Bam, clarity on the toilet.
Field Notes 20260731 - Friday
All week my meditations have been on the quiet side. After writing that sentence out, I realize how ridiculous it sounds. It’s meditation, not frantic multitasking. Nonetheless, the reason I have this feeling behind this week has a lot to do with my ability to drop out completely after sessions and into more immersive altered states, something I fell into the habit of doing over the last few years.
Today’s Field Notes illustration:
Page of Cups. The court page of the suit of Cups, my rendition of the Rider-Waite-Smith card illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. Smith’s page stands at the water’s edge in a flowered tunic and soft beret, a golden cup held out before him; a fish has risen from the cup, and the two regard one another. In my version, the shore is gone — the page keeps his tulips, his scarf, and his cup, but he receives his visitor while seated on a toilet, tiled floor underfoot, paper roll on the wall, because that’s where the message actually arrived. The card speaks to the imagination’s unannounced messages, surprise, and receptivity — news from below surfacing wherever it finds you. As a meditation focus, its lesson is that the buildup doesn’t summon the message, and the setting doesn’t dignify it: a week of runs at the drop produced nothing, and then lucidity surfaced on its own, in the most ridiculous room available, looking right at me. It doesn’t matter what fills the cup beforehand — attention is what the fish answers to.
The usual culprit when I have a hard time accessing immersive altered states is falling asleep/unconscious quickly. I know I’ve mentioned that the physical body being put to sleep isn’t an issue anymore, and it isn’t, but oftentimes during these stretches I’m just doing that for an hour.
Physically, my body is always sleeping after meditations during long afternoons; however, I’m still there just like… during the meditation itself. No threshold comes for me to hunt the exit, no stateless transition, just quiet teasing of unconsciousness coming on but never materializing.
This flaccid “threshold hunting,” as I call it, is like waiting for an EDM drop on a badly engineered track. The drop is the main climax and high-energy peak of an electronic dance music track, defined by tension and release.
Picture a typical EDM buildup, but instead of sound it’s visualization. By the peak, several tracks of imaginal activity are competing for attention; that’s how I feel it coming closer and closer. Then there’s this weightless silence that comes on abruptly. You can feel the default reality slip through your attention, much like getting “butterflies” in your belly when going over a hill or a rollercoaster. Then the drop, the abrupt cutoff from one frequency to the next, and there you are in a new environment.
This week I’ve been running up to the drop fairly consistently, but it just does not happen, or if it does, it’s like a badly mixed track engineered to annoy you. Some afternoons I flat out can’t even get into a hypnagogic state at all.
I did have a brief lucid dream yesterday afternoon — come to think of it, I haven’t had one of these in a while (been mostly projections).
Here’s a very odd and glamorous lucid dream for your entertainment:
I became lucid while taking a crap in a bathroom that looked like a mashup of all the bathrooms I’ve ever used for any length of time in my life — I know, weird, but it is a dream and that’s how this shit (heh) seems to work. I got done, cleaned up, then started to wash my hands. I remember how ridiculously soapy they were and that my oldest boy came in to use the bathroom right there with me while I was drying my hands on a hand towel.
I don’t know why, but I started singing “The Phantom Opera Ghost” by Iced Earth. I haven’t heard that song in a couple decades. Specific line that comes to mind: “Oh, Christine, don’t you know it’s all for you?” In Matt Barlow’s voice, of course. My oldest boy stopped, looked up and scrunched his face at me with one eyebrow raised, as expected. As I was chuckling to myself and wiping my hands, I asked him if he’d ever heard of that song.
Now to back up a bit, I knew I was in a lucid dream before I started singing; it all kind of blurs together in these settings. What’s even more odd, upon reflecting: the scene and setting had nothing to do with anything I was visualizing prior to this sequence. Towards the start of the lucid dream, they were all viciously competing for attention, and bam, clarity on the toilet.
I think this is another “indication” that it doesn’t really matter what you imagine/visualize before any of these kinds of altered states, but rather the strength and attention on any particular one, or in my case multiple, bootstraps the launch. I could be partially wrong, or completely. The only way to determine that is to continue exploring and experimenting as I always do.
