Introduction: A Novel of Metaphysical Suspense

For more info about purchasing this book, contact dr Steve. Queries from agents and publishers are welcome.

The Dream Group - Episode One - Gateways

Author's Forward

In America, as the Millenium dawns, how-to books and support goups are a way of life. In Miami, Florida, one such group meets weekly at the University to study their dreams. The metaphysical tale you are about to read, full of lucid dreaming and sacred sex, the marriage of spirit and flesh, is about them. It’s my story, too, for I’m a member of the group.

They asked me to tell it because I'm a writer.
Our Dream Group is part of a heritage that includes Christian Gnosticism, Hindu Tantra, the Sufis of Islam and the Kabbalah of Judaism. These traditions have empowered humankind for thousands of years by making it possible to experience dreams and sex as sacred parts of a sacred universe.

As you read this account of the Dream Group’s adventures, perhaps you too, will reconnect with these ancient truths, catch a glimpse of your divinity and the sacredness of your sexuality .

I began by interviewing each of the twelve Group members. When the first draft was done, we used three weekly meetings for review. Everyone thought I’d prettied it up too much. They wanted the kinky dreams and supernatural events described just as they'd happened. I hesitated because the draft already stretched the limits of mainstream fiction. Finally, I did as they asked.

What follows is the version approved by the Group. It begins with Paul Holcomb and is told mostly from his perspective. It is a tale of dreams come true, fear, hope, lust, love and salvation -- a story about life. It happened and is still happening. Just as life never ends though we seem to die, so this story continues though the book ends. Be happy for the people you meet here. They live on.


The Dream Group, a novel of metaphysical suspense, Chapter One

"We are guided, guarded and protected. One Spirit animates everything. Never alone nor separate, no matter how it seems, we are always being led toward love and wholeness."

Josh Wilbeth, Ph.D., Rhodes Scholar
Director, Dream Group,
Miami International University


Paul Holcomb had a desire to worship, the way they did in those old Hollywood biblical epics. His eyes drifted up and away from the thick reference book. To bow down, naked before, his hands tightened on the book, a gorgeous woman. His face flamed crimson at the admission. Enough.

To WORSHIP, to connect sensually, with an other, greater reality; to lose this hollow existence, submerge his consciousness and fill the aching emptiness. Oh, yes! He yearned for it even as he fought thinking about it; to abandon rationality and writhe in ecstasy.

He shivered and squirmed on the hard chair; touched his burning face.

Grovel! Abase yourself before Me. Praise and extol. The imagined commands echoed in his head.

His penis stirred. Paul cleared his throat loudly, smoothed back his blonde hair. Quivering, he coughed, leaned way back in his chair, gripping the desk for balance and stuck his head out of the cubical. The long aisle was empty. At the end, near the librarian’s desk, someone walked toward the exit.

What would it be like to worship that way, wanton and unafraid; completely lost to it? Bowing low, adoring the elegant symmetry of toes and arches?

Smell!

He looked down the dim aisle in the other direction. To sniff, then inhale; yearning beyond all caring only to smell and lick and kisssss?

He swallowed, tilted back into the cubical. The lump in his throat didn’t budge.How would it feel, afterwards? Sated? Guilty? Washed clean; boundaries dissolved, consciousness finally fit to mingle with Hers?

He swallowed again.

One thing was sure, mother would not approve, though it was she who’d inadvertently instilled the desire. Neither would his friends. But Antoinette. A smile curled Paul’s full lips. Yes, his sexy older sister would approve. But she was ancient history. Their last scene had been eight years ago. Now, when he thought of what they’d done, which wasn’t as often as it used to be, he was able to focus on other things. His new girl friend Magdalena Renaldo would approve and perhaps even his thesis advisor professor Joshua Wilbeth, might as well.

But Magdalena. Ah. Paul felt himself stiffening.

Just a few weeks before the Fall Orientation, he'd been preparing a group of juniors for their first class in Dr. Wilbeth's abnormal psyche lab and Magdalena was there, a new student just transferred in from Miami-Dade College. His radar must have been defective that day or simply overwhelmed -- there'd been so many beautiful women around -- because Magdalena had seen him, but he hadn't seen her.
As she told him weeks later, in bed, while they lolled in a dreamy post-coital haze, she'd seen him assisting the other students and was attracted by his courteous manner and blonde all-Americaness.

