lucid dream by Rachel Baird

I am writing from the Holy Isle

Just off the eastern shore of Lamlash, 

Isle of Arran, Scotland.

During Green Tara prayer hour

I let the waves of chant wash over me and quickly moved into a lucid dream.

The ocean streams into the small meditation room

That is perched in the eaves of the teahouse building.

I am under water, gliding, breaching,

Blue whale mother finds me there.

I come up against her left flank

Just above her fin,

Hold fast like the smallest

Of new born calves.

She begins to sing to me her mother’s song

Of welcoming.

I remember being inside of her,

Hearing her song move through me

Through my forming bones and flesh – her dream of me.

And now, the water undulates

With the patterns of her song.

We float and dance together on the outside.

The ocean holds us up.  She is our collective womb,

Planetary mother; Okeanus.

The sounds blue whale makes are full of

Information, full of love.  

She tells me that before long, 

I will spend more time listening to her song,

and I will live inside of it again.

She tells me how to leave off all pain,

How to know the entire ocean at once, speak

To each other through it.

I sound back what it was like

Just yesterday, on the top of Mullach Mor

Standing in the sky with rock and heather at my feet.

Seeing all the way to Ireland, seeing ocean

And land blur together in the distance.

I tell her how I can’t stay there, up that high – it is too cold,

Too exposed, how the wind does not hold you like the water does,

Then I tell her of the sound the wind makes

Through the air, how the calling of the

Birds rise up and float, move with the clouds.

When you are under the sea, clouds are like blue mirrors,

Beautiful shapes drifting above but not joining you.

I tell her it is different on land. It is much heavier at times,

But the clouds, sometimes they swirl above, sometimes 

Come down to touch you there and when they reach, 

break open and spill the ocean back out onto the ground.

I show her how I have walked in the salted mist that gathers up the sea and carries

It into the air and lays a skin of ocean across the earth.  

That is where I first remembered

the dream of my blue whale mother – inside that blanket of haar,

inside the fingers of mist that reach across to caress,

that carry her sound to me now as I am somewhere between ocean and land,

between here and there,

looking through that veil again,

Looking towards home.