Night School
Musings on the mystery that longs to lay claim to us in the night.
Through most of my life, I’ve been visited periodically by a phenomenon I’ve come to cheekily organize under the umbrella term, Night School. On the more agreeable end, Night School looks like weeks-long stretches suffused with night dreams dense with symbolic and occasionally lucid heft. I love this version! The whorl and mystery of dreams is truly one of my favorite parts of being human, and in Dream Time Night School I’m all devotional nerd. Making incense and flower offerings to the Gods as though I’m in some Asclepieion temple? Check. Recording my dreams and tabling them in my journal with descriptive titles for easy future reference? Roger. Sometimes, I return to these journals and see the unmistakeable, oracle-like nature of the unconscious. Some other times, I see warnings I wasn’t sensitive enough to catch.
The more demanding expression of Night School—the one for which I’m a willing but less enthusiastic student when it initially comes around again—can look like a full quarter where my dreams go largely quiet. In lieu of dreams, I find myself up in the middle of the night, awakened at a particular, recurring hour as if by…what exactly? I don’t believe I’m meant to know. But I find this night companion both deeply mysterious and familiar in its way. And find myself drawn upright—again, again—into what feels like the most intimate, ongoing conversation of my life. A conversation in which I’m invited to listen and speak to the dark.
It took me a long time to love this. As a child, I was a serious insomniac. My family had a plain, but elegant, antique wall clock that hung in the living room, and chimed off the hours. And there were nights as a child when I was awake in my bed for every one of them. Twelve chimes…one chime…two....counting up through the dawn. What I remember most about those nights, was a kind of hungry showdown with the darkness itself. Why? I wanted to know. Why, Darkness? What went on in these shadowy hours while everyone else slept? It’s not that I hadn’t tried getting some answers from my poor, bewildered parents. But I’d worn out my welcome quickly, padding into their bedroom in the middle of the night with low-key, eight year old questions like, “Why are we even here?” Or, “What is death?” With jobs to wake for, and more immediate questions than mine to answer, my inquiries were deemed neither precocious, nor essential. I was sent back to my room, and eventually my night watches became my own.
And those night watches evolved in their way. I recall “playing” the bars of my iron bed frame as though it were a harp. I recall studying the contours of my dark room, certain at times that I saw figures and patterns along the walls. But I never did turn on the lights. Isn’t that strange? Doesn’t electric light seem like the obvious answer to this child’s dilemma? Still, I didn’t turn it on, nor did I leave my bed after getting bounced from Mom and Dad’s room that last time. Indeed, it was as though something held me in my bed in the dark, some knowing that my most preoccupying questions would not be answered by lamplight.
Am I projecting depths onto a child who was merely lonely or high strung? Maybe. Probably. I was both of those things. But there was something searching in that vigilance too, something that’s as deeply a part of who I am as my having been a daughter, an artist, or mother.
Do you know something of that searching?
It wasn’t until I began to discover the writings of various mystics that I came to understand that my night watches—while weird—weren’t by any means unprecedented. There were others before me led by a hunger for intimacy with the mysteries, and the darkness Herself. There were many, many others before me who’d sought out the quietude of the night, of the inky pre-dawn, and felt something there akin to the Divine.
I’ve always found mysticism a far more attractive invitation to my skeptical nature than “spirituality.” Why wouldn’t any of us be skeptical of that word given its frequently tacky appropriations? But mysticism Friends, it’s dangerous. It’s punk, I daresay. It wants to blow past the human gatekeepers for an encounter with the absolute through direct experience. In James Finley’s words, a mystic is someone who assumes an inner posture of the least possible resistance so that they might be temporarily overtaken by something that through their own finite efforts, they’re powerless to attain. You feel that? It’s been a minute, but I think the closest analog for me is performance. The best thing I could do as a drummer or singer was to approach a performance in the most supple of manners, to open myself. And if the Gods so chose to pay a call through me, so be it. But it was never my doing if it was any good, that was patently clear. There was indeed, the feeling of being overtaken.
The beauty of it, I think, is that we don’t decide when we’re overtaken in this way, we can only make ourselves receptive. Moments touched with the fairy dust of infinity meet us when they meet us. Watching a sapling turn in the wind. Breathing in time with an infant or a lover. Getting into “the zone” while you’re painting and suddenly coming to realizing you’ve needed to pee for 2 hours. And that suppleness, that receptivity, where better to practice it than when we’re awakened in the middle of the night in a manner we would not consciously choose? What if it’s not merely insomnia, Pals? What if there’s an intimacy that longs to lay claim to us there? What if those night watches are not meant for ringing our hands about the economy, or climate change, or the safety of our children, but for encounter with an artfulness, a wisdom that by our own finite efforts we are powerless to attain.