Skiing blind

Night of November 23rd. Manhattan.

I'm much more likely to have the action/adventurer/the-bad-people-are-after-me kind of nightmare than anxiety dreams. But. Not. Last. Night.

I was at a ski resort that had opened up too early or too late in the season. The snow was built up in places, and then very scant in others. That's challenging enough, especially since I haven't skied for maybe 7 years. But the oddest thing started happening to my vision. I noticed that the ground kept blanking out, like a photograph being overexposed, and it was impossible to see where I was going or what the terrain looked like. It was also impossible to slow down or stop. My heart was racing, but I had to keep going - it was the law of my relationship to the slopes, like the law of gravity. Somehow this law just applied to me, and others were able to stop just fine.

I could still see other skiers and snowboarders as blurry black figures, so at least I had some sense of what to avoid, but it took tremendous skill, luck and focus to make my way down the mountain. I then realized that other people's vision was also starting to go intermittently blank, but somehow they were able to stop, and I could hear them yelling at their ski instructors - like they wanted their money back because this problem of the terrain blanking out was really detracting from the Snow-Bunny Vacation Package.

Suddenly it was unclear whether it was a vision problem, or whether the mountain itself was going blank.

Finally, I was able to slow down at the bottom of the slope. Throughout the whole skiing experience, I never once felt like I had accomplished something. Isn't that kind of strange? I felt like I had gotten away with something, that I had managed to cover up my personal shortcomings, and people wouldn't have to know that my vision had gone bad (which completely discounts the idea that it might have been the mountain itself going blank, and that other people were also losing their vision).

I went inside the lodge to change clothes and get warm. I had to get to my friend who was waiting for me back at the hotel and that I was running late, but had no idea how to get out of the lodge. People kept filtering into the lodge, looking very purposeful, being noisy and hungry. Since they were coming in, there would seem to be a door, but then there was no way to actually use the door and leave. There just kept being walls of glass and extra corners and people saying "go that way."  It was like an Escher house of impossibility.

I found these two elderly men who were lying on lounge chairs in boxer bathing suits under skylights. They had extreme tan lines, and were nearly going black in some places from years and years of tanning. In a casual way, they got up and said, "Oh yes, that does sound like a problem with the doors." They started to help me find a way out. We went around asking people, but no one seemed concerned about the predicament of not being able to get out. Everyone was all, "Oh, later it will work out. When [something] and [something] happens, then we'll find the doors. Why don't you get some hot chocolate in the meantime?" I didn't know whether to trust them or to keep looking for the doors.

In the last second of the dream did I suddenly find myself outside, bathed in too-bright sun? Or am I only making that up now, as I write this?

This is where you start

Night of November 18, 2010. Manhattan.

I’m not a yoga teacher, but am an on-again-off-again student of yoga – mostly based on how much money I have to spend on classes.

Last night, I dreamt that I was doing an intensive yoga program, and that while I was doing the asanas, I was not really doing them. I was shaking in postures, and not giving 100% effort. I was coasting, following along, barely being a student, much less a future teacher (which, to be in that class, I should have been trying for). There was an old man, a retired guru-status teacher, who was not teaching the class but was observing it. His stare was fierce and sharp. He had a wide face, with high cheekbones, and was ruddy like Tibetans, but was also pale. Really, he was so old that it seemed nationality and ethnicity and been stripped from him. Thin, with white hair in the few tufts that it grew on his head. He was a bare soul, and scared me because of it.

He rarely talked and rarely did anything out of the ordinary. But at the end of the class, he pulled me aside and asked me what I was doing there. I was found-out. He knew that I didn’t belong. I wanted to explain myself. I felt that rush of grasping at straws. I told him I had been doing yoga my whole life, on-and-off. And as I was saying “on-and-off” I realized how he would see my lack of discipline and perseverance. I knew I had given myself away, and he saw the realization as it dawned on me. “Yes,” he said. “That is why.”

He meant, that lack of discipline is why you now find your practice and yourself hiding from life, going along, coasting,  shaking, weakened.

NYPL Photography Collection. 1908-1909.

I was trying to hold it back tears because there were so many people around and I didn’t want to broadcast this intense shame I felt. An image of the sheer rock face of the Hudson palisades went through my mind, as though that was the image-equivalent of my life and myself.

I told him that I couldn’t feel the asanas. That they felt hollow. That my spirit was gone and I had no idea how to get it back.

“This is where you start,” he said.

I couldn’t stop crying. He meant, if you’re hollow, start from there. Do the asana from there. Don’t do it from an inauthentic place of pretending to be from where you are not. As I started to understand this, he watched me and said, “Yes. Yes.” And I felt the return to myself, and cried and cried. More than most dreams, it felt like a message.