I'm taking two weeks to work through the Magician/Magus card in my in-depth tarot work, mostly because I didn't have the time last week to sit down and spend hours writing like I did for the week before when exploring the Fool. One of the reasons I didn't have time was because I have been struggling with writer's block for my next SageWoman column, which is due at the end of this week. Last night over dinner, I talked with Jeff about some ideas for where to go with it, since the original idea I had is clearly not working out no matter how much I try to push forward. That brought us back around to the idea of the animus again, since writing about that would be in keeping with the issue's theme in a kind of abstract/psychological way. And since I'm working with the Magician these two weeks, I might as well ride that energy. I had half a notion to set an intention for my dreams for last night, to try to get in touch with my animus again in that context, but I didn't. Apparently, though, a half-thought intention was enough.
After some random action-adventure dreams that involved flying cars and an evil villain dumping huge vats of first salsa and then sour cream into the local river...
I dreamt that I was a man (I looked somewhat like David Boreanaz, more from these days than from his moody/brooding/dreamy days on Buffy), and I was out with my wife in a kind of touristy downtown type of place poking around in shops before going to dinner. I glanced across the street to see myself in drag — dressed as a woman, wearing a skirt and a wig, though in a way that was much more akin to Monty Python than RuPaul — and I was confused about what "I" was doing over there. I had the impression that this version of me had been off doing things without my knowing about it, and it became really important to me to track her down and see what was going on.
I must have woken up briefly at that point and fallen back asleep again, because then the dream switched over and I was once again female, my usual real-life self, but this time back in high school. The girl who was my best friend in the dream was egging me on to find this alternate-me, but we had the sense that we couldn't get out of school to play hooky without somebody noticing we were gone. So she devised a plan that involved us agreeing to be tour guides for new students, and we had a pass to get out of class in order to attend the introductory meeting. After that, we found some excuse to get outside and walk the grounds, including the woods that were out behind the school. From there, we were able to slip away and catch a plane to fly across the country. We arrived in a place that seemed to be some kind of national park, that was in some ways very much like some of the parks in Utah and New Mexico, all rocky desert landscapes, but also had places that were more like Acadia, with rocky shorelines and rivers running out into the ocean among mist and tall fir trees. We spent some time walking around these amazing places, joining up with various tour groups who were exploring the different overlooks. We had the impression that, because we couldn't find the alternate-me among the tour groups, we must have missed him. For some reason, we had the impression he was also looking for me, though again, I had the sense that this task was less important to him than it was to me, something that he was fitting in among his other obligations. We thought that he must have been flying across the country in the other direction at the same time we were, and so we'd crossed in mid-air. Somebody from the tour group asked me if I was meeting someone, and I told them this (making a hand gesture to show what I meant), but when I looked up at the person asking, it was him. He looked somewhat Arabic/Middle Eastern this time, with a long thin nose, very dark eyes and shoulder-length hair. He had a somewhat thick accent (though the accent itself didn't sound Middle Eastern). But it was definitely him, and there was a recognition between us. After that point, the dream basically involved wandering through the park with the tour group, listening to a ranger as she talked about the history of the place, while trying to stay near (but not too near) him. At one point, there was a visitor's center type of place where they were playing a short film, and while we sat watching that, he reached over briefly and held my hand.
The gender reversals in this dream are really interesting, though I'm not sure I have any interpretation for them beyond the pretty straightforward stuff about gender fluidity and the animus/anima as being the inner man/woman within each person. I think it's interesting that I start out the dream as a David Boreanaz-like figure, who (especially as his character in Bones) strikes me a bit as a kind of meathead/muscle-man type (more so than the tortured-romantic nature of Angel in Buffy)... but the eventual encounter with the animus himself has him as much more of a mysterious/mystical kind of person, even down to the dark eyes and the hard-to-place accent.
Whether or not any of this will actually help me write my column remains to be seen.
Showing posts with label dreams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dreams. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Monday, January 21, 2013
Dreams of the Angel at the Gate
He's been seeping into my dreams again over the last couple weeks or so, appearing occasionally in the background, not directly involved in the action. Last night, however, the dream was vivid and our interactions were direct.
