Soulfood and Dreams
For the past several nights I’ve been falling asleep to Deeper, the second disc of the Breathe album by Soulfood. Soulfood lists this site as the one to visit, and has this to say on the liner notes to the album:

Soulfood follows a familiar path to rediscover…ancient wisdom and lost knowledge. Throughtout this musical journey, you will have the opportunity to experience an innate connection to the first people who walked the earth. Through creation stories, many of the sounds and melodies heard in this journey can be traced back over 100,000 years. Maori, Aboriginal, and Native American are many of the musical influences touched upon within the compositions. Indigenous voices, drums, flutes, rattles, shakers, bells and a variety of other instruments are presented in a way that amplifies many of the exotic harmonies and rhythms of the indigenous peoples throughout the world. Exploring these harmonious rhythms may take you back to a time where celebration, dance and ceremony were honored daily in life.

We wish to transport each listener on a musical journey through the human experience. Two linear ways of experienceing Soulfood are by moving through the Seven Directions of the Ancient Indigenous Medicine Wheel and the Seven Chakras found in Hindu tradition. While there are individual tracks, the program is a continuous theme which takes the listener on an organic / electronic adventure within which the secular meets the sacred.

Musically, it’s not bad. It’s a little reminiscent of MCMXC A.D., Enigma’s first album, only with a native culture / aboriginal inflection as opposed to Gregorian chant. They cite the work of Stanislav Grof, Linda Wolf and Jaquelin Small (among others) in the liner notes, and mention the practises of Halotropic, Shamanic, and Integrative Breathwork. It strikes me that a lot this music would be appropriate for breathwork sessions – then again, a lot of music is appropriate for breathwork sessions that one might not consider. In Portugal, in some of the first breathwork sessions I experienced firsthand, my teachers played Juno Reactor – and it worked really well. Actually, I loaned this CD to them for some time, and only retrieved it the last time I was in VT.

And I’ve certainly had some interesting dreams the past few nights. For the most part, they’ve been the brief and fragmentary single-image sort of dreams where “one thing happens,” but interesting nevertheless.



• It was late at night, just after a rain, and I was in a vacant part of a dark city. The area was perpetually unfrequented even on the most auspicious of occasions, and on a dark and rainy night it was desolate. In this strange locale, I was walking toward a building on the corner of two empty streets, a storefront which had just closed for the evening. I was going to see my friend N., who I think worked there; in any case she was there out of obligation, and I was coming to see her with some purpose; I was to see her safely home, or accompany her on some uncommon errand. The building, I believe, was a pizzeria, but there was more to it than that; I felt something coming from the building, something dark and brooding. I don’t know if the pizzeria business was merely a front which provided a plausibly nondescript cover for a building housing a confluence of spirits, or whether it was less deliberate a thing, and was instead possessed or otherwise haunted without the consent of its earthly tenants. I had the sense that in either case, there was a tremulous balance to the place – there was an inadvertent serenity about the building, but only for the moment. I let myself in and walked through the dim and rather barren restaurant toward the counter, which was rather far away from the door. I was conscious of having to walk through the majority of the room – and thus leave a good deal of it at my back – to get to the counter, and that just as I could sense and apprehend other presences in the space, I too was being watched. To approach the counter felt akin to approaching the chancel.

•A fun dream: doing a succession of many standing backflips, one after another. Fun because that’s something I’ve been working with in my hung gar classes and trying to teach myself to do, and in the dream I was not only doing them easily and gracefully, but I also had a real proprioceptive sense of them – I could feel the motion in my body, and I could feel the tense and release of my muscles. I had a distinct feel of before, during, and after each flip. Perhaps the dream is showing me a new way to move; perhaps the movement will in waking life become easier for me as a result of feeling it in a dream. Would that through will and artifice alone, anything from dreams could be so easy a translation.

•A confusing one: one night over this past weekend I was startled from sleep, and as I jerked awake the last wisps of a dream drained away and I can make no sense of the remnants. I was reading something in a strange cipher of other alphabets and other numbers, and I was, I think, in the air or out of my body in the dream; it was as if I was reading the air itself. The only bit I recall was written am ii; I don’t know what that meant in the dream.