“But, as I got to know you, Amor,” Magdalena said, “I realized what really attracted me was your vulnerability and respectful gentleness towards women. And I have not been disappointed!” Magdalena’s brown eyes pierced his. He tingled as she reached up to stroke his cheek.

“Your responsiveness , your. . . .” She searched for the precise word; smiled proudly when she found it. “Chivalrous attention to my most personal needs, is amazing.”

She leaned closer. The calico sheet dropped away revealing a softly gleaming breast, its reddish-brown nipple erect. “And the sex. . . ." Magdalena caressed his naked thigh with the tips of blood-red finger nails. His entire body shuddered. ". . . is fantastico!"

Perhaps too fantastico, Paul thought, trying to return his attention to the book in front of him. Straight at first, it became kinkier as they revealed their most secret desires. Fantasies became ever more erotic, Magdalena more demanding, and now, even the occasional role-plays were not enough.

He recalled his first conscious contact with her at the Fall Orientation, on the warm September evening Magdalena and eighteen other new people crammed themselves into the Psychology Department's conference room for the Dream Group's Annual Fall Orientation. Magdalena and the others asked intense fearful questions which Dr. Wilbeth passed to Paul and the other "old timers" like Veronica Clarke, who'd co-founded the Group with him ten years earlier.

Paul had been out of it, worrying about his Masters Thesis as he waited for the meeting to begin. But his long thin face brightened and his blue eyes lost their hazy inward focus, when the husky accented sound of Magdalena's voice saying his name called him back into the room. Looking toward the sexy sound, he found the young woman's eyes staring archly into his own, demanding attention.
Who was this person? She seemed the very embodiment of that sensual sound. How come she knows me and I don't know her? Had "Paul" ever sounded like that, or meant as much before?

As he answered her question, she devoured him with her eyes. He'd never felt anything quite like it. Her smoky gaze resting first on his mouth, then on his broad shoulders, now penetrating deeply into his blue eyes. The sensation was somehow more potent than physical contact. She didn't seem to be listening to what he said, either. She just engulfed him with the intense smoldering consciousness pouring out of her eyes. She seemed to be there for him alone, not the Group.
But he was there for the Group. It was a big part of his life.

Paul had no sooner answered Magdalena’s question, then Dr. Wilbeth directed someone else's to him. Paul knew Josh used his old timers that way to show the newbies they could participate, too. Josh wanted the annual Fall Orientations to be just like the regular weekly meetings, informal and friendly. No application forms, no selection criteria; just enthusiastic people sharing and making progress.

The crowd settled down.

“Two fundamentals are behind everything in dream work.” Josh’s gruff voice was deliberately soft. The crowd got quieter and leaned forward to hear.
“First, dreams are always therapeutic, no matter how frightening. They’re always trying to heal and make whole -- to achieve physical and spiritual unity.
“Second, we are healthiest when head and heart cooperate, neither trying to dominate the other.” He smiled, his bushy grey mustache crinkling. Paul, sitting to his left, felt a deep warmth, a kind of grace, in the smile and sighed his comfort. “This Group, is about learning to use the energy in dreams to build that cooperation. We’re the thinking man’s, hmm,” he paused. “Excuse me, not politically correct, the thinking person’s alternative to this culture’s fear of intimacy."

Josh caught Veronica Clarke’s eye and gestured for her to continue.
Her voice was low and warm.
"As you listen to the dreams others share, reflect on your own. There’s a pattern.” She leaned forward. “When head and heart are forced apart.” She interlocked her hands then pulled them apart. “When love and sex are disowned, repressed and denied -- dis-ease follows.” Veronica let her hands fall into her lap. Paul thought she was the greatest. If she weren’t twice his age; but no, she and Josh were the perfect couple. “Love and sex become what Carl Jung - we talk a lot about him here, he was a great psychologist - called the 'shadow.' Shadow energy haunts the rest of the personality until it is embraced and reintegrated."
Veronica pointed to Paul. His turn to lead.

