Peace, and a sky full of stars.

"We shall find peace.
We shall hear angels.
We shall see the sky
sparkling with diamonds."
~ Anton Chekhov

When I was young and was falling asleep into the never-never land of the unconscious, sometimes I could feel myself spiralling in the nothingness of eternity. And I would fear it so much ~ I thought there could be nothing more boring than an eternity of nothingness. Nothing in this moment, nothing in the next. Dullsville. And it scared me so much, that nothingness, that I would wake myself up from it.

Last night, as I was falling to sleep, I felt my shape change.
I floated out of my body, and realised with a start that I was conscious dreaming. I was on the hallowed astral plane that I had tried valantly to reach as a teen so often, and succeeded only a few times - the place where you can dream with consciousness.
I became a tree. A majestic, beautiful tree, in a forest of others.
In the blink of an eye, over fifty years, the forest was chopped down and I remained.
I watched the sky changing, the landscape morphing into desert.
Finally I too was severed at my roots, and became a part of the earth again.
Heartbeats later, the earth exploded, disintegrating into nothingness.
I became a part of the cosmos ~ the air and the dirt infinitely intermingled.
Everything was one.

And whilst all of this happened ~ these great upheavals of change, death, rebirth,
throughout the destruction of the trees, then the earth,
all I felt throughout this dream was
P E A C E
and a great blossoming joy of enlightenment.

I wasn't attached to anything.
I just was. I am. You were. You are.
We are one, in this cosmos.
Whether in this second we collide as bodies, the next we collide as particles.

P E A C E.

As I flew through the deep expanse of dark pincushioned with light,
Only sky with endless stars,
I brought into the space of fearlessness those anxieties I held ~
I let dogs bite me;a stranger enter my house as I was asleep; murder.
I allowed these things to happen in the safety of my conscious dream to release them...
to view them in the same PEACEful way as I saw the rest of change and movement.

There was something so infinitely beautiful in the infinity, in the endless change.
Of being neither here nor there. Of releasing fear of all things, including death.

P E A C E.

I would say excruciatingly beautiful, but it wasn't.
It wasn't excruciating at all. It wasn't achingly beautiful.
No, there was no pain in this at all.

Just the incredible sweetness of peace.

I awoke this morning a changed person.