[FICTION][12/24/25]The Terrible Floods in My Mongoose Hole
by Amelia Moriarty
Daily activities at the monastery continued until after dinner, with clean up, and even later on on weekends when members were invited to join, by volition, an evening meditation that could go until dusk. A few radicals might stay past sunset, but the rest of us made a point of staying a 30-minute minimum before leaving together as one wave signaled by the elder Gladys who had an exceptionally well-tuned internal clock.
I quickly learned to attune myself to Gladys’ direction. I would note her placement in the circle before I closed my eyes so that my ears could stay perked for the sound of her garment rustling as the cue for our dismissal. I’d keep my eyes squeezed shut, allowing barely a peep until the first rustle of fabric had swelled into the joyful chorus of robes standing by the dozen as all participants rose in unison from their cushions to line up around the cubbies, slip bare feet back into shoes, and leave at long last for bed.
Growing curious about this practice at which I failed so miserably, I’d begun leafing through the bookshelf downstairs—a library on mediation—and had become rather enamoured with the practice as a whole and the various guiding philosophies of its origin. Still, I could not bring myself to empty my mind.
I much preferred daydreaming. My thoughts would wander as they wished almost to a point of hypnagogia, the pre-sleep state of mental drift, when they began to take their own initiative, becoming dislodged from my wakeful reins.
I’d slip into debate with a snake butler, sparring me in riddles, so that I might be let out of my mongoose hole before the flood struck. In a moment I’d snap to attention, realizing real fear had slipped in as I forgot the rising water level and the rest of it was a construct of my own drowsy mind. So enthralled in the visualization of my mongoose self, I’d forgotten that I was really only a girl on a cushion who could just as easily have been soaring through rainbows on a pegasus if my imagination so desired.
Somehow, the demi-dream-thoughts that slipped out from the reigns of logic—daymares perhaps—never took the form of a pegasus mount lifting me over rainbows. They were always some absurd sort of puzzle, a completely ridiculous predicament involving nonsensical elements over which I always became invested to the point of frustrated tears or frantic fear. Perhaps it was that fear, the sense of high stakes, that made the illusions as believable as external reality and not self-induced frivolities.
Even in waking life, fear produced forces outside of our control, oppressing us, controlling us, demanding our attention to bring about resolution if we desired freedom from them. Though in reality, such forces might not be any more real than the snake butler. If I remained a mongoose, I might not really drown, but I would fight against the flood as if I was drowning. If I could find a way to startle myself awake, I might be able to evaporate the figments of fear I imagined. I might realize there was no flood at all, only a sense of doom manifesting as a symbolic bookmark.
In my waking dreams, I would never be able to produce a pegasus or a rainbow for it to fly over. Not by the force of my own will, not to an extent that I could believe as reality. For if I actively willed the pegasus and the rainbow, with intention, then I would be, in that moment, conscious of the fact of my own will, the part my mind played in constructing existence, and therefore aware of the illusion.
And so, by logic, my daymares would remain always daymares, their content the sort of nonsense completely irrelevant to my desire. In order to fall for the illusion, I must be rendered helpless to the gibberish of my unconscious, independent from any willing request.
In childhood, I’d read a book on how to lucid dream. I believed in it about as much as hypnotism, which is to say I remained an agnostic-leaning-hopeful.
Starting from the first page, I practiced the methods prescribed with diligence and regularity to no avail. Despite my hope, I’d never entirely succeeded in controlling my dreams. Perhaps because lucid dreaming is a skill to be inherited rather than learned. Or perhaps because the book was a farce.
What I remember from the book takes advantage of this idea that dreams emerge from the gibberish of our unconscious. Techniques to control dreams begin by attempting to override the snag of the conscious will having no role in the selection of that gibberish.
In attempts to override the snag, the book develops a clever trick. The technique attempts to bias the unconscious towards certain imagery over other latent gibberish by dedicating the period before sleep to concentrated visualisation of the desired dream. For example, one might spend the 20 minutes before sleep laying out, in microscopic detail, a hugging session with her crush from science class. The efficacy of the method lies in the attention to detail, and the intensity of concentration. The technique employs the authority of the conscious mind to proactively saturate the favored content with vibrancy ripe for pulling as visual reference with the objective to override the unconscious mind’s selection process.
The method, ironically, holds parallels to the books on witchcraft in my mother’s Wicca-curious library, which I had been reading around the same period. Witchcraft, like any other religion or spiritual practice, recognizes the power of the universe. Unlike many other forms of faith, however, witchcraft teaches the control of this energy for the personal benefit of the practitioner, rather than teaching acceptance to the natural flow and the acquiescence of the universal energy to the universe. Insert here: alignment with, and submission to, God’s providence within Abrahamic traditions. Petitionary prayer exists—believers asking God to change things—but their ultimate posture leans toward trusting and accepting God’s governance of events.