The most vivid part of my memory of the dream begins when I am flipping through photographs of landscapes on my iPad — gorgeous pictures that I've taken (in dream, not in real life) of mountains, rolling hills, misty forests, etc. — and, when I come across one I want to share with everyone else, I "flick it" up from the iPad onto a large projector screen (using some sort of bluetooth connection and an app that recognizes the gesture — someone should actually invent this because it was awesome)... At which point, the photo would appear not simply as large as life, but also in 3-D, as if the projector screen were actually a window we were looking through to see into the landscape beyond. I don't remember if the photos were actually video clips that moved — since they were mostly landscapes, there wouldn't have been much movement, but a sense of the swaying of trees or the gentle movement of mist or flowing water or birds taking flight now and then, maybe...
He was standing right beside me. As usual, there was an intense longing to be near him, to have his attention on me, and yet also a sense that this was taboo or forbidden in some way.
Back when I was Christian, I thought of him as the "angel at the gate" — the one who stands with a fiery sword guarding the gates of Eden. (Although technically I think Genesis says God stationed several angels, specifically cherubim, to guard the gate, I've always thought of this angel as Archangel Michael, probably because he, too, is depicted as having a fiery sword.) Years ago when I was little, he was the one who appeared to me in the forest and then dissolved into sunlight — though the feeling then was all affection, as if for an older brother, rather than this kind of attraction/eros. Still, even the eros in recent years has been of an almost innocent, adolescent kind — more ecstatic longing than sexual desire, if that makes any sense. Being near him feels thrilling, almost electric, but it's all in the heart and soul, rather than the body (or rather, it's throughout the body, a bone-deep magnetism rather than a sexual pull). I don't know who this figure is — I find it problematic to continue to think of him as an angel in the Judeo-Christian context — but I wonder if he is some kind of expression of my animus. Sometimes he takes on the appearance in dream of people I know in real life, though I can always recognize it's him, but that often only serves to exacerbate the feelings of taboo or discomfort (for instance, he once appeared in a dream as a college professor I had, which left me feeling deeply embarrassed because I felt completely impersonal and professional towards the actual professor himself, who was anyway kind of old and goofy).
In any case, in this dream, I was showing pictures to a group of people, the usual half-anonymous Crowd of Family and Friends. We were all standing and milling about outside in a park-like area, with the projection screen off to one side, and he was standing quite close to me so that I could feel the warmth of his presence alongside me. Then, the landscape photograph I was displaying seemed to somehow come alive and expand, until we were standing within the landscape looking out across a vast mountain range with beautiful shadowy valleys — mist snagged on the mountain peaks high above and pooled in the low valleys below us. It began to snow, and everyone was so excited at the beauty of it. It was as if we were all kids again, thrilled at the first snowfall. This snow was not exactly ordinary snow, for it didn't feel all that cold and it drifted down in huge, lazy flakes that seemed more like autumn leaves, except that they were white and crystalline in delicate designs, and they melted when they touched bare skin. People began laughing and playing, trying to catch the slowly drifting snowflakes on their tongues or with outstretched hands, some people leaning down to scoop up handfuls from the ground to throw like snowballs, though the snowballs were always soft and feathery, not cold and compact in a way that might hurt if you got hit. There was a lot of happy bumping around and into each other as everybody played in the snow, which jostled me into him a couple times so that I got that warm electric thrill passing through me, but the sense of taboo always made me withdraw and try to play it casually. (I'm not sure if I'm exactly describing this well — it always seems to me that he shares my understanding, both the attraction and the awareness of the taboo, though it doesn't bother him as much, as if neither weighs as heavily on him as they do on me in these dreams. Yet it seems as if the taboo is because of him, some other obligation or duty that holds him back, and not so much because of me or who I am.) In any case, in this dream I thought somehow the snow was his doing, and I joked with him about it or hinted at it, as if the others didn't know who exactly he really was, but he shook his head and said it had been my doing, somehow. While everyone was distracted playing and no one was looking, he briefly placed his hands on either side of my face, drew me close to him and kissed me on the forehead. It was at that point that I woke up.
I can't help but think that this has something to do with my work with the tarot cards. Last night I began work with the Magician/Magus, reading through some of the various books I'm working with and examining the various Magician cards from all my different decks. I wonder if I'm connecting the Magician with the Animus/Angel at the Gate somehow, who has always been a figure of energy, light and warmth, somewhat fiery but also ecstatic and creative in his energies.
