Very early the other morning, I was sleeping and dreaming. You know those just-before-you-wake-up dreams that are haunting and poignant at the same time. I often dream crazy just before I wake.
In this dream, I was teaching a workshop on pranayama (the yogic art of breathing) at a yoga conference, but I didn’t know where. It was dark and there were very few people attending and no faces that I recognized. My particular class had only two students. Both were flaky and wanting to play the role of esoteric yogis who claim to know a lot about intricate and complicated breathing techniques. One guy was wearing a turban. I remember thinking that both of them were weird and that their extreme breathing practices were possibly making them extra bizarre.
I started teaching and presenting my motivations for practicing pranayama. I was explaining how my motives were not breath control or the effects on my nervous system, but rather the exploration of direct unity with both the ‘space’ around my body and with the universe at large. I remember feeling impressed with what I was saying, like a chord being struck perfectly on a musical instrument. You know, that confidence that can only come in a dream state because you are only aware of the feeling and not the actual words you are saying. Of course, I abruptly woke when I started feeling too confident.
As I opened my eyes to wakefulness, I remained still, trying the savor the feeling of this dream-driven sensation of unity. Then, out of nowhere, I started singing the refrain from the song Dream Weaver by Gary Wright. At that precise moment, my alarm music turned on: it was Dream Weaver by Gary Wright. I was singing exactly in sync. I lay there and smiled.
So what happened? Was it pure coincidence that I was singing the exact lines from the song as they came on? Or was it rather a stunning occurrence of transcendent unity, an example of directly touching an unknown part of the present moment. Or did the song come on a fraction of a second before it was consciously audible and my subconscious brain instantaneously turned it into my singing? How would I prove anything either way? Does it matter?
I know the scientific method would want me to repeat the phenomenon to determine if I wanted to claim such instantaneous unity with my surroundings as an ability. As I write this, I am supremely confident that I will never again experience something so perfectly and impossibly in sync. Does that mean my experience is not a ‘real’ example of the sensation of unity? It’s so funny that science follows only what’s repeatable as the measure of what is meaningfully real. But so much of our lives is unrepeatable, including the particular event that is you and your particular lifetime. The irony inherent to science is staggering.
I do not claim that I have some remarkable prescient ability. Or that my sense of unity can move backwards and forward in time. I can just let the experience make me smile and know that the Universe is a wonderful place.