A recent dream hit me hard, what I could remember of it, what I managed to scribble down before it evaporated…

As I began to wake that morning, I had a vague memory of John O’Donahue saying, in his luvly brogue, “When you dream, when you wake in the morning, when the clock goes off or whatever, don’t open your eyes first. Keep your eyes closed and try and get the tail end of the dream. And then if you just get two fingers on it, you’ll pull most of the thing back, and then just note it down. The Talmud says that a dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that has not been opened. And now, if you’re sending yourself these letters every night, it’s only courtesy to call around some time and kind of pick them up.”

Our dreams tell us who we are, John said. In First Nations, futures were planned by the symbols in the dreams. This dream I was emerging from, this letter I’d just received, felt momentous and had to be grabbed by the tail, opened, its message captured and deciphered.

Trying to pull the thing back, I grabbed a pencil and pad by the bed, wrote fast, eyes closed, trying to keep seeing the images I’d seen, hearing the words I’d heard.

The day roared in, the busyness began, and I moved through it, dragging butt, everything feeling too heavy to move, the scribble upstairs, back-of-mind, through the hours. What did the dream mean? Why was it weighting my day?

Back to bed, exhausted, the note was there. I could barely read the scrawl.

"Anger. What if all traces of us and even the planet were gone?”

Anger. I remembered rage at being told that this was to happen. Us, it, that, everything… erased.

Well, the idea of humanity doing ourselves in isn’t a new one. We’ve been working on that one for a long time. But, of course, there would be traces. Things we’ve made. Roads between cities. Buildings in the cities. Remnants of dams on rivers. Statues fallen in deserts. There would be evidence that we had been here.

The dream presented a future with no Ozymandias, no statues fallen in deserts—no deserts. The planet itself would be gone. I found myself not pleased that I’d opened this letter. Angry again, until the dream began to shake hands with a possibility that’s nibbled at me for years.

Despite the “logic” of there having to be life elsewhere in the universe, despite every beloved story of travel to and from other planets, I’ve also had the daunting idea that this might be IT, the one and only place in all that vastness where there are life forms in a life-affirming environment. What if, in all of infinity, there were just this one place where Life happens, one infinitely detailed… experiment?

Western Science does not have a Theory of Everything, yet, hasn’t even explained gravity, doesn’t understand the workings of consciousness. But I have a T.O.E. hunch.

Following the “all matter is actually energy” discovery, I think the next big reveal from our Science will be that energy is consciousness, that everything is conscious, that there are no guardrails, lanes, or boundaries on Consciousness, that it is Energy, in everything, everywhere.

We know this, experientially, from human explorations of altered states, no matter how far behind Science may be on analyzing and explicating that reality. People who have meditated or shroomed their way into glimpsing what’s in and all around us have reported having no personal edges—they’ve experienced the reality of all matter being energy, and all consciousness being a single thing and every thing being conscious.

That being part of what part of me knows, I think again about the rage in the dream and realize that I want us to have more time to prove we and the planet should keep going, should keep moving toward knowing and living that T.O.E.

Who or what would pull the plug? The dream didn’t say. There was no Death Star doing us in. There were no deaths, no suffering. Earth and everything on it just blinked off, an experiment that had run its course.

Considering the message in hindsight, the anger is gone, replaced by a smile and a renewed recognition of a Message we all know well.

Yes, dear reader, as we’ve been told since humans first tried to figure out why we’re here and what the assignment might be, the message is —treasure everything, every being you know, every song, every story, every drawing, every creature, every taste, every event, every plot twist … It is all so precious, so fragile and so finite. In the time it takes to blink your eyes and reopen them, it could all be gone.

Letter opened. Message received.

Carpe diem, Memento mori, Amor fati, Be here now.

Got it.

Future planned accordingly.

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