I just hopped over to Wikipedia to see if I could find anything on the animus, since I really know next to nothing about it other than that it's supposedly the female's parallel to the male's anima, the archetype manifesting from the collective unconscious the totality of the feminine (or, for the animus, the masculine). I seemed to remember reading that Jung really didn't examine the animus at all, being much more interested in the anima in the male psyche. This is what Wikipedia has to say:
::foreheadsmack:: This seems like a pretty obvious connection between the Magician (symbolized especially in the Thoth tarot but in other decks as well as the figure Hermes, messenger of the gods, with snakes twining around his helmet and wings on his feet)... and the figure who appears to me in dreams.
The most vivid part of my memory of the dream begins when I am flipping through photographs of landscapes on my iPad — gorgeous pictures that I've taken (in dream, not in real life) of mountains, rolling hills, misty forests, etc. — and, when I come across one I want to share with everyone else, I "flick it" up from the iPad onto a large projector screen (using some sort of bluetooth connection and an app that recognizes the gesture — someone should actually invent this because it was awesome)... At which point, the photo would appear not simply as large as life, but also in 3-D, as if the projector screen were actually a window we were looking through to see into the landscape beyond. I don't remember if the photos were actually video clips that moved — since they were mostly landscapes, there wouldn't have been much movement, but a sense of the swaying of trees or the gentle movement of mist or flowing water or birds taking flight now and then, maybe...
He was standing right beside me. As usual, there was an intense longing to be near him, to have his attention on me, and yet also a sense that this was taboo or forbidden in some way.
Back when I was Christian, I thought of him as the "angel at the gate" — the one who stands with a fiery sword guarding the gates of Eden. (Although technically I think Genesis says God stationed several angels, specifically cherubim, to guard the gate, I've always thought of this angel as Archangel Michael, probably because he, too, is depicted as having a fiery sword.) Years ago when I was little, he was the one who appeared to me in the forest and then dissolved into sunlight — though the feeling then was all affection, as if for an older brother, rather than this kind of attraction/eros. Still, even the eros in recent years has been of an almost innocent, adolescent kind — more ecstatic longing than sexual desire, if that makes any sense. Being near him feels thrilling, almost electric, but it's all in the heart and soul, rather than the body (or rather, it's throughout the body, a bone-deep magnetism rather than a sexual pull). I don't know who this figure is — I find it problematic to continue to think of him as an angel in the Judeo-Christian context — but I wonder if he is some kind of expression of my animus. Sometimes he takes on the appearance in dream of people I know in real life, though I can always recognize it's him, but that often only serves to exacerbate the feelings of taboo or discomfort (for instance, he once appeared in a dream as a college professor I had, which left me feeling deeply embarrassed because I felt completely impersonal and professional towards the actual professor himself, who was anyway kind of old and goofy).
In any case, in this dream, I was showing pictures to a group of people, the usual half-anonymous Crowd of Family and Friends. We were all standing and milling about outside in a park-like area, with the projection screen off to one side, and he was standing quite close to me so that I could feel the warmth of his presence alongside me. Then, the landscape photograph I was displaying seemed to somehow come alive and expand, until we were standing within the landscape looking out across a vast mountain range with beautiful shadowy valleys — mist snagged on the mountain peaks high above and pooled in the low valleys below us. It began to snow, and everyone was so excited at the beauty of it. It was as if we were all kids again, thrilled at the first snowfall. This snow was not exactly ordinary snow, for it didn't feel all that cold and it drifted down in huge, lazy flakes that seemed more like autumn leaves, except that they were white and crystalline in delicate designs, and they melted when they touched bare skin. People began laughing and playing, trying to catch the slowly drifting snowflakes on their tongues or with outstretched hands, some people leaning down to scoop up handfuls from the ground to throw like snowballs, though the snowballs were always soft and feathery, not cold and compact in a way that might hurt if you got hit. There was a lot of happy bumping around and into each other as everybody played in the snow, which jostled me into him a couple times so that I got that warm electric thrill passing through me, but the sense of taboo always made me withdraw and try to play it casually. (I'm not sure if I'm exactly describing this well — it always seems to me that he shares my understanding, both the attraction and the awareness of the taboo, though it doesn't bother him as much, as if neither weighs as heavily on him as they do on me in these dreams. Yet it seems as if the taboo is because of him, some other obligation or duty that holds him back, and not so much because of me or who I am.) In any case, in this dream I thought somehow the snow was his doing, and I joked with him about it or hinted at it, as if the others didn't know who exactly he really was, but he shook his head and said it had been my doing, somehow. While everyone was distracted playing and no one was looking, he briefly placed his hands on either side of my face, drew me close to him and kissed me on the forehead. It was at that point that I woke up.
