Dreaming of Pieces of the Moon

The other night I had what I thought was a very strange dream until I thought about it over and over again. In the dream I found myself climbing up a very rickety ladder toward a high wooden building perched on stilts. Below me climbed a very dear deceased friend who was one of my mountain-climbing buddies. When I reached the very top of the ladder, the floor of the delapidated building remained some three or four feet still higher.

Mark said, "Go on, you can make it!" I tried once or twice and failed to reach the floor. Then I did something I would never do in real life--I jumped from the top rung into the air and reached out with one hand to grab the floor boards. Somehow I pulled myself into the room. Mark, amazingly, was already there waiting for me.

He pointed to a table containing a clear plastic covered-dish that I had to work hard to open. And then, there it was--slivers of dark gray moon rock. As I touched them, the joints of my fingers went numb, but very very peacefully numb. Mark admonished me to quickly close the container and return to the ladder. But how?? As I closed the container, peace filled my soul much like the time a Buddhist priest in Japan touched my head with heated foil dangling from a wand. I dropped down to the ladder and quickly descended to the ground without Mark. Then I woke up.

What on earth was that about? The thought of the original harmony of the spheres came to mind. The moon is much more a part of that universal harmony than our tainted, polluted planet with all of its dissension and distrust. A piece or two of the moon would have in it the music of the spheres giving peace and calm to a human being--perhaps Neil Armstrong felt it in 1969 as he walked on the surface of the moon--did he not send a message of peace from outer space? Was it not on the surface of the moon that characters out of Cyrano de Bergerac's science fiction novel (Voyage Entre La Lune et Le Soleil) communicated with Nature by not using language.

What, then, did this dream mean for me? Perhaps, at least, some of the above. But I think it means that our lives are indeed a continual quest for something beyond our reach.