Carlos Castaneda spoke, in that curious book entitled ‘The Art of Dreaming’ (1), about perception and its role in shaping the universe around us.
Beyond the simple concept of daydreaming, being in babia or thinking about shrews to which the wise popular proverb alluded to indicate a catatonic state or of pure abstraction, reverie is an open door to that other parallel world, where the Perception, rising above that metaphorical Golgotha that are the limited senses, triumphs on its own, rising from the no less metaphorical cross of boring rationality.
There are places, moments, scenarios and situations, generally spontaneous and difficult to foresee, that by hidden mechanisms, perhaps similar to those detailed in Swedemborg's metaphysical notions, act as an opening key to a parallel and yet different reality.
It is frequent that in my long walks through certain places of special complicity, I let myself be carried away by that elf that we could define as an altered state of reverie and lending myself to that odious game of comparisons, some scenarios evoke happy readings of youth.
With this particular place, whose name, like Maestro Cervantes, I grant myself the privilege of not wanting to remember, it always brings back the memory of old Twain, the whisper of reeds rocked by the wind on the banks of the great river, the Mississippi and the evocation of its unforgettable characters, who, like Tom Sawyer and Huckelberry Fynn, always strike me as the perfect avatars of those purely Jungian concepts, such as anima and animus.
Notes, References and Bibliography:
(1) Carlos Castaneda: ‘The art of dreaming’, editorial license for Círculo de Lectores, courtesy of Editorial Seix Barral, S.A., Barcelona, 1994.
NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property.