Chevalia, The Way of the Horse, Book One, Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE

The Dream World and the Language Beyond

There is a language that does not belong to words.

We encounter it sometimes in the quietest moments of waking life, when the mind has become still enough to receive what cannot be spoken. We encounter it in nature, in the presence of animals, and in those inexplicable moments of knowing that arrive complete. And sometimes we encounter it in dreams, when the familiar world recedes and consciousness moves beyond the boundaries of our waking senses.

Every night, we surrender the visible world. The eyes close. The body becomes still. The room disappears from awareness. The identities we carried throughout the day loosen their hold, and yet experience continues. We enter landscapes that do not exist around the sleeping body. We meet beings who may be near us, far from us, or no longer physically present in our lives. We experience movement, emotion, recognition, fear, beauty, and love while the physical senses rest.

Something within us remains aware enough to experience another world.

The ancient sages of India contemplated this mystery thousands of years ago. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad describes the dreamer as taking the material of the waking world and creating from within:

“When a person falls asleep, he takes along the material of this world, himself tears it apart, himself builds it up, and dreams.”

— Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 4.3

There is something beautiful in this ancient recognition. When the outer world withdraws, consciousness does not simply become empty. Images arise. Landscapes appear. Encounters unfold. The dreamer becomes both participant and witness within a reality arising beyond the ordinary reach of the waking senses.

Centuries later, Carl Jung explored dreams as a language of symbols, recognizing that they often carry meanings the rational mind cannot immediately translate. Animals appear throughout this interior landscape, sometimes carrying instinctive and archetypal qualities that reach beneath our ordinary ways of thinking.

Yet what became most important to me was never simply what a particular symbol meant. I became interested in the place from which the dream arose and in the awareness that remained present within it.

Some dreams faded almost immediately upon waking. Others did not. There were dreams whose presence remained with me long after I opened my eyes. Something about them felt known. The details might belong to another landscape, yet the recognition they carried could be more enduring than the images themselves. Gradually, I became less interested in placing rigid boundaries around waking and dreaming and more interested in the consciousness moving through both.

The Taoist sage Zhuangzi expressed this mystery through the beautiful story of dreaming himself a butterfly. Within the dream, he was simply the butterfly, moving freely and without any awareness that he was Zhuangzi. When he awakened, certainty itself had been disturbed. Was he Zhuangzi who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or was he now a butterfly dreaming himself to be Zhuangzi?

The story has endured because it leaves the door open. Perhaps that is one of the gifts of the dream world. It loosens our certainty about the boundaries we have drawn around reality. It reminds us how completely we can inhabit an experience while it is occurring and how mysterious consciousness remains even to the one experiencing it.

There are also dreams in which awareness seems to awaken within the dream itself. The landscape remains and events continue, but the dreamer recognizes that dreaming is occurring. We call this lucid dreaming.

I have never found its greatest mystery in the possibility of controlling the dream. What moves me is something much simpler: awareness is there. The physical eyes are closed, yet there is seeing. The physical world has receded, yet there is experience. The body lies asleep, yet something within us witnesses.

The more I contemplated this, the more difficult it became for me to regard consciousness as belonging exclusively to the conditions of ordinary waking life.

I also learned that not every dream asks to be interpreted. Some are fragments of our days, our fears, our memories, or our unfinished thoughts. I do not believe every image is a message or that every encounter must be made mystical. There is wisdom in allowing an ordinary dream to remain ordinary.

But there are other experiences we recognize differently. Something within them carries its own presence. The knowing arrives before the explanation.

And sometimes love speaks through that language.

The beings we love become woven into us through ordinary life. With animals especially, so much of the relationship is created without words. We know the sound of their movement, the rhythm of their breathing, the expression in their eyes. We know how they occupy space beside us. We recognize their individual ways of approaching, withdrawing, resting, asking, watching, and simply being. Years of these quiet exchanges create a language of recognition between two beings.

When one of them leaves the physical body, that language does not simply vanish from the heart.

The absence of form is real. We miss what we could touch. We miss the eyes that looked back at us, the body that occupied a familiar place, the sounds and movements that belonged uniquely to that life. Grief reaches deeply into the physical world because someone who was physically present is no longer there.

And yet I have experienced moments when love seemed to find another language.

After the passing of one of my horses, there was a time when her absence was especially painful. I stood outside the stallion doors looking across the open sage field, a place filled with memory and with the ordinary life I knew so well. Everything around me continued, yet the one I longed to see was no longer there.

Through my tears, I called to her.

I did not call aloud. There were no words. It was the kind of call that comes from somewhere beneath language, from the place within us that reaches for someone we love when words have become useless.

