R.E.M. Chuck Van Drunen

R.E.m. Cycles

by Chuck Van Drunen Dream tidbits from noctural notions

Back in the day I used to make custom snowboards in an old warehouse behind where West End Donuts is located. Often times our workcrew would go there well after midnight, for a donut break when we were rushing some overdue orders. Zacca, the Iranian late night worker was always there making donuts for the morning. I usually got a buttermilk donut loaf and a carton of milk.

Zacca and I would often talk about life. He would say that even though he is Muslim, and I am a Christian, that we really believed the same thing. “Same thing, same thing, I pray to God, you pray to God,” he would say. He had other sage wisdom like advising the practice of having sex right before bed in order to get “very, very, very good sleep. As a single, celibate, person at the time, I found great intrigue in Zacca’s worldview.

That night I eventually went to bed around 3:30am and found myself in a dream. I was outside sitting in the forest on a simple chair; it was a late summer night and the sounds of the forest surrounded me. The crickets and cicada’s rhythmically singing in endless resonances that sometimes synced and sometimes not. uncertain terms of how I was deeply hurt.

It was all fully felt and responded to in authentic raw anger and delivered with unprecedented (yet appropriate) profanity. And after the rapids of emotion had run it’s course, my interior waters then widened and slowed to a calm pool. And with a clarity that I did not expect I then saw into the eyes of my abuser and I saw the pain he had endured through his own abuser(s). He was traumatized, and beat down, and hurt in ways that were harsh, and more oppressive than I could have ever know.

Ifelt. I felt compassion for him. He was not able to feel his own pain. Because he did not feel it. He could only harbor it and transmit it.

Ithen saw in the near distance a video screen that was playing an image of a historical, authoritative person that had hurt me as a child. My initial reaction was to turn my eyes away, and to stop the emotions and feelings that began to swell inside me in seeing this person.

But before I could do so I was instructed by a formless gentle voice to “not be afraid” and to “feel” to “really feel” whatever I had to feel for that person.

Hesitant, but curiously obedient, I obliged and I looked my abuser in the face. I felt intense anger and I let it flow over me like a waterfall. I held my gaze and then angry, powerful words flowed like a river out of my mouth. I felt it all, and I let it all out, and I expressed myself fully in no To me and others.

Ithen returned to the buzzing sounds of the forest and with my emotions felt, I now, slowly began to feel an amplification of my senses. I began to hear new sounds, and the nuances of the crickets became clearer. I felt the gentle breeze on my neck. I felt my own breath roll over my lips. I saw the sliver of moon in sharper contrast. Everything was more alive. Everything was singing, with and without sound, it was all a song for me, and it is always around me.

Having felt...I could hear it all. Sense it all. For a moment. And then I woke up.