The Crane Dance

Years ago, my sister was nearly kidnapped. It was ludicrous; the kind of thing that only happens to other people, or people in movies, not me and mine- until it did. A masked man jumped out of a white van and grabbed her from behind. My sister reacted perfectly, as she was trained; she became a whirlwind of sound and fury and nails and elbows, a whirlwind violent and troublesome enough that the man in the ski mask on his face and evil in his heart decided to give up and drive away.

My sister ran to a friend's house; my father flew across the country the next day and knocked on doors up and down the street where it happened, asking if anyone had seen anything, fuming, determined. We pleaded with him not to kill anyone, and he obliged. He nor the police ever found the perpetrator, and that was that.

That wasn’t that. For a long while my sister was different. I'd playfully sneak up behind her and she’d lock up, go white and wide eyed and start to cry. She’d see a shadowy figure across the street on a walk home from the synagogue with me and she'd collapse on the sidewalk, shaking. I started to have recurring nightmares, where I'd walk my siblings home, a van would pull up, they’d grab my brother and sister, and I of course would be locked in slow motion, the air would become thick as hot honey, and I’d be helpless, unable to save them.

Awakening Within The Dream

I had this nightmare over and over, and figured I'd just have to live with it. Years passed this way. I graduated from high school and went to Beis Medrash- kind of like graduate school for rabbis- where they treated us a bit more like adults, gave us a bit more freedom, which meant I managed to sneak internet access into my dorm room. I started eating books and gulping down movies, so many movies- movies so impactful and pregnant with meaning it made me wonder if I was on the wrong side of the wall separating the heathens from the chosen. One such movie was called Waking Life- and this is where I learned about lucid dreaming.

I learned quickly. My first lucid dream, I spent flying over a city at night, and as I zipped over the landscape, I could actually see my subconscious rendering reality beneath me. It blew my mind. My second lucid dream was all sex. I vaguely recall an orgy in a helicopter. It was glorious. Then, a few nights later, I had the nightmare. But this time, about halfway through, I realized I was dreaming. I was wading through the hot honey horror, trying to save my siblings, and I realized I was inside my own mind.

I shifted my weight, and teleported in front of the first kidnapper. I shifted my weight again, and then launched an uppercut with the power of a rocket ship. His head disconnected from his shoulders, tumbling towards the stratosphere. The other assailants head quickly followed. I woke up with a smile on my face. I never had that nightmare again.

A New Nightmare

I kept reading books and watching movies, and eventually realized I wanted out of the box, and did so. That transition was one of the most difficult, terrifying, lonely and immensely rewarding things I've ever done. Shortly after, a new recurring nightmare began. This one had much more juice; it has occupied a huge portion of my recalled dreamtime, for the better part of a decade now.

For most of my adult life, it feels as if the most repeated dream I have is a variation on the same scenario: I'm back in yeshiva, and I don't want to be there. That's the dream. That's the loop my subconscious can't stop tossing and turning in, a decade since I left. It went the same way, mostly: I realize I'm there, I experience dread and horror, I try to either fit in, escape, or sometimes, a weird third option. Most often, I'd awake with my heart pounding and my chest fluttering with old feelings.

I have a very heavy handed subconscious. I almost never need to interpret my dreams. In one of the earliest variations, I tried to escape through the forest with two companions; a golden retriever, and a tall, ethereal, beautiful woman with the same colored hair. Eventually my rabbis caught me, rifles appeared in their hands, bullets appeared in my body, and suddenly I was awake, heart pounding.

It’s worth stating here that I experienced no physical or sexual abuse in yeshiva. Not that this kind of thing hasnt happened in yeshivas like mine- I have friends who were beaten with sticks, one was sent home with duck tape on his wounds, I know people who were sexually abused by their rabbis- I mean fuck, the man who taught me to read hebrew was caught with CP on his computer- but as far as I am aware, none of that happened to me.

Whatever my subconscious is still chewing on is emotional, and complex- it would be simple if Yeshivah was all bad, but it wasn't. My rabbis brought us into their homes, fed us, supported us, and devoted much of their waking life to their students. There was ancient beauty and meaning in the life we lived. It was a confusing mix, and I reckon that's a big part of why my subconscious hasn't fully swallowed and digested it all, despite years of chewing.

