A DREAM, MAY, 2025

I descended, almost like falling down a treacherous mountain, maybe half-way down. There a young man, not at first visible to me, had put scores of anchors into the slope. The anchors were connected by a thick rope. Another person, almost like an angel, appeared and pointed to the knot at the center of the rope and said that when it was pulled up, the network would become a house, a shelter against a hoard above threatening to destroy everything. The house could instantly appear and disappear, and thus foil the hoard, and our safety was not in living inside the house when it was raised but in knowing the house was there. The rope was Indra's net.


The dream shifted. My teacher, Mircea Eliade, appeared to me in the dream. I saw other teachers with their students. We were in a large shelter. As he took me aside, I sensed other teachers spoke to their students as he was to speak to me, sending their students forth. He said to me, "Teach as you must. This is the age of horror . . . . There is no way out. You must look through it." I then realized this book is my looking through the horror into the sacred.


NOTE: I had this dream after I had completed revising the sonnets, but it caused me to review the INTRODUCTION yet again. I had thought it was ready, but the dream led me to revise and add to it in light of a sharper sense of the horrors and what Eliade taught about, in his famous use of the phrase, "the terror of history."