Rebirth
by Rae Dwyer
Recently, I’ve taken to ending my days by sitting in the dark. I draw the blinds to shut out the glare from the upstairs flat, and turn over the wifi router to block out the power light that would otherwise protrude through the space, lending me the assurance that it was only me in the room.
And it used to be just that; an assurance.
The sensation of something lurching over me as I crossed a dark landing or through an unlit corridor followed me so far into adulthood that I thought it might never leave. I resigned myself to being governed by a fear of a thing that only existed by virtue of the fact that there was no tangible way of proving that it didn’t. That’s the impossible conundrum of a delusion, isn’t it? You don’t have to see what you feel.
The lurching something that followed me was an indescribable presence that edged ever closer the faster I ran. It was a faint breeze on the back of my neck. It was a ringing between my ears. It was waking up at 2am in need of the toilet and opting to lie there, busting, until dawn. It was twenty something me, sprinting down stairs and thinking fucking hell Rae this is ridiculous why are you doing this but feeling like I might actually pass out if I attempted to slow down.
With such a chronic and gnawing sense of disquietude, came an array of sleep problems; insomnia, nervous twitches, paralysis and night terrors. I took up smoking weed in my late teens and it helped in so far as it got me to drop off, but it served to heighten the neuroses in the long run, as anyone who’s tried to medicate intrusive thoughts with THC knows.
The nightmares recurred incessantly. Sudden pitch black out of nowhere. As a kid they almost always took place in my childhood home. I’d lived in eight different addresses by the age of twenty five, the dream followed, and to my immense frustration and bewilderment, it played out exactly the same way every single time. I’d be in the living room (or if I wasn’t in my childhood home, in some other house that my psyche made up) engaging fully in the business of dreaming, absorbed in whatever it was that I was absorbed in, and then in a split second of petrifying lucidity, an internal trip switch would crack -
- and then darkness.
Much like the unfolding, my reaction remained exactly the same; I’d curl up in a ball and disappear inside myself. Sometimes I’d feel the breeze around me as I drifted, outside of my physical body, back to my bed. Sometimes I opened my eyes before I got there and saw myself asleep.
It took me some years to wrap my head around, but I eventually realised in that split second before becoming engulfed, that I knew it was a dream. Yet I opted to retreat.
I’ve dreamt lucidly ever since I can remember and I regarded the darkness episodes as instances where I was semi lucid, it was the only explanation I could think of. The semi state being characterised by a proneness to slipping in and out, to forgetting and then remembering and then forgetting and then remembering again. A process akin to the drifting and recentering of our waking lives, of becoming distracted and returning to presence.
There’s a fuller sense of lucidity, though, and herein lies another battle-dance that has striking similarities with the ebb and flow of wakefulness. I have seen things in these ‘full’ lucid-dream-states and thought christ, I will remember this and write this down as soon I wake up and then I wake up and I don’t know... the impression I’m left with is impossibly faint and entirely beyond words, yet paradoxically intense and enduring in it’s own way.
The most enduring aspect of all is the aggression with which I am pulled into wakefulness. It isn’t always present and I’ve come to learn of the potential triggers, such as: Don’t tell dream characters that you’re dreaming, don’t ask people too many questions, don’t taunt, take the piss, or be intentionally disruptive. I’m acutely aware of being watched and I’ve been yanked out with such hostility on some occasions that the residue of alarm has stayed with me for days.
I speak of it as a battle dance and believe it be similar because the cycle of drifting and returning feels as though it originates at the same source. The more present I strive to remain in waking life, the more ardent and sometimes, straight up belligerent are the attempts of my ego to drag me away, back to that which is familiar and as far away as possible from anything that might challenge it’s wiles.
This ongoing and agitated dynamism might serve to explain why so many of us wonder whether we’re becoming more deranged on our path to “sanity” or why at times, the space between us and our perceived sense of connection feels as though it’s widening.
I refer to this widening as a feeling because if we could truly see, we’d know that there isn’t a gap in need of closing.
Perhaps it is in this imaginary gap - this partition that we feel but cannot see - that the delusion conundrum takes form. Perhaps it is amidst this infinite, pitch black space, where, in the absence of clear sight, feelings are form.
And perhaps, beneath the heavy layers of suffocating fear that have built up like sediment from generations upon generations of unspeakable trauma, is the connection we seek.
I rarely cried as a kid and in hindsight, I didn’t really do emotions full stop. Save for a few pivotal moments of extreme existential terror and grief between the ages of five and seven that lead to the inevitable conclusion that it was probably better not to engage in the business of feeling if I were to stay in one piece.
