This one was different. Although I have had occasional “airport anxiety” dreams in the past year, the kind when you have a flight you must make but somehow nothing is working right to get you to the terminal on time, this dream was more specific, more intense, and seemingly much more real. I was alone in London, walking at a brisk pace, pulling a single bag of luggage. There was an underpass and then a very busy street. People jostled. Daily business rushed by. I tripped on a curb. Unless something changed, I was going to miss the flight. I pressed into the sea of activity around me. Suddenly, a large van pulled up alongside. Its sliding door opened. I noticed that it was full of passengers, each facing forward.
“Going to the airport?” I asked the driver.
The figure in the driver’s seat smiled. So I got in. A single seat was free in the back row. I took it.
“We’re going to airport, right?” I asked again. The driver caught my eye in the rear view mirror. Then he pulled the van away from the curb.
It felt better not to run, not to drag a heavy piece of luggage through the chaotic outside world, not to sweat in labor over an attempt at being on-time which I knew was futile without help. Perched on the edge of the van’s plastic bench seat, I watched the bustle of the day pass the van’s side window. Maybe I would arrive in time after all. Maybe I could rejoin my family who, for some reason, were traveling separately.
Slowly, the scenario out the van’s window began to change. What began as urban clutter transformed to less active side streets. Brick row homes eased into view. The street size narrowed. Perhaps the driver was taking a short cut. I looked about me, wondering if any of the other van passengers were alarmed. None seemed to notice the change in our route. All sat calmly, without expectation.
“Hey!” I hollered to the entire van. “We’re going to the airport, aren’t we?”
Alarm recirculated through my veins. I shifted nervously in my seat. The driver did not look up. No one in the van acknowledged my question. I turned to the two people seated to my left, two woman I had not previously noticed. The woman immediately to my left side was wrinkled, withered, and extremely old. Her shoulders were hunched, her white hair was wispy, and her eyes were clouded with swirls of blue. On her left side sat a middle-aged woman of dark hair and relaxed expression. The pair said nothing. The woman with dark hair leaned forward, looked at me, and smiled.
Why had I not noticed these two earlier? They had no luggage – but then no longer did I. Strangers by physical features, the pair nonetheless seemed familiar, or at least I seemed familiar to them. The hunched elder by my side appeared older than time. She spoke no words. And yet she seemed to be saying something that I could not hear.
Then, inexplicably, I understood: we were not going to the airport. We were – no, I was – well – this was a journey with a different destination. In an instant, and without announcement, I understand that I had died. I was dead. Without an specific memory of illness or accident, I was no longer part of the outside, regular world. We drove. I felt sadness well up from within. And then I felt the touch of the aged being to my left. Her single index finger, long-nailed and bent, reached up and gently pressed on the middle of my forehead. The contact was light. The effect was immediately and overwhelmingly comforting, reassuring. All anxiety, all care, all concern left me, as if in a single heartbeat. I felt myself float. I was dead to the body yet alive to the spirit. I was buoyed in an embrace of acceptance. Asleep, still in my dream, I was awake, somehow, in my being. Never before have I experienced such a pure state of peace. Never before have all states of consciousness seemed aligned in harmony and balance.
Recent weeks have presented me with a tumultuous mix of joy and sadness. In the midst of the commotion, I have, on multiple occasions, experienced a sort of inversion of the normal sensory order, almost as if my insides are no longer enveloped by my physical form but were instead externalized, exposed, untethered. Humbled by the brief dream-state experience with the van and with absolute calm, I have come to wonder – with hesitant detachment – about identity, role, and responsibility. I am someone accustomed to action. Problems have solutions. Challenges in life can be addressed. Perhaps, I am learning, it is not so simple. Perhaps, the touch on my forehead instructed, boundaries and burdens are not so easily circumscribed.
Yesterday morning, relatively mindless over a cup of tea, I was soundlessly visited by the melody of the Beatles’ “Let It Be”. I listened to the arrival of the music in my mind. Then I found a recording online and heard the song anew through my physical senses. I sought out the piece’s history, and read that Paul McCartney wrote it immediately upon awakening from a dream in which his mother, who was named Mary, repeated the phrase “let it be”. Since the song’s release, fans and followers of McCartney’s music have wondered if “Mother Mary” in the melody meant more than a memory of his biological mother. McCartney said no.
But I can’t help thinking of the woman who visited me in my dream. Her gaze was impenetrable. Her presence was archetypal. Was she an ancestor? Or might she have been a fellow earthly traveler, a Tibetan elder from across the globe who, on that night, died from her body and, with others in that not-so-metaphorical van, moved from the human world to the next plane of existence? Had I temporarily joined her, and others’, journey to the great beyond?
Maybe. It is also possible that the strange woman on the van bench next to me may have been – may still be – a spirit guide, an archangel of the cosmos, a guardian angel in my own journey in this strange and unusual form I name as myself. Her touch released me to the miraculous experience of letting myself, and everything around me, simply, and beautifully, be. Accept, my vulnerability. Surrender, to grace. Open, to inspiration. Act, with less prideful ownership.
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.