I am at one of Cody's outdoor survival classes. Everyone is in hushed silence and awe, following him. It seems more like a meditation retreat than a survival course. He lays out a beautiful violet meditation cushion and sets up an alter. He holds up a brass elephant (perhaps Ganesh but not in any of his classic poses) and says "Today we will practice focusing on a sacred object". He has several clear quartz crystals also set in front of him. Throughout this dream I am never in front of him. I am always behind him or to his right, never his left. He is very indifferent to me and cool. While everyone is meditating with their eyes tightly closed, I get up and walk around. I lay a small grouping of beautiful leaves on the left side of his alter, in warm tones and oranges and yellows fading to greens, while he stoically meditates. I realize that I am supposed to be quietly sitting down but I am not, I wonder if he will notice. My movements are silent. A small boy gets up and walks to me. He is holding a piece of art he has made out of natural objects. It is a collage on a small, square, flat surface overlayed with flat pieces of bark and leaf. In the negative space he points out a rabbit. The pieces keep sliding and the boy has to periodically rearrange them to show the rabbit. I tell him it is beautiful and It is. The rabbit image is disappearing and revealing, almost too frightened to remain on the page. The imposed silence seems contrived and so I show the boy the real outside (though the meditation seems to be taking place in a contained outside) where we can make noise and breathe loud.
Next, I am sitting beside Cody to his right, my feet near his lap. He continues to ignore me while he gives advice to others. I don't seem overly perturbed, just noticing. Next, I am in my shelter which looks like a tiny house structure with wood walls and hundreds of large insects (centipedes and roaches and such) crawling into the wood walls. Cody is beside me on my left (his right). I tell him that I would rather sleep outside on the ground and under the stars than in this shelter with its many bugs. He is unimpressed by my distaste for so many insects and shelter. I step outside anyway. Someone asks me why I am even taking this workshop and I say "I have known Cody for a very long time, not that anyone would ever know it". All the participants continue busily working on their forced poetry and connectedness and I look up into the branches wide above and look out over the participants. I feel the emptiness and lifelessness of the search for life (or the preservation of life, aka survival) when life is all there is.
I wake up.
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