Isn’t Inhaling the World Through a Flower Like Seeing It Through Rose-Tinted Glasses?
Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Deconstruction of a Dream
The music is by:
Oceanvs Orientalis, an electronic music project created by Safak Oz Kutle, a DJ and producer from Turkey,
Roseaux, a French music project initiated in 2012 by Emile Omar.
The subconscious has its own rhythm, yet I wonder how many dawns spent far away from home it takes before dreams finally loosen their grip on the familiar and settle into the here and now. For me, it has taken more than twenty mornings. Perhaps the swift rhythm of travel—resting my head on a different pillow each night—hadn’t been giving my mind enough to weave into coherent dream-fabric. Until now.
My chaotic dinner, paired with a day of wrestling the untamed Pangandaran surf, had me crashing early last night—probably alongside the happy domesticated fowl from the beachfront huts. So here I am, up and running before 4 a.m., for the first time since Suan Mokkh, awakened not to memories of home, but to vivid scenes of my time spent with strange-looking Javanese on the beach. They faces were hidden behind veils, yet somehow I understood them—not through spoken words, but by tuning into the current of their thoughts, glimpsing fragments of their unspoken worlds.
The strange dream culminated in what felt like the swiftest awakening imaginable, the kind you’d see in cheap Hollywood productions from 1980s, where the undead snap to life in their coffins or mummies rouse from ancient slumber. It wasn’t a jarring jolt from a nightmare, but a robotic shift—like flipping a switch from sleep mode to action mode*. In less than half a second, my body understood there was no turning back, and I needed another fraction of that same second to accept the situation. It was as if someone had softly whispered:
❈
The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you
Don't go back to sleep!
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep!
People are going back and forth
Across the doorsill where the two worlds touch,
The door is round and open
Don't go back to sleep!**
❈
Now, just minutes past 4 a.m., following the great poet’s advice, my first mug of instant 3in1 coffee begins to unlock the secrets hidden in the stillness of the dark as I sway back and forth on a hanging chair, rocked by a hefty ocean breeze on the terrace. Long before the sand bubbler crabs muster the courage to peek out from their burrows, the second mug carries me down to the beach to sit some more on the imagined line where the stormy tide meets the patient shoreline of the proud Republic of Indonesia.
Just before 5.00 a.m. I leave the waxing crescent moon to keep vigil over my empty coffee mug, half-buried in the sand, and sprint toward the northern kingdom of my binary crabs.
At the end of the beach, I discover that my musicians are still comfortably nestled in their burrows, so I take a long moment to sit in peace under the Cretaceous red bed sandstone cliff, this time free from the weight of watchful gazes.
As the sun begins to break through the thin line on the horizon, its warmth gently touches my eyelids, coaxing my right eye to flutter open. To the greatest of possible astonishments, right next to my Saucony Guide 9 running shoe lies an alien face etched in the sand.
“Oh, mighty Garuda Pancasila! Am I truly facing what I’ve subconsciously awaited since I first saw Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind—evidence of extraterrestrial civilisations and their touch upon our corner of the galaxy? Is the great secret finally going to find its happy resolution on this stormy, northern stretch of Pangandaran beach?” I ponder this thrilling possibility and immediately spring into action.
I pick it up, scanning the surroundings for the presence of hidden cameras, my heart racing like a war drum. I examine the alien face, then rise, raking my empty mind for plausible explanations. As I bend down to retrieve another face, a far-fetched theory begins to take shape: perhaps an indigenous tribesman from a Sumatran, Bornean or Sulawesi rainforest once lost his exquisite, bone-carved, alien-inspired necklace, and now the storms have washed it ashore at the very end of Pangandaran beach.
I get up to look around, and about ten minutes later, with a dozen alien faces resting on my trembling palm, I abandon the ridiculous necklace theory. Instead, I embrace the extraordinary: a cosmic leakage! The extraterrestrials had somehow found their way to the the ocean’s bed, and now, from the depths, they have chosen to emerge and unveil the truth we’ve long sought!
At around 7 a.m., I race back to the central beach, my palms cradling dozens of faces, each nested together like a collection of precious gold teaspoons. However, upon my arrival at my hostel, I’m quickly compelled to dismiss my whimsical alien theory and see for what the faces really are. The bubble has burst! They are neither crafted by human hands nor by extraterrestrial beings, but forged by nature itself!
With a calm demeanor, the receptionist calmly looks into my wide blue eyes and explains that these curious shapes are fragments of sea urchins, commonly known as sand dollars.
Not happening! To me, they will forever be aliens with flowers for noses. Isn’t inhaling the world through a flower like seeing it through rose-tinted glasses? In that sense, dear aliens, aren’t you just like me?
* There’s a rare ophthalmological condition called apraxia of lid opening (ALO), where a person is unable to voluntarily open their eyelids after they've been closed—not because of muscle weakness or paralysis, but due to a neurological glitch (Wikipedia). My awakening this morning was on the opposite end of that spectrum.
** ”The Breeze at Dawn” cf. Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi, HarperOne, 2004.
”Todo lo Que Puedas Imaginar Es Real”—Pablo Picasso
There will be Borobudur next week. And remember my dear subscriber that whatever’s been published before, can be found in the archives. Also, if you can’t find my post on Monday next week, well… it will mean that I have gone to do the next thing that is making me tick at that moment I time….