One of the most common reported nightmares is taking a test and being unprepared or naked or some such. Schools of any kind seem to leave their mark on people's psyches. It's just that in my school, this kind of stress was turned up to 11- it wasn't an academic test I was worried about, it was my divine judgment of my eternal soul. The first year I was in yeshiva we had a class for an hour a day with the head rabbi, in which we focused on the severity of sin and the urgency of repentance- we were instructed to be in a state of constant anxiety and shame, to ruminate as often as possible about the the severity of the punishments we faced, and to be in agony over our failures. I was very eager to serve God as he instructed, and I took these lessons to heart. It wrecked me.

Divine Judgment

During the month of Elul, which was devoted to soul searching and preparing for the Day of Judgment, I wrote down every single sin I'd ever sinned and constantly begged for forgiveness, and beat my chest, and roiled in anguish over my sin, as I was instructed to. I felt in my bones that God was disgusted with me, turned his back to me, and when his face became hidden, every positive emotion and sensation I had ever felt disappeared as well. Meanwhile, our rabbis told us that God rewarded us to the degree that we suffered for him- the harder learning torah all day was, the more this pleased god. I tried my best to accept this, and the suffering, but the cognitive dissonance grew and grew with every passing year. How could this be the life God wanted for me?

Even the most fundamental parts of how we served him confounded me- we spent hours of the day translating Aramaic to to english word by word- why didn't we just spend a year or two learning Aramaic first? Why didn't we study the history of the men we were so obsessed with? When I asked about this, my rabbi told me I had a ‘goyishe kop’- a non-jewish mind.

Sometimes I'd wait until late at night when everyone had left the prayer and study hall. I'd go to the holy ark- the sacred structure containing the Torah scrolls we’d face while praying- and kiss the thick heavy embroidered curtains draped over the doors, get on my knees and beg God to make it all make sense, to sweeten his words on my tongue, to forgive my wickedness, as my sobs echoed through the empty prayer hall. But it was to no avail; the Talmud made less and less sense to me as time passed, and so did my life.

Adventure Beyond My Wildest dreams

So I left, and had adventures1 beyond what I could have dreamed of. I made friends; one such friend was Jesse, a long blond haired Californian dude who I met first over a game of cards against humanity at a neighbor's house, and then again by chance at the Dead Sea. I remember how thrilled I was to have my first ‘goyish’ friend, complete with a ‘goyishe kop’ and how hard I laughed when he told me he was in fact half-jewish.

We spent some truly impactful weeks together there, in the salty holy weirdness of that place. He had a kind, patient, bemused affect towards me that I appreciated- I recall him chuckling as he helped me carry a gigantic unwieldy suitcase clearly designed for airport floors up the rocky hills near our camp, for example, and listening with a combination of horror and awe at the circumstances of my life and my reactions to it. Our conversations lasted for many hours; meaning flowed both ways as we played catch with half filled water bottles, floated in the salty sea and hot springs, and smoked spliff after spliff under the eerie magic moonlight of the dead sea.

So it felt natural to reach out when I was in California on my way back to the PNW, and my family. I asked him if he wanted to visit my yeshiva with me, the place I'd told him so many stories about over finjan-boiled Turkish coffee over the sandy campfires he taught me how to care for. He agreed, and so we drove together to this absurd place I had told so many tales about under the pastel sunsets of Metzoke Dragot.

Return to The Scene

We parked a ways away from the yeshiva itself, and hiked into the hills, smoked a bit, stared at some of my beloved deer, until I spotted the fenced yeshiva campus. “There it is,” I said. “Auschwitz for childhood dreams”. I was still very young, very dramatic, and fairly stupid- for some reason I got it into my head to wear a Palestinian keffiyeh I had bought in Jerusalem. I wanted to be as edgy as possible. I looked ridiculous.

I found a journal entry from that day, the better part of a decade ago:

“Today I returned to the scene of my trauma, to the yeshiva at which I spent four years. I began my journey with a head full of thoughts- mostly concerned that returning would trigger some emotional upheaval that I wasn't ready for- but like any good trip I've had, the fears melted away when I first came face to face with the direct experience. I confidently joked around with kids I have seen in my nightmares, sat in the rosh yeshivas office and laughed. I went with my new self- the free, mindful, experienced, autodidact into a place where a past broken profoundly lonely self lived and touched the walls he touched and proved to myself that it really all did really happen.

I went with a friend too- one of my first non-Jewish friends with whom I deeply connected, who I met in a place so far beyond my yeshiva self's imagination- a place where people wore little to no clothing and watched sunsets with same religious awe and ceremony that we prayed with in yeshivah, and I brought him to see the crazy world I had come from and to provide a tangible piece of that Metsokeh way of being into this nightmare of a compound for children's dream to die.
I'm so happy I went.

