Dream of the Planetary Alignment
I had this dream way back in the 1980s but was reminded of it again when reading about the planetary alignment that begins today – the eve of my birthday on January 24th - and continues for the next couple of weeks. The dream itself I consider to be one of the “Big Five” that I’ve been privileged to receive in my 60-odd years, and its implications still surprise and amuse me when I return to it.
Planets Align by RD Armstrong
The Dream: I am in a house that I do not recognize when there is a powerful tremor – not like an earthquake, but more like a vibration, as if the lowest string on a cosmic harp were being plucked. I run outside to the courtyard and look up and I see that there are five planets that have lined up in the night sky. I sense that this phenomenon presages something important.
In the next scene I am climbing up a steep but very small hill towards a tiny house that perches at the summit. It almost feels like a children’s book illustration of a little house on a hill. Once inside I see my maternal grandmother. [She had passed away the year before, but looked her usual, well-groomed, slightly severe self.] She beckons to me to come forward and says, conspiratorially:
“I will tell you the three principles that hold your world together.”
Eagerly, I lean in to catch this wisdom from the elders.
“They are: GRAVITY, HYDRAULICS AND METAPHOR.”
There is a pause while I ponder this strange set of ideas. Then my grandmother leans forward with the hint of smile and confides:
“And it’s ALL METAPHOR!”
I glance out the window and see the five planets vibrating in the sky as if they were dancing.
I’ve had many theories about this dream over the past three and a half decades. Gravity and metaphor were concepts with which I had at least some sense of familiarity, but hydraulics was a complete bafflement. Up until that dream I don’t think I’d ever entertained or spoken the word except when being taught how to use a bicycle pump. But reading more deeply into the mechanism – and moving with the thought that all of this was metaphor – I saw that the principle of hydraulics could be another way to explain much of what we have come to call “the Secret” or “the Perennial Wisdom” or “magical thinking” or even “the new physics.” To summarize it in theological terms, it is what we mean when we say “As above, so below.” The essence of hydraulics is that, by virtue of a connection or relationship between two entities, the application of force on one entity has an effect on the other. All spiritual healing, all witchcraft, all the mysteries of action-at-a-distance of particle physics experiments hinges on this idea.
Gravity, I was surprised to learn, is still one of the great challenges in science, in terms of understanding exactly why it works. According to Einstein, gravity is a curious property of the space-time continuum and not an absolute law; that is it only applies to the part of reality that conforms to the limitations of time and space – i.e. our reality. Since gravity is based on the attraction of objects within time and space, I like to think of it as the scientific corollary to the idea of Love.
Metaphor, my favorite subject, is the recognition that something which we do know can represent something which we don’t yet know and allow us to make the cognitive leap toward comprehension. Some have argued that all knowledge is via analogy or metaphor. Metaphor enriches every aspect of natural life by suggesting that we can make meaning out of it in an infinite variety of ways – retelling the story of what life means in ways that comfort, sustain, challenge, surprise, invoke, provoke and evoke the endless possibilities of existence.
I hope that you experience your own provocations at the wonder of our world in these weeks when the planets line up to dance for us!
Rebecca Armstrong