I can't help but think that this has something to do with my work with the tarot cards. Last night I began work with the Magician/Magus, reading through some of the various books I'm working with and examining the various Magician cards from all my different decks. I wonder if I'm connecting the Magician with the Animus/Angel at the Gate somehow, who has always been a figure of energy, light and warmth, somewhat fiery but also ecstatic and creative in his energies.
I just hopped over to Wikipedia to see if I could find anything on the animus, since I really know next to nothing about it other than that it's supposedly the female's parallel to the male's anima, the archetype manifesting from the collective unconscious the totality of the feminine (or, for the animus, the masculine). I seemed to remember reading that Jung really didn't examine the animus at all, being much more interested in the anima in the male psyche. This is what Wikipedia has to say:
Jung focused more on the male's anima and wrote less about the female's animus. Jung believed that every woman has an analogous animus within her psyche, this being a set of unconscious masculine attributes and potentials. He viewed the animus as being more complex than the anima, postulating that women have a host of animus images while the male anima consists only of one dominant image.
Jung stated that there are four parallel levels of animus development in a female.
The animus "first appears as a personification of mere physical power - for instance as an athletic champion or muscle man, such as 'the fictional jungle hero Tarzan'".
In the next phase, the animus "possesses initiative and the capacity for planned action...the romantic man - the 19th century British poet Shelley; or the man of action - America's Ernest Hemingway, war hero, hunter, etc."
In the third phase "the animus becomes the word, often appearing as a professor or clergyman...the bearer of the word - Lloyd George, the great political orator".
"Finally, in his fourth manifestation, the animus is the incarnation of meaning. On this highest level he becomes (like the anima) a mediator of...spiritual profundity". Jung noted that "in mythology, this aspect of the animus appears as Hermes, messenger of the gods; in dreams he is a helpful guide." Like Sophia this is the highest level of mediation between the unconscious and conscious mind. [emphasis added]
::foreheadsmack:: This seems like a pretty obvious connection between the Magician (symbolized especially in the Thoth tarot but in other decks as well as the figure Hermes, messenger of the gods, with snakes twining around his helmet and wings on his feet)... and the figure who appears to me in dreams.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Fairy Dart Dream
This morning between the time when Jeff left for work and when my alarm went off, I fell into one of those sudden and intense dream-states — during which I dreamt that I woke up to find three fairy darts piercing my left big toe. The toe ached like crazy and felt slightly swollen. The darts were long, thin and black, looking very much like porcupine quills except much thinner, and when I went to try to pull them out, they snapped and disintegrated into dust, leaving their barbed points lodged beneath my skin.
On careful examination, I could see the broken-off shafts of the fairy darts where they were stuck in the rough skin of my toe (which, for some reason, was incredibly large and hairy like a hobbit's). They looked somewhat like clogged pores, and my mother insisted that these were not fairy darts at all (what a stupid notion!) but some kind of strange disease wherein my toe was actually rotting from the inside and exuding the black, putrid flesh out through my pores. She gave me a pamphlet that she'd downloaded from the internet, which listed the symptoms of this disease (which, if you had visible symptoms, was already too far advanced to cure). The list of symptoms consisted of a series of nonsense words (among which were definitely the repeated words "amme" and "zoot") arranged in lines of verse, and I suddenly had the suspicion that they were a kind of chant or spell that could bring on the disease if read out loud.
At that point, my alarm clock went off and woke me. My left big toe was aching and continued to ache for about an hour after I got up.
I fear that this does not bode well.
On careful examination, I could see the broken-off shafts of the fairy darts where they were stuck in the rough skin of my toe (which, for some reason, was incredibly large and hairy like a hobbit's). They looked somewhat like clogged pores, and my mother insisted that these were not fairy darts at all (what a stupid notion!) but some kind of strange disease wherein my toe was actually rotting from the inside and exuding the black, putrid flesh out through my pores. She gave me a pamphlet that she'd downloaded from the internet, which listed the symptoms of this disease (which, if you had visible symptoms, was already too far advanced to cure). The list of symptoms consisted of a series of nonsense words (among which were definitely the repeated words "amme" and "zoot") arranged in lines of verse, and I suddenly had the suspicion that they were a kind of chant or spell that could bring on the disease if read out loud.
