A few days ago, I was sitting in the sauna trying my best to clear my sinus pressure and relax. Several times I have tried to meditate while in there, but to no avail. This time, as my throat ached and my ears pulsed with a sound that can only becoming from inside my brain, I sunk into Ujai breath. It’s a yogi type of breathing that you do by constricting the throat and making a ‘fogging up a mirror’ sound as you both inhale and exhale with closed lips. It worked.

However brief, I sunk quickly as the lava lamp of paint colors began to swirl and bobble on the back of my eyelids. The hardest part was letting go of the excitement that swept over me. It has probably been a good year or longer since I was able to meditate. Visions are usually how I know that I’m moving through something or arriving somewhere else.

The above painting was my vision and it was only a flash, but it stuck with me all day until I was able to take time to try and recreate it on canvas.

I don’t always have a plan when I sit before a blank canvas and when I do, it turns out to be an artistic disaster that later serves as great texture behind the next painting. This time, it came out almost exactly how I saw it.

Usually I paint with emotion guiding the bristles and drips. This time, I waited with a calm mind for what messages came from the vision. Still, as I look over my left shoulder at it sitting on my easel calling the breeze of the ceiling fan to set it, I feel calm rather than emotional flooding.

The word ‘inception’ circled again and again as I painted this morning. The definition is “an act, process or instance of beginning”. Of course the movie Inception pops up as well and articles explain that it represents the idea of lucid dreaming, of being able to create and change your environment within a dream. This is a gift that I can not always access, but have had for many, many years. I can be deep within a dream, know that I am dreaming and call out loud, the changes that I need. I can bring loved ones in or kick people out. Its cool, but…what does it mean?

We live in a world that is cloaked in rules and procedures and expectations. We succumb to the mundane idea of “it is what it is” BUT…is it? Scientists and Doctors explain about the many parts of our brains that are asleep. The overactive and dare I say, incredible, imagination that I have been gifted with often wonders if those parts are awake somewhere else and we are only stuck here, waiting to find the door.

I can not paint reality. I can not commit to writing a story that resembles reality. I try, often…and sometimes it makes me feel lazy or too lost in my imagination. It makes me feel stifled and caged. Is this why so many, many artists turn to drugs? Not for an escape of this world, but in search of the doorway for the world that they are certain, awaits them.

As a writer, I love quotes. And today, as I paint and try to understand-and now ramble along in this post-I hear “Create the life that you want” in my head. Maybe this vision, this painting is a marker for the beginning, the inception of something bigger. A life that I am coming to understand is not a dream, but real possibility. In the movie Inception, we get lost in wondering if Leo is in a dream or awake. I get lost in the ida of being able to create my own world like he created buildings on the beach. I get lost in the idea of finding something more, awaking to a freedom that we don’t even know enough to imagine. It all makes me wonder, who made the rules? Who told me that I had to agree to them? And what is this awakening that stirs within me now?

After all, “We are the Music-Makers and WE are the dreamers of dreams.”

And LIFE…is but a dream.

Wake up.