I looked out across the sage.

And suddenly, a beautiful deer seemed simply to appear in the field.

She stood alone.

I looked at her, and our eyes locked.

There was something in the way she looked at me that I knew. She seemed to look at me as my horse had looked at me. I knew her, and somehow, she seemed to know me.

The recognition was immediate.

I was not searching the field for a sign. I did not reason my way toward an explanation or assemble details until they became something I wanted to believe. I looked into her eyes, and I knew.

It was her.

There had always been something about my horse that reminded me of a deer—a softness, a purity, a quiet alertness. Now that familiar presence seemed to be looking back at me through another form.

For those moments, the distance between us seemed to disappear. There was the sage field, the deer, my tears, and this extraordinary recognition passing silently between us.

My heart poured out to her.

She gently stepped toward me, stopped, and held my eyes—and my heart—within hers.

That simple step carried everything.

There was nothing dramatic in the movement itself. She simply stepped toward me. Yet within that small movement was a response to the call that had come from my heart.

I had called to her.

And there she was.

I could feel her.

I did not experience the moment as a memory of her. I experienced her as present. The recognition did not arrive through thought, and I did not need to persuade myself of it. It was the same kind of knowing I had experienced at other moments in my life when something was understood before the mind could find language for it.

Her physical form was no longer beside me, but what she was had not disappeared. The connection between us had not been severed. Only the way I could recognize her had changed.

I remained within that encounter without needing to understand how it was possible.

There are experiences we can diminish by rushing to explain them. The mind wants to take what is sacred and immediately ask how, why, whether, and by what mechanism. But there are moments when explanation is not what has been given to us. What has been given is presence, recognition, and love.

The deer did not need to prove anything to me. Neither did I need to turn the encounter into proof for anyone else. It belonged to the relationship between us and to the knowing that arose within it.

My grief did not disappear. I still missed the physical presence I had loved. I still longed for the form through which I had known her. But grief was no longer the only truth I could feel.

Love was there too.

And love was alive.

That encounter changed something in my understanding of what it means for someone to be gone. We naturally associate presence with form because form is the language our physical senses understand most easily. We know someone through a face, a body, a voice, a touch, a movement, the sound of footsteps or hooves approaching. When the form disappears, the senses tell us that the being is absent.

But the deepest bonds I have known were never created by appearance alone. They were created through recognition, presence, trust, familiarity, and something far more difficult to name. The body gave those relationships a beautiful physical expression, but I began to wonder whether the body had ever been their source.

This is where dreams, nature, presence, and love began to meet for me.

A dream can carry recognition without physical proximity. Nature can communicate without human words. A horse can know us without language. A moment of stillness can contain more understanding than an hour of explanation. And someone we love can sometimes become unmistakably present even when the form through which we knew them is gone.

I began to recognize a language beneath all of these things, a language that seemed older than words.

Perhaps this is why animals and nature have been such profound teachers in my life. They continually return me to forms of communion that do not depend upon explanation. A horse does not need language to know whether I am truly present. A tree does not ask me to define silence before I can enter it. The natural world continually invites me into a relationship with life that precedes interpretation.

Dreams can open that same doorway.

Sometimes those we love appear within them with such clarity that the encounter remains alive long after waking. Sometimes nothing is spoken because nothing needs to be. A glance, a touch, or simply the presence of another being can contain the entire communication.

At other times, recognition comes through the waking world, as it did for me in the sage field.

I no longer feel compelled to decide precisely where one world ends and another begins. Perhaps consciousness does not recognize these boundaries as rigidly as we do. Perhaps love does not either.

What I know is that the more deeply I have entered presence, the more permeable some of the boundaries I once considered absolute have become: waking and dreaming, visible and invisible, here and there, presence and absence, life and what we call death.

I do not say this because someone taught me what I should believe about these things. Life placed experiences before me that asked for a larger understanding.

The dream world was part of that opening. It showed me that when the physical senses become quiet, consciousness does not necessarily become silent. Another language may become perceptible, one spoken through image, recognition, resonance, presence, and love.

Perhaps we have never truly forgotten this language. Perhaps it remains beneath the noise of waking life, waiting for us to become quiet enough to recognize what some deeper part of us already knows.

This may be why certain dreams feel less like journeys into somewhere strange and more like returning to somewhere familiar.

The dream world does not give us all the answers. It opens the boundaries through which we have tried to contain the mystery.

Beyond those boundaries waits a question that eventually touches every living being: What happens when the body itself reaches its threshold?

For me, that question would no longer remain philosophical.

I would come to know the veil between worlds through love, loss, and direct experience.