Wednesday, July 30, 2008
The City
In Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming Robert Bosnak relates the following story concerning a particularly powerful lucid dream:
I discussed my dream with a man I greatly admired, Henry Corbin, the great scholar of Sufism.
In the dream I found myself walking along a river. On the other side of the river I saw a Middle Eastern City of white stucco cupolas. Without hesitation I jumped into the river and swam across. When I walked through the white city I was almost overwhelmed by the reality of the place. It felt more real than anything I’d ever seen before.
I told Corbin this dream because, within weeks of having it, I heard him speak about the City of Light at Eranos… His description of the City sounded so much like the one in my dream that I decided to ask him about it. I was at the beginning of my life, in my mid-twenties, and he was at the end of his, in his mid-seventies. For some reason he was fond of me and turned his hearing aid on while listening to me. Hearing tired him. He lived in a world in which, he used to say with irony, most of his contemporaries had been dead for a thousand years. I loved him. After hearing the dream, he smiled. “You were there,” he said. “You were actually there. You were in that City. That’s why it felt so real. You were there because the City exists.”
From Robert Bosnak, Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming, New York: Delacorte Press, 1996, 48-49.
I discussed my dream with a man I greatly admired, Henry Corbin, the great scholar of Sufism.
In the dream I found myself walking along a river. On the other side of the river I saw a Middle Eastern City of white stucco cupolas. Without hesitation I jumped into the river and swam across. When I walked through the white city I was almost overwhelmed by the reality of the place. It felt more real than anything I’d ever seen before.
I told Corbin this dream because, within weeks of having it, I heard him speak about the City of Light at Eranos… His description of the City sounded so much like the one in my dream that I decided to ask him about it. I was at the beginning of my life, in my mid-twenties, and he was at the end of his, in his mid-seventies. For some reason he was fond of me and turned his hearing aid on while listening to me. Hearing tired him. He lived in a world in which, he used to say with irony, most of his contemporaries had been dead for a thousand years. I loved him. After hearing the dream, he smiled. “You were there,” he said. “You were actually there. You were in that City. That’s why it felt so real. You were there because the City exists.”
From Robert Bosnak, Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming, New York: Delacorte Press, 1996, 48-49.
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