I kept up the façade until a few days after I turned 21 - mid October 2010. It started with a car alarm sounding outside my bedroom window at 1am that didn’t go off until 3am. I had a headache - a bad one - and I never get headaches. I found some paracetamol in the kitchen drawer just before 4am and then upon closing my eyes the room started to spin. Keeping my eyes closed for longer than a few seconds resulted in a panic attack. I literally could not close my eyes. So I didn’t.
I stopped leaving the house bar trips to the Co-op across the road. The days were spent in a state of total unreality, walking underwater, feeling as though I were looking out at the world through a victorian camera. A state of depersonalisation that I recognised deeply from the pivotal childhood experiences that shocked me out of feeling.
As soon as it got dark I’d snap back into a terrible sense of aliveness that saw me holding my breath in case of disturbing the predator lurching over me. I occasionally tried closing my eyes but the spinning continued. The only sleep I had came in the form of exhausted blackouts, usually in daylight hours, where I’d awake slumped over a table and on one occasion, on the bathroom floor.
I acutely remember how it began but I don’t remember a definitive end. I guess it lasted no longer that six weeks because I was on a bus home from Wales to Essex for Christmas and aside from missing virtually all of my lectures during that time, had managed to keep this brief period of psychosis a secret.
I don’t remember when it ended but I do remember the peak, the crescendo, and I guess the point after which the steadily ascending curve representing my bearing on reality started to flatten and level out. I’d passed out on the sofa just before sunset and had a dream about talking to a volcano on the verge of erupting. I woke up in the dark and wondered what it’d be like to die.
Then I watched myself, outside of myself, tying my shoelaces and walking to the front door.
And I ran. I ran really fast and I ran way past the end of my street and I guess I outran the predator because when I returned, sweating and coughing and for the first time in forever, crying, I slept.
I vaguely remember attending a lecture a few days after and straining to hear over my heart beat. It wasn’t an instant fix, but the act of flight after a lifetime in freeze, the gesture of moving through space after having previously relied upon disappearing to survive, helped to reroute the pathways keeping me stuck and sick and without hope. The nights lost their edge. I started leaving the house more often. The spinning eventually subsided.
The dream didn’t go away, though it became less frequent and the insomnia ebbed off.
I would find myself gravitating towards books about complex post traumatic stress disorder during my twenties, while training as a yoga therapist. I learned about dissociation and I wondered if my ‘disappearing inside myself’ when the darkness fell, was in fact me doing just that. Is it even possible to dissociate during a dream? It explained why I never woke up with a start, why I simply recalled it with a sense of vague nausea the next day. Vague enough to leave running in the background, nauseating enough prod at my memory like an unpaid bill.
Mostly I read these books that I slowly became morbidly obsessed with, while feeling validated in the notion that none of what was contained within them was ‘me.’ Reminds me a lot of my partner / mum / dad, I’d say. That was my excuse.
It would take another few years before I would be forced to withdraw the projection and conclude that it was, in part, me, while sitting in a room with a person who I’d paid to listen, where I would learn that dissociation could come in the form of compulsively ripping skin off of fingers, in pathological daydreaming, in binge eating, where I would start to have the dreams again, in full force, only to my newly piqued curiosity and part-triumph-part-shock, with a different ending.
I had been granted lucidity.
I remember the first: I’m in the living room of my childhood home and I scream into the black. It really was the blackest black and maybe this is so because you can’t really ever feel your whole body in a dream can you? So it’s like I WAS the black. The sensation of becoming engulfed is that of being dissociated from one’s body.
Throughout my time in psychotherapy the dream continued. I had another where I was in a huge warehouse and I ran at full pelt into the darkness, hurling obscenities and willing ‘it’ to come out and face me. I told my therapist, who contrary to her usual, professionally applied dispassion, looked somewhat excited in that moment and said “That’s your fight!”
And she was right. After the flight, came the fight. My fingers healed. I gave up cigarettes completely. I stopped eating when I got full. I gave my rage a ground to stand on and a channel to flow through.
And over those months, I fought tooth and nail in that room and in my sleep.
And I won.
Late June 2017. The sun’s setting. My bed is awash with the last light. Dappled and peach. I sit down to meditate. I put earphones in because I’m drawn to a particular sound frequency that feels like it’s pulling me into the core of the earth every time I listen to it. I feel this delicious heaviness from the waist down that is delicious purely by virtue of the fact that it is a totally novel experience for me.