"For veteran Group members,” he said, “and 'veteran' means anyone who's come for three weeks in a row. . . ."
Everyone laughed.
". . . the most challenging dreams show the unnecessary split between head and heart Veronica was talking about. Dreams express the 'heart's thoughts' in exaggerated dramatic ways to overcome the head's censorship. That's why dreams are so strange. Why we have to interpret them.”
He opened his arms wide to include everyone in the room.
"All of us get involved. A lot of really good interpretations begin with insights from the Group. We use professional sources, too, like Ann Faraday and the "topdogs" and "underdogs" of Frtiz Perls' Gestalt Psychology.”
People groaned.
“Easy! None of these is hard to understand. If you learned to use a computer, you can learn to use Perls' underdog/topdog metaphor. Personally, I think Perls is easier."
More laughter.
Paul gestured for Veronica to take over. She went to the blackboard and drew a heart and a brain.
"Dreams are the heart’s way of provoking the head, the waking mind,” she said and drew an arrow from the heart to the brain. “Pushing it to re-integrate the power and joy in the separated shadow. To ignore a dream means not only losing the psychic energy of the shadow; it means leaving that awesome power unchecked to express any way it can.” She paused to let that sink in.
“You’ve all felt it, haven’t you? An awful, out of control feeling?”
Veronica gazed around the room acknowledging the nods. What neat technique, Paul thought
“Nasty, right?” Veronica was saying. “Unconscious compulsions driving pushing. Yech! This Dream Group can help you with that. Just look at Paul.” She turned to face him and he began to shudder and his tongue lolled out. “See how well it works?” A few of the newbies guffawed. “But seriously,” she said, “the separated shadow idea is so well accepted now, that quite a few religious scholars think it accounts for the things we associate with the Devil; including the man himself.”

Veronica walked to her seat. A few people applauded. She bowed. Josh stood and cleared his throat.

“I’m going to tell you about one of the first cases I ever had,” he said. “It’ll pull together what Veronica and Paul have been telling you.

