Prologue to Lavender

PROLOGUE

For one moment on earth, her finger touched a star above…
She pulled it from the sky and began to examine its many facets.

“It’s like trying to lasso a swarm of bees,” a friend once told me.

He was referring to the collecting of the years of dreams and the thousands of fragments it
would take to tell this story. To turn chaos to order, to tell within time a story that
manifested out of time – essentially, to transform a square into a circle –
seemed indeed a feat beyond my ken, but I knew I had to try.

So begins the weaving of a seamless reality….

It began in the middle. I awakened one morning, turning over in my mind my dreams of the night before. Awaiting me was my morning ritual, in place for many years, of recording these messages. But, on this day, somehow, I drifted back into the arms of sleep.

There appears to be a star in the sky. At first, I have trouble making out its shape, for the image is quite fuzzy and seems to be billions of light-years away. Very gradually, it begins to travel closer, until I am able to focus. Indeed, it is a star – a very clear and lustrous star. It draws closer and closer – and then disappears. The scene goes black. A new star appears. It seems to have gauze covering it, but is larger and considerably closer than the first one. The closer it comes, the brighter it is, until it is practically in my bed with me. And then this scene, too, fades. A constellation appears; then the image of a stone embankment, stretching into infinity. I see a lion made of stone. He comes to life and moves his head. Next, I see the head of a young man, also of stone. He, too, comes to life, and following that, there appear more heads made of the same stone, three men and one woman, each one turning slightly as though taking a bow – like the finale of a play.

The Mentors, Steno, Ptolemy, Galen and Curie

I could not know at the time that the statues who awakened within
the dream would breathe life into all that followed.

Some weeks after this dream, I read that before man tried to count the stars, he grouped them into images. The star-studded firmament became one of the most compelling picture books of humankind. This imaginative world led man toward the divine, to the meaning of existence and to portray this meaning through that use of images. It occurred to me that my dream images were like stars, and that such grouping of stars is what I had unwittingly been doing with my dreams for years.

A year later, I took my first trip to Luxor, Egypt, and visited the Temple of Karnack, one of the most spectacular places in the world. I was overwhelmed to see that its walls of brick were the same stone embankments I had dreamt. The statue of the sphinx, with its body of a lion and its head of a man was remarkably like the stone lion in my dream. I wondered about all the people in that dream who were stone and came to life. What part did they play?

Were they the royal protégés of the sun god, Amon, to whom the temple was dedicated? Why would I be dreaming of them? Could the stone people in my dream in some mysterious way be related to the generations of pharaohs who left their marks on the stone of the sanctuary during the two millennia of the temple’s use?

The sanctuary’s walls are almost entirely covered with ornamentation and hieroglyphics; hieroglyphics that resonated with symbols I’ve seen, before and since, in my dreams; symbols somehow directing me to something higher while concealing that something until I was ready.

Threads joined my star- and stone-bound dream to Egyptian mythology and the age-old mysteries of reincarnation, resurrection, and an afterlife. I found the surface of my questions about my own microscopic existence still unscratched – even though my dreams were driving me on.

This was the first of many links. Threads spun out to the reaches of consciousness and beyond. They joined topics of human discovery and learning with mysteries people have pondered through the ages. And they became so all encompassing that I had to relate them.

With such connections is life’s tapestry bound.