At this point I’m a curious observer whose intrigue is tempered by a healthy dose of scepticism. At this point I don’t care much for googling anything, in fact I’m unusually hesitant to, lest it syphon out the depth of my experience. At this point I’m not aware that 528hz is the frequency of the root and the sacred geometry of the spiral and if you’d told me I’d have scoffed at you, in the same way I scoffed at the idea that sound could alter one’s state so deeply and absurdly during meditation.
But here we are, it’s just after sunset and I’m dropping in and the light that my eyelids had registered starts to fade. I’ve been here a while, perhaps around half an hour, and there is a shift, a sense of arrival, one that I would go onto recognise in future practices.
And then there is another shift that produces an instant, nauseating recognition and that is spinning. The spinning. There is a sharp intake of breath. There is a wobbling, a moment of being convinced of the imminent fall, followed by a steadying. My eyes remain closed and instead of the terror I expected, I’m absorbed by a sense of travelling in all directions at the same time.
I see a vortex and it invites me in. I don’t know how long I’m inside, under, within for. I see the end of the tunnel and the end is that there is no end because there is nothing. I’m four years old and I’m sitting on the floor of my childhood living room and there is nothing.
Eyes snap open.
Of course it’s fucking dark. I didn’t put the light on.
It lurches over me as I scramble for the switch. I want to be sick.
To this day, this is the only genuinely unsettling experience that I’ve had while meditating.
I stopped leaving the light off.
I plucked up the courage to take the journey again months later and I’m guessing around fifteen minutes passes this time before I arrive, then spinning, then the vortex. I’m thinking: Is this the core of the earth? The abyss opens up and for a moment there is nothing and then amidst the black I see faces, petrified and grotesque. I’m thinking: What is this? I hear:
This is fear.
Google has gotten the better of me now and I’m aware preceding this bizarre adventure that 528hz is the frequency of the root. I’m aware that the spiralling tunnel I’m seeing is seen by others. I’m satisfied and my ego inwardly mumbles something about root chakras and fear and oh look you’ve solved the mystery well done you can we just leave it alone now?
And for a time, I did.
The night before Samhain 2019. I am asleep. Dreaming. I’m sitting in the living room of the flat I currently live in. My husband is there. Then there is nothing. The fear is as visceral as ever. This is the first (and only) time in my entire adult life where the nightmare is set in the place that I’m living in. I’m in bed the following morning, doom scrolling, thinking: This is a violation! It is upon me. Inside my home. And then moments later I read:
Happy Samhain! Remember, the veil is thin.
I tell my husband that I think I’m being harassed by a dodgy ancestor and actually, I’m half serious.
August 2020. We celebrated the end of lockdown to go off grid in West Wales for a few days, you know, to get away from all of the people. The only light is emitted from a stove and we’re in the forest and the dark is the absolute darkest dark I’ve seen in my waking life. My husband is extremely alert and can’t stop moving and wonders aloud if he’s awoken an old hunter-gatherer mechanism. I look out into the nothing from our window, I dare myself to hold it’s gaze and I’m overcome by a sense of it holding me.
September 2020. I am asleep. Dreaming. The majority of the dream escapes me but I recall it having a clear beginning, middle and end. I’m on a mission. I see that it’s the evening and that my mission is complete. I’m walking down a busy, well lit street. I’m talking to a friend and there are people and cars. I look out in front and the flurry of activity is swallowed by darkness. My friend says: I don’t want to go down there, can we turn around? I see everyone turning and running up the street, away from the abyss. I know what’s coming.
-and the moment before I’m engulfed I hear my friend say: Rae, I think it’s after you.
Sounds sinister, doesn’t it? Yet my reflections the following day are tinged with something that makes my throat ache and my face prickle.
This time last year I was still very much in the habit of sorting through myself like you would an old box of things, deciding what to keep and what to throw out. This time last year, simply discarding that which didn’t sit just-so with the fresh and new identity I was carving out for myself was a common practice. It had only ever occurred to me to consider this lurching something, this persistent and ineffable presence, as misplaced at best and malevolent at worst.
Yet there I was grappling with this strange sense of something other, something that I’d neglected while seduced by catastrophe and victimhood, something misunderstood and chronically rejected, tugging at my sleeve and asking for the final time if it could just come in and have a sit down because it’s been a long night and it needs a rest and this is the only home it knows and will ever know.
