour absorb me.

I am in my old university office and the telephone rings. It is a young woman asking if she can get a train to Memphis Tennessee from where she is. I say that I will come down to see her. I ‘phone through to the trainline and a ticket costs £1540. I meet her outside. She is with a friend. I tell her the price and suggest that she would be better off getting a hire car. She has a small day-sack on her back. She is not best pleased. I say that it is an easy drive. She says “ok, then. I will drive” and flounces off. She is a Ph.D. student due to present at conference.

The scene changes and I am sat on a faded red armchair isolated with no room reference point. I can feel the wind whoosh by my hair and the world is whizzing past as if I am travelling through space. I am reminded of the Maxwell tape adds.

—–

——

I feel absolutely rooted to the chair and the world, the universe even, whizzes past. I cannot see myself but can feel the chair and its arms under my hands. The motion is fierce.

The wind dies down and I can now see myself from the front of the chair. I am sat on the chair wearing a full bright yellow Gelug ceremonial crescent hat. I am in Tibetan style monk’s robes and have a mala on my left wrist. I look like I do now only my hair is freshly buzz-cut. I seem energized. In front of me on a very ceremonial table in its pouch is my Vajra-bell. I know that the chair is in fact a ceremonial throne, my throne. With my mind the pouch around the Vajra-bell disappears. The bell swells in size and takes on a golden radiant hue. The quality of it is vastly enhanced and intricate. The bell starts to radiate light in all directions until it becomes almost blindingly bright. But I know that this light is not normal photons. It is Vajra-tantra. I sit bathed for what seems like a very long time, the light feeling much like the gale-wind from before only vibrant.

The scene changes and I am sat at my old desk from when I lived in Brixton. On the table is an open propped up Microsoft Surface tablet. It is large and expensive. It is not mine. I can’t remember what I did the night before so I press play on the tablet. A video starts to play.

In it I can see a few men, eastern European, query Russian. They are standing in a near circle. One of them has his flies undone and what looks to be a semi-erect penis protruding. On close inspection it is the head of a snake. One of his comrades pulls gently on the snake head and guides it to the floor. Slowly a huge snake reminiscent of a fat Burmese python eases its way out of the trousers. The snake is several metres long and more than  ~30 cm thick. It is massive and powerful. It has a racing-green lush colouration and glistens with a self-moistening sheen. I am now fully in the scene and the snake comes towards me, it welcomes me and I temporarily incorporate it. I become one with it.

The scene changes to the far artic north. I am outside a base with wire mesh fence. I dig a deep square shaped hole deeper that my height. The sides of the hole are perfectly cut squared because I am digging into permafrost. Into the hole I place my Vajra-bell along with several near-spherical objects which have an egg like purpose. They are ancient and sort of sacred. I am the keeper. I then exude the snake into the hole for protection. It nestles down. I go off and cut several chunks of ice slab. These are ~one metre by one metre by thirty centimetres, they are heavy hundreds of kilos. But I manipulate them by hand and mind into the hole as a stopper. I am about to cover with dirt when Max walks by. I ask him if he would like to take a look before I close it. He is unsure but agrees.

The dream ends.

Gelugpa Wrasse – Dreams and Snippets 21-02-2025

The first thing to say here is that what follows is inordinately difficult to verbalize.

Leading up to the last few days and despite numerous appearances of Tibetan based themes in dreaming I have been fairly certain that I have never had a Tibetan-Bhutanese-Nepalese incarnation. In whatever visions or dreams I have had with a Buddhist flavour I have never been wearing the maroon robes of that locality and certainly never any groovy hats.

Nevertheless, the tulku {or nirmāṇakāya} phenomenon has been resident at the periphery. I have never had the Mahayana urge or thought form pertaining to a bodhisattva training journey of coming back for the benefit of all sentient beings, to teach and to aid. This idealised wish form projected onto would be bodhisattvas seems a human thing and potentially prevents beings from leaving when they ought to be exiting the wheel of rebirth. “Please don’t leave us”, is not an empowering or enabling sentiment.

A few days ago, in the twilight between sleep and wakefulness I had a few images of me dressed in maroon monks robes with a yellow hat characteristic of the Gelug lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. I was surprised. It was a “turn up for the books” and does not fit with my hypothetical chronology. The only Tibetan stuff I have felt akin with are the tales of Chögyam Trungpa though I met at a distance Akong Rinpoche. Their relationship was complex if I understand it correctly. I have a hypothesis as to why Trungpa resonated.

What is safe to say is that the thought-forms associated with and to centuries old Buddhist traditions, studied and recited by thousands are firm, almost solid. The lineage has a “mind” all of its own, nurtured by devotees of and with a ruthless and tireless devotion. It exists in the mental and emotional space of humanity. People reciting and chanting for centuries make something almost tangible in a physical sense. The traditions and practice are kept vital and alive by regular enactment, quasi-archaic though they may be. They are alive.

Newtonian mechanics dominated the human psyche to be improved upon around a century ago for microscopic systems. Yet Newton is useful to this day in our everyday reality. These mechanics are a part of the mental space of humanity. They have merit. They work. There is a loose analogy.

This morning, I had a brief dreaming sequence in which I encountered a fish in a tank. The tank was large, beautiful and with coral. The fish was an ocean going wrasse. It introduced it self as a Gelugpa Wrasse. It told me that even if I had been previously associated with the Gelug, there was no place for me therein in this life. Such a thing would be way too disruptive. The wrasse was calm and relaxed. It was just conveying without colouration.

It said that way back in the 1990s in Switzerland there had been a possibility but life circumstances had scuppered that. “Not to worry”, it said. It showed me some images of Bern.

I struggled to hold more of the dream but the wrasse part remained clear. Fish is the dreaming symbol for awareness or the need to be wide awake. The wrasse was pretty enough though contained in a tank. It was not free.

I am not sure what to make of it.

Last night we watched the Netflix programme “Adolescence” in which life for a family changes dramatically overnight. It was very good and left one with a breathless reminder of how normality can be completely flipped in a matter of hours.

We have had a few flips over the years.

Freaky Friday, an equinox talking with fish again…