I only really started paying attention to my dreams after I quit heavy weed smoking, which had consumed three years of my life. Those three years of diving into my subconscious had slowly lost their direction, stirring unnecessary fears to the surface and blurring my sense of reality. After all those years of embracing the stoner lifestyle, the water had become too muddy to dive in, so I gradually drifted away from it, allowing dreams to flow into the stream again, and it was very scary.
At first, they were completely chaotic. I had some of the most terrifying dreams of my life. My sweetest coworker would turn into a serial killer and literally decapitate everyone with an axe. I dreamed of living under military control after a terrorist group had taken over, struggling to survive a genocide. I lived in a village ruled by a criminal organization. Countless times, I found myself confronting death, feeling the absolute powerless that comes with being vulnerable.
Looking back, that whole journey felt like walking through a long, narrow, dark tunnel before finally reaching a grand opening. After long years of feeling confused, traveling alone in the desert, drifting between emptiness and existence, I finally settled into my physical world and surrendered to the unquestionable. I reached Far North Queensland, home to the oldest rainforest on Earth.
I was lucky enough to meet my partner and a group of truly good friends at a hostel in Cairns. During that time, we explored the magnificent rainforest. I reopened myself to connecting with others and witnessed the harmonious relationships that weave the ecosystem together, seeing every living thing play its own role in creating this beautiful symphony. Even entanglement, erosion, and destruction can become creative forces that speak the truth of love. The inevitable force of separation within me extended its feelers. For the first time in my life, I learned how to heal and regrow.
I never thought about how to reach the other side. But dreams came gently. The trust I developed in other beings, and in everything around me, softened me, bringing me back to a place where we were all just children. What did we desire most? What fantasy stories did we dream of? What made us so naive, so imaginative? Where did that joy come from? Before I became the person I am today, what was waiting inside the bud of that flower? Why was I hurt and neglected so badly?
After countless terrifying dreams, one night I fell into a dream unlike the others. I witnessed a group of people who loved one another deeply, faithfully making a pilgrimage across the desert. They endured immense hardship but worked together as one. They even survived a gunfight before eventually reaching the top of a waterfall nestled in the mountains, where they leapt together into the rushing water, embracing death.
As they jumped, I felt as though I was one of them—part of the group, and at the same time part of the immense force of the falling water. Everything ultimately became one, unfolding as a fantasy that was both terrifying and magnificent, passionate and unapologetically sincere. As an abused child, this was my fantasy. It belonged only to me—to my spirit, and to the place where my spirit meets the world. Was this dream a doorway into a deeper myth? At the time, I didn’t know the answer.
But all those terrifying moments, the abuse I endured as a child, the pain I have carried throughout my life, and the struggle of getting up and continuing to live—because of the faith I have in the world, I was able to carry them through. And I, too, leapt into the rushing water and became one with it.
Love, I realized, is also surrender. It is the willingness to yield to a force far greater than yourself, to remain vulnerable before the inevitable. At the end of the great chase, there was a loaded gun pointed at me. I raised both my hands and accepted it. I fell into the arms of the world with my blood spreading everywhere. I thought I could reach the answer and stand on top of the world, fighting against the abuse I had once suffered. But I lost. I was totally lost.
Then the world awaked, quietly reached into my body and pulled out the bullet then whispered the secret to me and carved the path I was meant to walk in this life.
“Do you still remember the two rocks you carried with you from Uluru? It’s time to return them.”
I opened my eyes and, without hesitation, walked back into the desert. While the world whispered the myth to me every time I fell into that tender space at bedtime, composing an oceanic symphony note by note, I sang it back:
“I will always be your child.”
6th July 7:19AM Taipei
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