It’s October 2020 - a couple of days before Samhain - and for the past two-or-so weeks I’ve turned the light off. Every year at this time and especially in recent years, I notice the subtle shifts in my internal state that indicate the looming anniversary of that make or break night, preceding the most difficult weeks of my life. Due to time having taken on an altogether different form during these fateful weeks - a spiralling and spinning that as mentioned, left me with very little sense of an end (did it ever end?) - I treat the entire season of Autumn as a grace period-of-sorts, as a fleeting series of moments to embrace being between two worlds.
It’s not lost on me that Autumn is widely regarded as the liminal space within the cycle of life, death, rebirth. It’s not lost on me that I was born at this time or that the central point of my afflictions and gifts are characterised by a sense of being neither here nor there.
So I’ve taken to ending my days by sitting in the dark. I draw the blinds to shut out the glare from the upstairs flat and turn over the wifi router to block out the power light that would otherwise protrude through the space, lending me the assurance that it was only me in the room.
And on this night, two days prior to the 31st October, I’m drawn back into the vortex. Breathing whittles down to nothing, outline dissolves. I transition fully into the other of the two worlds.
The initial journey remains true to the usual unfolding, I travel for a time and the enormous darkness opens up. I encounter the same twisted and distorted entities as before and I’m fairly sure I sense something akin to a tentacle creep across the back of my neck and I almost pull out in repulsion, but there’s a knowing that anchors me in: That which repulses me is that which requires my loving attention.
The activity recedes back to darkness and just as I consider that this journey might be drawing to a close, I’m faced with a singular presence that I’m at a loss to describe. What I feel is gladness, a strange thing to feel without immediate context, and it’s only after some moments that I realise that this presence is as glad of me as I am of it, relieved to be able to finally come in and sit down and rest.
We depart in peace, having come to a wordless understanding, both separate and intrinsically linked, one and the same. The moment makes no sense within the confines of constructed reality but is entirely perfect in this entirely surreal moment, and once again I consider that this journey might be over.
Then out of the dark space appears a light so brilliant and beautiful that I almost pull out in a shock that rivals the repulsion of minutes before, but once again, there’s a knowing that anchors me in: That which blinds me is but a reflection.
This light is ice blue, and appears spherical, electric. It gradually enlarges across my field of vision before fading back into the infinite black space that I now realise to the depth of my bones, has only ever intended to hold me, has never intended to stalk or engulf me.
I’m awash with relief. A sense of never needing to fear again.
Imagine what that feels like, knowing that you never have to feel scared of anything ever again. It felt like that.
It’s fleeting and I’m immediately aware of it’s passing, but like all moments of stark clarity, it leaves a permanent fleck on my inner landscape, a sense of having retrieved something that can never be taken away.
I’m awash with relief but I’m also itching with curiosity - certain that I’m not the only person to have witnessed this phenomenon. It doesn’t take long, seconds in fact, to find the information that I need:
The Blue Pearl. A once heavily protected esoteric teaching brought into collective knowledge by Swami Muktananda, a siddha yoga practitioner born early last century in Mangalore, India. It is described as the physical manifestation of the soul and the energetic entity that, via the pineal gland, enters the body at birth and exits at death.
“The Blue Pearl is the abode of god. The form of the self within us. Once you begin to see it in yourself, you will also begin to see it in others. As you continue to meditate, one day this light will expand and within it you will see the entire cosmos.” - Swami Muktanda
I’m flooded once again, with the realisation that I need never be governed by fear and I’m brought to tears at the discovery that after so many years of freezing and running and lashing out, so many years of expecting some kind of face-off by way of a resolution, an epic final battle, a brutal takedown, I end up meeting with myself in its purest form.
I know that this isn’t the end of fear. Only fear as I have known it. Only fear as a signal that says something is fundamentally deficient within me. Only fear as a cause for isolation and disconnection. Only fear as the shroud that prevented me from recognising the inherent divinity that exists in all things human and non human, of the earth and beyond the earth.
I told this story in its entirety verbally before I’d finished writing it and I’d begun to write it before the ending had even happened, with an entirely different vision for the piece in mind. I found myself saying several times you just couldn’t fucking make this up! And I’m still in awe as I tie everything together over a month later.
How we don’t all exist with our eyes-wet-in-awe permanently remains beyond me. How easy it is for us to lapse back into fixating on the insignificant and inconsequential. How quickly we forget.
I tell a friend of the blue pearl experience days later and she says: Wow, a rebirth!
I recall a dream that I had only the week before about a person called Renée, we fought at first and then we made peace. The name had stuck itself to my brain so I looked it up the next morning, and it means:
