the timboucher experience

I spent today extraodinarily hungover, with a fair amount of vomiting. It was especially unpleasant, but I think I have finally slept it all off at last. While I was sleeping this afternoon, I had a series of interconnected dreams in which my brother and I were back in New York visiting. We were talking on the streets to people and making friends wherever we went, which is roughly the opposite of my experience living there. I became filled with energy and was running and jumping over all kinds of things in excitement. At some point, we entered the subway, something like Penn station.

One of the scenes I remember from when we were underground is we came upon a scene where a number of immigrant women who had been selling quilts and knitted clothes had been rounded up and handcuffed for selling things illegally. I saw this several times in New York and it always struck me as extremely sad and not at all right. My brother shouted something in anger at the police. I don’t remember what it was but I made him leave quickly with me, so the police would not turn on us instead. As we walked on, a woman stopped us and thanked my brother. I guess she was somehow connected to the women being arrested, or they worked for her, or I don’t know. After that, I guess her husband or the real boss of the place came and chatted with us. He was either Chinese or Korean, and he had his daughter give us free samples of noodles that one of his nearby restaurants sold. He was extremely intelligent and kind, and kept getting interrupted by people to get decisions from him about his businesses.

At one point, I think my brother said something like, “You see everything, don’t you?” Meaning that no detail missed his attention. And the man replied in somewhat awkward English, “I see because all of my eye muscles are open.” Then I felt compelled to ask him, “What is it that you see?” His answer was, “My window is cracked.” At the time, I took him to mean that it was cracked open, like when a car window is rolled down slightly. But now I think I understand that he realized that the biggest thing he could see with his immense powers of perception, was that his own power was inherently flawed, but that was okay.

His daughter was also very kind and perceptive. She made jokes with us, announcing that she was only 25% Chinese, and only 25% as clever as her father. I told her that she seemed like she was at least 40% and she seemed to enjoy the joke. She told me that something about me made it seem to her that I ought to go to England. She also told my brother something like that, but I can’t remember what.

The other subterranean dream I had actually involved Jesus. I actually saw Jesus in a dream, which is not something that I’ve ever accomplished before. One time last year, I thought I met this Hindu goddess, Durga though (looking back, it happened on nearly the same day last year - November 8th). Anyway, maybe it wasn’t underground but it was in some kind of old city square, and the sky was dark and overcast in such a way as to give the impression of being indoors. I was laying on a blanket amidst some of the other poor people and beggars who had assembled, because we knew He was coming. I was also laying on my back, because I felt sick (a half carry over from being hungover in real life). He came through the crowd and looked into different people and told them different things. I didn’t expect him to come to me, and I was fine with that. But then he did. Actually, first he came to my brother’s cat, who was there with me. To my brother’s cat, Jesus appeared as another bigger cat which looked just like him. They licked each other’s fur a little bit, and that was all He needed to do to convey his message there. Then He came and looked down at me. Each of us smiled and I felt a warm sensation over my body. I looked straight into his eyes, but I can’t remember what he looked like. Or rather, the way He looked was sort of amorphous. He didn’t look like any one person; maybe He looked like all people somehow. And then he told me an extremely cryptic parable about what my mission in life was.

It went something like this: “Do you remember all those stories in the news of women who had gone to the doctor, and the doctor had ended up taking advantage of them and sexually molesting them? This is what you need to think about.”

I think there might have been a little more to it, but that was the essential message, and I had absolutely no fucking idea what He was talking about, and then He smiled and left. After I woke up, I puzzled over this for a while, trying to interpret it too literally. Then I remembered my theory that the way dreams work is like your brain is playing Pictionary with you. It doesn’t know how to speak to you in a straightforward, more linguistic way, so it strings together people and images and events for you to interpret symbolically. So I thought about what He’d said in a more symbolic way, and struck on what I think was the real message.

In his story, people had gone to a person whom they trusted and expected to be healed by them. Instead, that person played upon their needs and further violated them on one of the most primal levels. They suffered enormous psychological and spiritual damage as a result of it. So, I think my subconscious mind struck on that as a way to explain to me better what I’m doing, and why I’m interested in religion in the way I am. I’m interested in empowering people and giving them the tools so that they can heal themselves using stories and religion, and so they can see and stop it when they are being violated by others in the name of healing & religion.

I’m not especially concerned with the first question most people would probably have which is, “Was this really Jesus?” Maybe. Maybe it was my subconscious mind choosing an especially potent symbol. Maybe it was the same archetypal figure which gave birth to Jesus in the first place. I’m not as concerned with that as I am with what he told me. Actually, it also ties in very interestingly with one of the points from Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis:

39. Out of itself the Brain has constructed a physician to heal it. The subform of the Macro-Brain is not deranged; it moves through the Brain, as a phagocyte moves through the cardiovascular system of an animal, healing the derangement of the Brain in section after section. We know of its arrival here; we know it as Asklepios for the Greeks and as the Essenes for the Jews; as the Terapeutae for the Egyptians; as Jesus for the Christians.

The brain, in this case, is the deranged gnostic god who created the Universe in error and in pain. For more info on this and other concepts he mentioned, here are some links…

1. An intense article by Dick, called Cosmogony & Cosmology
2. Who was Asclepius?
3. What is Phagocytosis?
4. Who were the Essenes?
5. There’s no page just on the Terapeutae, but there’s a quote here and here about them.

• Being at work early
• 5 minute subway romances
• To the small as small
• Another subway-related post
• Snowing in NYC