We hiked in through the hills I fell in love with nature in, with Californian herb mixing with Turkish coffee I had brought from the shuk in Jerusalem jostling in our brains. I left triumphant and anxiety free, settled in the felt knowledge that I am well past that place and it's neurosis, and more free than I ever would have dared to hope to be, more understood and loved than I ever could have ever hoped for, filled with a new sort of gratitude- not to anyone or anything specific- just a deep wholesome sensation that I am happy to be where I am. Healing can come faster than one expects.”

I have more memories from that day that the journal entry did not cover. I recall that sneaking into my old dorm room felt like piercing the veil into my subconscious- it felt like I was walking into the dreamworld. Inside inside a tattered old trailer, still on flat wheels, I found a few of my deer photos still clinging to the wall with doubled up scotch tape. I found a dirty piece of paper on the floor- half folded and torn- a note from a mother to her son, that she'd included some food for him in his bag, I pocketed it and slipped out of the dorm.

We walked to one of my old spots at the periphery of the campus, a chair facing the hills the sun set over, and with Jesse's help I folded the note into an origami paper crane, danced around a bit, and placed the crane on the chair. We walked past the study hall- I stared for a moment, listened to the sound of Talmudic debates and decided to pass it by.

There we came face to face with some kids- after speaking with them a bit, I found a couple of them recognized me- I had been roommates with their older brothers, they knew about my photos. After we chatted for a while and parted ways, Jesse noted how intense the looks on their faces were, how it seemed to betray a flurry of thoughts they were not sharing. As we discussed this, A doob-tube containing a spliff fell out of my pocket, and Jesse laughed and picked it up behind me, just before some of the rabbis I thought had already gone home for the day spotted us. The head of the school, and my former 9th grade rabbi were heading toward us with pleasant puzzled and restrained looks on their faces.

I approached them quickly, and wrapped my former 9th grade rabbi in a hug. I was shocked by how frail, small, and shaky he was. In my mind's eye they were huge and substantial, but in person felt like they might fall to pieces at any moment. The head of the yeshivah invited me into his office to schmooze a bit.

As I did, he pulled some classic shtick with me. He walked into his office, and closed the door behind himself, in my face, and gestured towards some seats designated for students to wait for his audience, and started on some paperwork and calls. I laughed internally for a few minutes, then seethed for a flash, stood up, and walked into his office. If this was a shit test, I was going to throw the shit right back at him. He smiled as I sat down, and we began to schmooze.

“We brought you something,” Jesse said, and pulled out a bunch of sage leaves we had picked from the infinite sagebrush hills surrounding the campus. “What's this?” he asked, staring at it in hands, unsure what to do with it. “We were both kind of dumbfounded. And gestured out his giant window at the hill almost exclusively covered in sage. “That” we said, almost simultaneously. “Ah” he said and pushed the sage forcefully into a fake potted plant he had on his desk, snapping the branch and smushing the leaves. Jesse and I stared in amazement at the perfect metaphor unfolding before our eyes.

We talked for a bit longer, and then we left. I slept great that night, a dreamless sleep.

Bottom Up or Top Down?

I still have the yeshiva nightmares- many variations of it. I've considered lucid dreaming about it but… I don't have a strong desire for it anymore, or for lucid dreaming at all, really. It's a bit similar to this strange phenomenon wherein many people who learn to access strong bliss states through meditation (known as ‘Jhanas’) seem to do it for a while, get a huge kick out of it, and then rarely do it again. That was my experience as well, much to my surprise. At least for now.

I find myself reluctant to mess with the process that seems to be unfolding. On the other hand, perhaps it would be healthier just to snap out of the whole thing, the dream, the process, the story- and just punch some rabbis' heads into the stratosphere? But as I continue to age alongside this dream, I find I react differently- not always, I still often lose my shit and wake up with my heart pounding- but a good amount, perhaps most of the time, I'm less immediately reactive and panic-stricken; I seem to take in my surroundings with a kind of patient curiosity.

Sometimes I just amble around schmoozing with classmates. One time I gave everyone acid, and we all tripped together. On another instance I teleported the whole school to the ancient holy city of Tsfat and ambled around for a day to visit the tombs of the early kabbalists. It feels like some subconscious part of me is slowly relaxing its grip on this old identity and circumstance, like old parts of myself are catching up with the new. To skip it feels a bit hasty and unwise.

If I lucid dream-solved this nightmare like the kidnapping dreams, would I lose out on those moments, and on going at the pace my psyche is telling me it needs to go? I'm not sure. For now I'm leaving it up to my gut to decide how to strike the balance between 2bottom-up and top down. I want to see how this unfolds.