In such a way, the monastery had convinced me of the evils of witchcraft. The power of the universe wasn’t meant to be controlled, bent like a tool towards private ends. Any such attempt could come at the cost of the individual’s spirit, a hollowing out of one’s alignment with the divine. The universal energy was meant to be channeled, released, and shown its due respect through piety and obedience. In Buddhism, this means submitting to the impartial law of karma. In Taoism, dissolving one’s will into the current of the Tao through wu wei—effortless action. The message is consistent: real spiritual pleasure lay not in the grasping of power, but in letting go of it, in relinquishing control.
Beyond the library, living wisdom abounded. The monastery hosted a rotating residency of Buddhist monks who, like us volunteers, arrived from all corners of the world. I attended, in full, each lecture, and the occasional workshop, of those masters passing through. There was the Zen Buddhist sister from Plum Village teaching mindful tea drinking, the brother in the Mahayana tradition from Nalanda monastery lecturing on the ritual of puja in Tibetan Buddhism, or, one of my favorites, the brother from the Dechen Chöling residential retreat who took us to the fields for a lesson in a form of archery called Kyūdō. But all teachings drew back to the core path of obedience, alignment, and surrender.
In the end, perhaps it was for my own good that the methods of the lucid dreaming book failed. This meant that I did not sin against my soul by practicing black sleep magic, accrue bad karma, or otherwise risk divine misalignment.
Rather than learning to assert my conscious will over the dream universe, it was better I accepted the gibberish of my unconscious mind as it arose autonomously to weave the sleeping reality.
The defining trait of a lucid dreamer is her awareness of the dreaming state as separate from waking reality. She may be able to control the fabric of her dreams, to fly, to transform into any creature, to plant thoughts into the minds of others, to alter the environment, to stop time, to do anything she wishes. But she cannot fully appreciate a drop of this magnificence because she is aware of the illusion. Once this illusion was broken, she could not return to the same sweet innocence of belief as the pure dreamer, totally-immersed in the fabric of the dream beyond distinction from reality.
As a flunked lucid-pupil-turned-baby-zen-disciple, I could finally recognize with deep gratitude the freedom awarded by my inability to overpower the gibberish. The ignorance preserved my oneiric illusions. Blissfully unaware, the dream remained my concrete reality. I could accept the miseries, the atrocities, the snake butler and the terrible floods in my mongoose hole, all of it, if only to keep on believing in the marvelous illusion.
Perhaps this was the core failure in my meditation practice. I didn’t want to clear my mind, let go of my thoughts. I would never reach nirvana, let go of all earthly desire. Even understanding that these desires brought suffering, still I could not let go. I would cling all the harder, refusing to part ways with the pretty illusion. I did not want freedom. I wanted to remain ignorant, in beautiful delusion. No matter how much I admired the teachings that all earthly existence was but insubstantial appearance, a butterfly’s dream, I refused to wake up.
Moreover, the gibberish did not only manifest as nightmare fuel. I did not always wake in a sweat after drowning as a trapped mongoose. The desires chaining me to this reality did not cause only pain and suffering, but occasionally the most unreal bliss. I could withstand those terrors, gripping at sliver of hope that one night my unconscious mind might materialize for me a pegasus to mount and a rainbow over which to fly. I would remain patiently waiting for my mythical beast to land, fluttering and mane-tossing, before me even if it meant suffering a thousand snake butlers.
If a lucid dreamer grew intolerant of the snake butler, she could wave her hand and turn the hissing servant into a white rabbit, her mongoose hole into the gateway to Wonderland, and herself into Alice. A wonderful dream, but the white rabbit wouldn't really be a white rabbit, merely a creation of her own mind, a part of herself. As she chased the white rabbit down the hole, she wouldn't be chasing the white rabbit at all. Just herself. If she wished to chat with the Mad Hatter, to ask for a riddle to solve, it would be her own mind providing the riddle. Herself riddling herself. In the same way, when we reach nirvana and realize the self and the universe are one, all else dissolves, at last unbounded.
The resident monks would say that it is not so much the universe that merges with the self, but the illusion of separation that falls away. Realizing that all things are interdependent, without fixed essence, the boundary between “I” and “world” dissolves like a dream upon waking.
Even if it meant freedom from nonsensical suffering, I could not allow myself to dissolve. I remained clinging to the illusion of solidity, compulsive, craving. I would remain powerless to the nightmare, allow it to charge me, startle me, scrape me, rattle me. For if I could see through the nightmare, turn it to a transparent ghost, my science class crush would arrive in my dream as much a figment as all else. His arms would be my arms, each of us the same unfixed energy, interdependent essence. To embrace the universe, realize my oneness with all things, I’d be just as lonely as before.
I’d rather be held by my dream boy and believe in his illusory arms as reality.
If I took the reins back from the daymares, I’d be left alone hugging myself. He would be just as real as all the fears I’d made disappear. That is to say, not at all. The heft to reality slept cradled in total powerlessness.
AMELIA MORIARTY writes from Paris, where she paints, dances, and models. This story is an excerpted chapter from her debut novel manuscript. Her writing has appeared in Page Gallery Journal, Maudlin House, Poetries in English, Taxi Society, and others, with work forthcoming in New Sinews and Free State Review. A finalist for the New Writers Flash Fiction Competition, she is currently pursuing a masters in comparative literature at the Sorbonne. You can find her on instagram @milalamori.