Into The Sublime

"Often the soul is conceived as a bird ready to take flight."-Frazer , The Perils of  the Soul page 218

I should not like to say that sublime experiences are rare, for I know that both myself and a small circle of friends experience the sublime many times a week, sometimes every day of the week. It is an experience that invites awe and disgust, wondrous joy and petrifying fear;  there are stunning landscapes with characters right out of the storybooks and buildings the imagination can only play at. The experience I speak of not only encompasses myth, but has surely aided in the creation of a great many myths. Yes indeed, the experience I speak of is that brief and terrible moment between sleep and awakening, that sublime moment where dreams just might be a reality.

No one is bereft of this sublime experience, every soul under the sun has had some memorable nightmare or dream. Hasn't everyone woke in a cold sweat thinking  that monster lying in wait under their bed was very much real? Hasn't everyone touched the mysterious and the vexing while in sleep, only to stir into wakefulness to find that the "real world" has no patience for their wonderlands? Most people I know have experienced such, and most will agree that the moment between dream and reality is indeed as frightening as it is supreme. 

What I find to be the most sublime part of that half minuet in bed is the possibility of the impossible. For just that awful, intoxicating moment, myth has free range. I can clearly see Europa being carried off by Jove into the waves, I can hear her soft pleas and reach out to drag her bag with my own hand, I can feel fear and concern for the poor girl as she disappears off to the horizon, and for the moment, it is all real. The demons and evils that plague my nightmares reside alongside the Gods and virtues that languidly roam my dreamscapes. And for that 30 second interval between dream and reality, the world becomes a richer place. 

"The soul of a sleeper is supposed to wander away from his body and actually visit the places, to see the persons, and to perform the acts of which he dreams."-Frazer, page 218. If what Frazer states above is true to any extent, then we need not concern ourselves with sorrow over the reduction of the mythic, for the mythic lives within us, emerging into the "real world" in that ever-so sublime moment when we come to wake to the day.   

Can there possibly be a more sublime experience then being caught between myth and reality? Where the "glitches in the matrix" need not be seen out of the corner of your eye,and where mythic clues are mythic tomes.