THREE ARABS IN A PONTIAC

This year is 30 years since the incident described below happened. This post is in honor of everyone who has a genuine spiritual experience, like a question in a dream actually going into you.  If something like this has never happened to you? Keep hitchhiking! -- Jean

WHO AM I?

  In 1988 I moved my family from Dallas, Texas to Sussex, England so my wife and I could shift gears in our careers and also to help my 3 children become “citizens of the world” in addition to being Texans by birth. My wife studied artistic therapy based on Rudolf Steiner’s color and therapeutic insights while I studied Rudolf Steiner’s Social Development insights and human phase development theory (Biography).

     During this year I studied with 30 other individuals from around the world: Germans, Dutch, Icelanders, Norwegians, Fins, Canadian, Spanish, Brits, Danes, Israeli, Serbs.

     The curricula was lecture and small-group intensives, art and social artistic exercises. For one year of powerful exploration of who I was. The second year I interned with staff, helped write a Total Quality Management (TQM) and worked as an Organizational Development consultant with non-profits and UK Governmental agencies. Third years was much of the same.

     In the middle of the first year, when I had turned my life upside down, and my diet radically changed (no Tex-Mex), and I was deep in self exploration, I had a remarkable dream – which is not an uncommon experience when you are on a path of total transformation. Here is my dream about Three Arabs In A Pontiac.

WHY AM I HERE?

     I am hitchhiking on a deserted roadway. There are no remarkable features besides flat. It could have been west Texas, I don’t know. I am by myself walking and thumbing.

     A gold 1974 Pontiac begins approaching. I know it is a 1974 Pontiac because it is exactly like the car I bought from my wife’s very elderly grandfather so that the family could get Mr. Fisher to stop driving. The one I had was a “lemon” but this one appeared to be radiant. The gold shimmered in the heat off the roadway.

     I have my thumb out and they stop. It’s a 2-door. I can see there are three people in the car – the driver and two passengers in the back. I bend and ask for a ride. The driver nods affirmatively. I open the door and get in. I smile at the passengers – but I never get a good look at the passenger directly behind my seat.

     We start down the road. I angle myself on the seat to see the driver and the passenger in the back, the one I can see. They are all in white robes and white keffiyehs or gutras tied with black camel hair cords. They all wear dark sunglasses so I  cannot see their eyes. The driver is a short and stocky man who resembles the Hollywood actor, Eli Wallach.

     I tell my story. From the U.S., moved my family, studying at the Centre for Social Development at Emerson College...

     I’m nervous about the guy behind me. I never see him.

     Finally the driver looks at me intently and says, “What in the HELL are you doing?!”

WHAT DO I WANT?

   Here it was, the ultimate question for us all. At that moment, his question goes INTO me. I see him speak it, it comes out of his mouth and I watch it enter into my chest. As I am lying in my bed asleep, I actually FEEL the question enter my chest. I wake up. And, I feel the question inside me. I’m horrified. It is moving. It is as if my nice, neat, well ordered thoughts and feelings were carefully placed within me to support my being confident enough to move my entire family thousands of miles across the world to pursue MY dreams of self-transformation, of studying of new ideas, lofty ideals, virtues, capacities to work with social and organizational psychology.

     For the next two weeks, the Arab’s question pushed hard on my neatly ordered inner thoughts and feelings and decisions and made sure they all became disordered.  My initial horror transformed into “dis-ease” but not illness. I physically could feel that question living within me – actually living. What the hell WAS I doing? The dream speeded up the process of change as a challenge frequently does. The question questioned everything, right down to my inner self.

     Clearly the symbolism of the dream is something that I have “gnawed on” (a phrase I have stolen from Nancy T.) over the years. But, I won’t even think about it as I don’t want to change it. It dream came and changed me. Who WERE these guys in the Pontiac? Were they Angelic agents? And, who was the one I never could see? Is he the future?
     It would have been wonderful if there was an answer for the question, but there really isn't. What the HELL AM I doing? Still. It’s still an active question. Not dead yet.
     And, as for the guy behind me, who I never see? Well, I think this a mystery, but one which brings the question into a quite different spiritual dimension.

© Copyright 2015, Jean W. Yeager

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