“I was interning at Harvard. The client was a woman who'd dreamt she'd killed her entire family. She was forty-one, but looked sixty-one. You could tell she'd been beautiful, once. Good bone structure, attractive eyes. . . ."
He quickly glanced at Veronica then turned away.
". . . But now, her face was ashen and her eyes sunk-in, with big, black circles under them. Her once athletic body was bloated and sagged in on itself. She was barely able to sit upright in the chair next to my desk. Her regular physician sent her to me because the recurring dream had kept her from sleeping through the night for three months. And she was afraid of even going to sleep because each time she did, she entered the dream and re-enacted the grizzly murders.
"The first three sessions were difficult. But on the fourth, she finally told me how she killed them. With a long, sharp kitchen knife, stabbing each of them over and over, exulting. I saw it on her face and couldn’t believe it. Her husband first in the bed they shared, then her two daughters, ten and twelve, while they slept in their beds.
“She went through this horror -- awakening, going down to the kitchen, selecting the knife, testing the blade on her index finger, going buck upstairs, four, sometimes, five times a night. Remembering was bad enough, but the horror she felt, in the dream, as her exultation drained away and she walked from room to room gazing at the mutilated bodies through their blood as it congealed on her eye lashes and face, was what drove her to seek help.”
Josh paused, stood up and began pacing in a tight circle. He stopped, jammed his hands into his pockets and spoke, voice softer than before. Though he’d heard all this before Paul still felt his muscles tense.
"I'd just finished Fritz Perls' on Gestalt Therapy and was using his 'topdog/underdog' metaphor to interpret my own dreams. I immediately saw a parallel. Progress was rapid once she understood Perls' idea that the things we take to be sacred and decreed by God, aren't laws embedded in our brains and bones, but merely rules laid out by authorities such as parents, teachers and religious leaders.
"In two more sessions, she realized her horrible dream arose from a conflict between her inner authorities, Perls’ topdog, and her desire for appreciation, love and sex, Perls’ underdog.
“She came to understand that the greatest conflicts, awake or asleep, come when the culturally instilled topdog turns our basic human needs into ‘underdogs.’ According to Perls, topdogs are constantly and fruitlessly trying to impose their will on the rest of the personality, which, for a time, then acts like an underdog, sneaking around, being passive-aggressive, trying to keep topdog's approval and still get its own way.
"My client resented being treated like a maid by her husband and two daughters, and wanted to get her own legitimate needs for appreciation and affection met. But her topdog repressed her desire, saying that 'good' mothers were selfless and sacrificed their own needs to those of the family.
"At first, like most of us, the woman did topdog’s bidding. She rationalized and repressed, forcing her own legitimate needs to behave like underdogs. Alone late at night or in stolen moments, she allowed them to come out and be petted, but only after she’d taken care of everyone else.
"After years and years of this, her underdog was fed up. At last her time had come. She was going to get her way no matter what the topdog had to say. So, one dark and stormy night, her underdog performed the grizzly murders to free itself from what blocked it. She ended the repression, got even with the topdog and taught everyone a lesson they would never forget."
People shuddered and leaned towards Josh, anticipating his words. And he loved it. His gestures grew broader, voice more meliforous and his eyes shone.
"Thank goodness her disowned shadow energy wasn’t intense enough to make her actually kill them. But it was strong enough to make her hurt them in small mean ways, such as getting sick just before the annual vacation or 'accidentally' ruining a party at the home of her husband's boss. Eventually, she might have developed a serious disabling disease, unconsciously of course, all designed to force her family to provide the attention she craved and deserved.
"Horrible as all this was, the woman finally came to see her dream as a blessing, and as a warning she’d had the sense to heed. Now she sends me a birthday card every year.”
People smiled. Josh opened his arms to include every one of his rapt listeners.
“Dream work helps us learn not to be frightened by the vividness and passion. Dreams always express that way. For two reasons. First, as in the case I just told you, only extreme expression could get past the inner censor into consciousness. And second, the natural forces of wholeness, health and sanity deep inside are always working to resolve such conflicts.”
Josh paused and looked slowly around the room, making eye contact with each person.
“The purpose of this Group is to free those forces of wholeness; to allow them to work. My client’s dream, and who knows how many of yours, was an opportunity for her waking consciousness to heal the split between head and heart. Her heart/underdog's needs for love and appreciation and the head/topdog's need for to be a 'good' and ‘do the right thing’ had be connected. She couldn’t go on with the topdog condemning her heart's desires, preaching that good mothers shouldn't feel unappreciated and overworked.”
Josh looked at the drained expressions, then smiled.
"Relax!” he said. “Believe it or not, frightening dreams are the exception. The great mistake in dream work is to believe that only the horrible, unpleasant dreams are valuable. The truth is dreams are much more powerful as what Ann Faraday called 'revealers' of hidden talents, buried beauty and unsuspected creative energy.
"Dreams urge us to recognize that we’re actually a lot nicer and a lot more talented than we think we are. In dreams, the real hopes and possibilities of the dreamer, not idle wishes alone, are given body and force to move the dreamer to creative action."
Applause rippled through the crowd. Josh smiled and bowed. And Paul was again struck by the power and rightness of his mentor’s vision. Feeling inspired and guilty, he berated himself for not applying that wisdom to his own life and dreams.
“Right-on,” his topdog mumbled. “Heal thyself.”
“Easy boy-o,” underdog soothed. “You always teach what you need to learn.”
Ugh! Back-to-back cliches.
Paul stood, hugged Veronica, then searched the thinning crowd for Magdalena Renaldo. Instead his eyes came to rest on Angela Saunders.
The statuesque black lady stood regally, hands on hips, surveying the room. Paul’s breath caught in his chest. She was magnificent: high cheekbones, full lips, large breasts and gently curving buttocks. He felt a part of himself open before her royal pose and fleshy power. His penis moved.

Newnan’s massive Psychological Archtypes After Jung, all 2,050 pages of it, lay open before him on the table of his learning carol, his red pen resting in the spine between the pages. Paul rubbed his eyes. Angela knows about worship, too; about being worshipped. He starred at the stacks in front of him, but saw Angela instead. A goddess if there ever was one.