They say the greatest gifts in life are always unexpected. Unplanned babies, meeting someone special right after you'd pledged to remain single forever, or finding a lost relative you didn't know you had. This is how I come to make and know dream friends. You can't let anyone negate or the legitimacy of dreams or the relationships we forge there, any more than you should allow the outside to minimize the importance of loving God or loving your own family! There is a way of loving and knowing God through your dreams, this is an irreplaceable gift that has the potential to arrive when we least expect it!
And so, we reembark on our dream saga. While I am enraptured to call many living people dream comrades, it is the living ones that haunt me the most. The deceased allies pose no threat because they cannot spring back to life and bitch slap me or tell me to fuck off. So I beg pardon to my living dream peeps before I say, one of my most unanticipated friends on this adventure, has been Layne. Allowing Layne to come and go has become somewhat voyeuristic, but at the same time, I could use someone to get naked for.
IN all seriousness, the piece of Layne's life that thunderstruck me the hardest was not anything he did on stage. It was a statement he made several weeks before his death. While giving what would become his final interview, Layne stated that he felt he was here on a "spiritual mission."
The severity of Layne's addiction was not taken seriously...until it was too late. A very humorless adversary to pangs of perseverance. Don't wait to take people--their suffering or their dreams--seriously! Not only are there are elected who act as earth angels, but dreaming yourself healthy is a built-in tool of perseverance. Through the faculty of dreaming, Layne has been able to continue the mission to whatever fraction we are able to draw encouragement. Before and after the shower curtain of death, we draw encouragement from the most unimaginable sources! Don't let the reality confiscate the source of happiness you derive from your dreams! It is the only location we have left that isn't regulated by our government!!!!!!!!! There is something to be said of this truth! Verily, verily, I say to you, the Truth is home. In the same way the law is love, the truth is home.
When at last we spoke in the language of dreamers, Layne was talking very passionately about God, affirming with that Leo conviction of his, and though the assistance of various ornamental omens, that God was his identity. On more than one day, as I was doing channel work with Layne, I heard him talk about the way he used drugs as "Medicine." God was the only medicine he really needed. Humbly, Layne understood that he alone had been the culprit of withholding eternal peace for so many years by substituting substance abuse in place of soaking in spirit. Addiction can appear glamorous, the yearning to swim with a like crowd or be included in a crowd at all, acts as a very crafty hook, but the errors of this reeling perception prove to be detrimentally costly in the long run. If you do not advance, your soul retards. Drugs comatose one to the matter of life at hand. Layne, my Lazarus of dreaming, is proof that the "damage done" does not have to be permanent!! Just as there is a chance for life, for victory, there will always be a chance to heal! Despite how solidly or heartlessly other people may have condemned Layne, it was his discretion to no longer condemn himself that alleviated his suffering and rectified the self-inflicted grief. It's not only the angels who ask us to replace our addictions with Christ, with God, but it's souls like Layne who learned the hard way, these missionary souls appeal to us as well. Self-destruction was my worst addiction. More than the content of my cheap romance novels about being visited by the ghost of Layne Staley, what I learned from his spirit was to replace my self-destruction with God's master plan for community building---the opposite of solitary demolition---divine blueprints for the whole. I need no further convincing of this, Layne's never given me any reason to doubt him and he's always done me the favor of telling me exactly how it is--when not many other living people would.
So, there we were, back inside Layne's condo again, only the air wasn't nearly as heavy or depressing as it had been on our other dates. Layne's soul has the sauciness of an Atlantean, a spice that is seldom understood, but a taste I know like I know my own soul. He smiled generously in a vivacious way that illuminated my the contours of my face. I let him wrap his hands around the back of my neck, his physique all but devouring me. A peculiar warmth was surreptitiously imposed all around us, but echoed as though it emanated from right inside my own body and was somehow corded into Layne's chakras. His face was no more than four inches from my own and in the closeness, I debated on how long to hold him and lose myself in his eyes, in his words about identifying with God. I envied him for all the right reasons. I didn't covet the feeling of Layne, I wanted to feel a sense of having an identity in God, in the law, in a way he confessed to knowing. I can always smell Layne in a way I can't smell anyone else in under the illustrious dream sheets. Just as I was trying to commit his scent to memory, any felicitous way to keep him with me after I woke up, inexplicably, Layne vanished into clear air, evaporating in the same way angels fade obscurely into the sheerness of the atmosphere. Still, in the power of disappearing, they remain translucently engaged as careful watchmen. As Layne drifted away from me and became one with the celestial vapors, I began to aim my focus to the windows. The rectangular shape of the glass reminded me of in the interior of my second grade classroom-- a large panel of black paned windows, constricted by three solid cream walls. Anytime a classroom appears in your dreams, the angels ask you to pay careful attention to any lessons or messages transmitted within the environment and apply them where needed upon waking. The collective lesson being that learning is the wise heart of God's identity. WE are God's identity! He wants us to learn for the sake of of making his law of love--our only true identity. That is such a valuable lesson, so I will reiterate it. Make the law of love your true and supreme identity! "I am the law of love."
Layne wanted me to share the lyrics and song with you, I heard him (or someone) mention the song in my good psychic ear! Originally composed by Bob Dylan, Ring Them Bells is one of those extraordinary songs that combines harmony and poetry into a form of musically soothing gospel.(My favorite type of music!) Dylan of course, is one of the greatest musicians ever, a brilliant poet and peacekeeper in his own right, whom I respect and admire more than I can say. Around 1993, Heart invited Staley to lend his voice on what proved to be a very awesome cover of Dylan's idea.
Ring them bells yea heathen from the city that dreams
Ring them bells from the sanctuaries cross the valleys and streams
For they're deep and they're wide
And the world's on it's side
And time is running backwards and so is the bride
Ring them bells
Ring them bells
Ring them bells
Ring them bells!
Ring them bells Saint Peter where the four winds blow
Ring them bells with an iron hand so the people will know
That the rush hour is now on the wheel and the plow and the sun is going down upon the sacred cow
Ring them bells
Ring them bells
Ring them bells
Ring them bells
Ring them bells Saint Martha for the poor man's son
Ring them bells so the world will know that God is one
For the shepherd is asleep where the willows weep
And the mountains are filled with little lost sheep
Ring them bells for the blind and the deaf
Ring them bells for all of us who are left
Ring them bells for the chosen few who would judge the many when the game is through
Ring them bells for the time that flies, for the child that cries when innocence dies
Ring them bells Saint Catherine from the top of the room
Ring them bells from the fortress from the lilies that bloom
For the lines they are long and the fighting is strong
And they're breaking down the distance between right and wrong
Ring them bells
Ring them bells
Ring them bells
Ring them bells!
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