The monk who broke things

In a dream this morning a bunch of people came into my apartment uninvited. All but one of them were maintenance people, and they immediately started renovating my apartment. I argued with them that a little notice would have been nice.

While that was going on, I saw that the other person was a Tibetan monk. While the maintenance people started drilling and cutting in various locations, the monk walked around the apartment breaking all of my things. He’d pick up a glass and let it drop to the floor and break, or work harder to break other things, slamming them to the ground. I ran over to him and asked, “Why are you breaking all of my things?”

He didn’t reply, but broke some DVDs in his hands. For some reason this made me more lucid in the dream, so I stepped on some of the DVDs he had dropped to the floor so I could crunch them more. “I get it,” I said, “it’s the whole ‘impermanence’ thing, right?” Then I thought of something and said, “Stay right here for a moment. Break something if you need to, but I’ll be right back.”

Then I went over to my DVD collection and grabbed my Dalai Lama video collection. I went back to the monk, handed him the DVDs, and said, “Here, you can break these, too. Or watch them. I don’t care.”

Then I remembered that my tv had just started on fire when the maintenance people did something, but it didn’t matter, the monk took the DVDs and sat down silently.

(January 28, 2020)