go smell the coffee

Back some time ago I had a journey/dreaming experience with a dear friend of mine. She led me through a process of going "inside" my imagination and just allowing the imagery to come up. I was asked to describe and express what I was seeing to her verbally.

This form of lucid dreaming is a type of meditative process that helps you to explore the layers of your subconscious and is probably just a little bit "out there" for most people.

It was a fun experience for me though and I enjoyed my journey "dream" very much.

One of the 'animals' that came into my mind was a wonderful badger. He was taciturn, a little curt, stubborn but wise, and very cute! He even wore a little jacket such as the characters in a Beatrix Potter storybook picture might wear.

He was also a coffee addict (I did mention this is like dreaming didn't I?) and drank powerfully strong black coffee - with three sugars - in a bowl as his snout made drinking from a cup a bit awkward. I can remember laughing at him over this, it did seem a little surreal to see a badger in a jacket sitting at a table inside a hollow tree drinking overly sweet black coffee after all.

I "saw" him slurp up the strong brew with relish. He looked at me over the rim of his bowl and told me I was to "Go smell the coffee mi". It was not a "get lost" kind of statement, it was in fact a command of some kind to actually go smell coffee!

I have no idea what it means.

To this day I have not yet smelled the particular sense of actual real coffee he was referring to (or I believe he was referring to). Oh! I have smelled ordinary coffee more or less but I haven't yet smelled that distinctive, strong, pure essence of whole coffee beans that pleases and assaults the nose with such intensity and insistence. I haven't actually smelled that smell in a very long time but I can recall it vaguely like its a faded photograph of the olfactory album of scents I have experienced.

Bat and I tried going to a couple of coffee shops one day but none of them were even close to the scent I "knew" I was supposed to smell. I still haven't smelled it.

I'm not exactly sure what will happen if I do smell that smell. Will the sun burst forth with a loud trumpeting sound and declare the Heavens are about to welcome me home?

Or is it that some subtle shift in The Matrix will change my life forever?

I've not drunk coffee myself since I was approximately 15 years old. Coffee flavors and coffee itself, as a beverage, leaves me entirely cold. I'm a tea drinker if you please. Pure tea or herbal at that with no milk or sugar or even a dash of lemon (although that is tolerable of course).

Coffee is this huge world business that I am sure, is the equivalent to the diamond trade! Good coffee is in enormous demand around the western world and now consumers are also demanding that that same "good" coffee come from ethical, ecologically sound and morally organised business enterprises. Well....we live in hope that consumers are demanding this anyway!

So... I was thinking about Badger today and am still perplexed as to why I am to "Go smell the coffee". I've not really tried that hard to find that particular smell (and I believe I will know it when I do smell it), but I wonder, if its not some harbinger inside my subconscious mind of something else too.

There were other things I was asked to do by this strange character inside my personal Dreaming too. He was insistent on a couple of other things...to do with understanding "The seasons" (oh...now THERE is a metaphysical circus if ever there was one :))... and something about me becoming "free" to express myself exactly how I pleased.

The subconscious mind is a powerful thing and also extremely mysterious. I love that about the human condition, that no matter how well we think we know ourselves - there are always layers and layers of other stuff lurking below the surface of ourselves, to discover and learn.

So anyway, that coffee thing has me completely stumped to this day. I will keep you posted if I actually ever do get around to smelling it. :)