Window Panes

I had an odd dream two nights ago.

I was seated around a table with a group of people whose faceless identities I could not place, but in my dream, I knew them well. There was a blind girl seated across from me. At least, someone next to me told me so. I remembered feeling sympathetic towards her because I noticed all around me that the sky was a dazzling azure blue, the trees and grass, a deep rich green, the flowers were sparkling gems in a multitude of colors (yes, I dream in dazzling colors). It is strange to note that even though my environment was brightly lit and brilliantly hued, the entities who sat around me were grey and pale, and seemed to fade and shimmer around the edges. They did not feel very solid, and were in fact, quite ephemeral. The exception was the girl, who looked solid enough. She actually had a face that I would be able to recognize if I saw her again.

I turned to look at her and noticed that even though I had been told she was blind, she was, infact, staring at something in front of her as if she could see it. Curious, I got up and walked around the table until I was standing directly behind her. I squatted down so that my eyes were at level with hers, and that was when I was able to see what she was so intently staring at. It was a rectangular window with 24 panes of glass, four panes wide and six panes tall. Through the window, I could see the sky, the trees, the flowers, but viewed through the thick distorted glass, they looked like basic blocky shapes, their colors no longer vibrant, but rather dull and lifeless. All the fine and sharp details of the landscape was gone, replaced by the thick dull muted darkened colors which turned the scenery into something that was almost unrecognizable as a landscape, and looking more like some cheap ugly surrealistic abstract art piece. Worse yet, five of the center panes had been completely blackened out so that nothing could be seen through them. It was almost as if she was only able to see a dark-and-dull, coarse-and-general hint of what the real world looked like, around the periphery of her visual area.

I felt so sorry for her. “Remove that window of glass and see the world around you!” I tried to tell her. I even went so far as to try to take the glass window from her hand, but she seemed not to notice that I was there, and in fact, had a death grip on the window with fingers that were white and shaking with the effort of maintaining that visual block between herself and the world.

“Why is she holding onto that window so tightly? Why can’t she see the world for what it is?” I asked the entities around me.

“It’s no use. She will not listen to you,” they told me with hushed whispers. “She cannot see. We already told you. She is blind.”

I felt sad and helpless, knowing that her blindness was caused by nothing more than her own stubborn clinging to the safety of her window. The blackened center panes were her safely lenses, hiding from her sight the truth of what was out there in the real world, the one that her imagined horrors had turned into the nightmareish world of her own creation.

Then I looked again, beyond the glass pane, at the gorgeous beauteous world all around me and I suddenly understood the difference between a 2-dimensional being and a three-dimensional being. I also had an inkling of what a 3-dimensional being like myself would seem to a multi-dimensional being who could view the world in more than 3-dimensions. I would probably be pitied for my inability to see the other dimensions all around me. And if they were to wrench the window of my own reality out of my hand, would I be able to handle the reality–indeed–the TRUTH of what a multi-dimension would look like? Or would I be frightened out of my mind to see the realm of spiritual beings and ghosts, intermingled with my own normal 3-dimensional world?

I woke up with so many questions unanswered. The entities around me, shimmering and breaking up into whisps of the morning sun. Perhaps I visit the multi-dimensional world when I dream. Perhaps that is why I can see the entities and the girl in my dream cannot see them. Indeed, she did not even see me, in which case, I must have been in a different realm than her plane of existence. I wonder if I know this girl in this or another lifetime. Maybe she is not any specific person, but rather, an archetypal person who represents all of us on this side of the plane of existence. I don’t know, but half the fun of life is trying to make sense of it all, and dreams are the stuff of power and magics that tap into the human subconscious and allow for us mere mortals, for one-third of our entire lifetime, to slip back into our god-selves and fly free from our solid 3-dimensional existences.