Doug Anderson: Surrender, Panic, and Control

When I was living in Texas in the 70s, I read a book on lucid dreaming that offered a technology of participating in my dreams. I had always been a dream flyer before that. I would find myself flying in a dream and then, inevitably, I would fall, terrified, and was always surprised when I hit the ground. I was never injured, but got up and walked away.

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When I began to practice the techniques of lucid dreaming, I found I could control the pattern of my flight, visit the neighborhoods of my childhood, and even see my playmates below, wandering the streets. I was also able to stay aloft while flapping my arms. I became quite smug and began to tell friends about this ability, but one day I stopped flying in my dreams. I’ve only flown once, and only briefly, since. I thought maybe I’d lost my ability to fly because I was intruding on the process of dreaming, that I had too much control.

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In one of the Carlos Castaneda books, someone, I forget who, says that if you can see your hand in a dream you can control what happens. This is the realm of magic and also its offspring, science. We can “make it so.” We can do things in science that would have greatly excited the high priests, alchemists, and other practitioners: imagine Athena arriving as a drone in the Iliad to influence events.

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But what we’ve lost is the ability to let things happen, to be surprised, We are so intent on control that we’ve suppressed our better part: unfettered imagination. The ability to browse among the mind’s wild creations without interfering. We have often heard the expression, “You could fuck up a wet dream.” Maybe fucking things up is related to control. Maybe this describes our foreign policy and domestic policing and surveillance. Maybe the tyrant’s last desperate draconian acts are the phase before he falls. Surrender, part of us says. Panic and control, says another.

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As I grow older I am much more comfortable with the idea of surrender, letting go, letting be. What life gives me without my asking is so much richer than what I can demand from it.

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copyright 2015 Doug Anderson