At that point, my alarm clock went off and woke me. My left big toe was aching and continued to ache for about an hour after I got up.
I fear that this does not bode well.
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Flamekeeping Shift: Intense Dreams
My flamekeeping shift started at sunset last night.
I've been having intense dreams for the past several nights, though most of them have been of a mundane nature. Last night I had two intense dreams.
The first, there was fire and a presence in the heavens, a great god whose laughter mingled with the long rumbling of thunder. Everyone was terrified. The sky was bright, too bright — the white, rolling clouds parted here and there to reveal impossible liquid-fire light beyond them, golden tongues licking the mist-curled sides of each billow of cloud. Lightning dropped like rain, jagged liquid fire, thick and slow, not the usual quick and thin streak of electricity but something else. Some people said it was Jesus. The mighty presence laughed. I recognized some Pagans among the panicked crowds, making offerings and kneeling in supplication to Zeus or Thor. The god laughed again, turning his attention to fall on them like liquid lightning. Squealing, they dodged out of the way as the fire fell, impacting the earth with a huge roar and a blaze springing up where they had stood. Terror ran through me, a fear welling almost to an ecstasy. The god drew spiraling lines in the earth, trailing fingers of lightning along the ground until the rocks trembled and buckled, scorched scars raised in long lines almost as though some burrowing animal were tunneling just beneath the topsoil, pushing up its trail. The liquid-fire lightning dragged along, raising spiraling welts on the earth as people dodged out of the path. The lightning turned and danced, and I found myself caught between converging lines with nowhere to go. I stood rooted in place, willing every part of me — from bone, blood and breath to soul itself — into complete stillness, waiting for the moment of convergence. Then there in front of me was a man, wild grin shining and a noise like thunder. It was — gods forgive me — the Tenth Doctor. (Not actually him, in the dream, but his look — my mind probably seeking for some visual representation of the mingled terror and adoration I was feeling.) I trembled, saying, "But... I know you." And the implication of recognizing this god with a kind of terrifying intimacy bordering on triumph. Somehow, I communicated to him, "You're scaring people, you have to go." He offered me the body of a serpent, bloody and skinned, its scaled hide sparkling with a myriad diamond jewels in the impossible light and the length of its body cut into chunks of wet, red flesh with the white, round center of its spine peeking through the mess. I breathed, and said, "No, I don't eat meat," to the horror of those around me, who were bowed down to the ground and weeping in fear, unable to imagine refusing the god anything. The god laughed again, uproariously, and then he was gone just as suddenly, the whole scene settling like dust into a quiet stillness. And I looked down to see that I was holding a plastic bag full of wet, juicy honeydew melon chunks (one carved in the shape of the serpent's head).
I woke up at this point in a lot of pain, with my legs twitching terribly, and it took a long while to fall back asleep again. Once I did, I had a second dream.
Not as detailed as the first. I was in a cart, somewhat like a cross between a roller coaster car and an open-topped railway train car, with rows of bench seats across it with seat belts. There were carts in front and behind mine, too, in a long chain and the train seemed to be underground in a long, dark tunnel with rough, earthy or rocky sides. The dream is only vague impressions for a while — there were many people in all these carts, loading and unloading as the train went back and forth along the line making stops, and many of the people seemed somewhat young, though not exactly children. I remained on the train the whole time, never getting off, and almost always sitting alone on the bench seat as people shuffled around me. Then, at one point, a man sat down next to me — I could best describe him as a stereotypical redneck hick — his hair was blond and short, cropped in a kind of bowl cut with bangs hanging down across his forehead, and he had large teeth and an overbite, barely a chin to speak of, and when he spoke he had an obnoxious stereotypically southern accent that seemed at once idiotic and overly cheerful. But his eyes seemed sharp and intelligent. He sat down next to me, and again there was a sense among everyone around me that this was somehow an honor bestowed on me. Everyone around treated him with a great deal of respect, almost reverence, and deferred to him as a kind of leader. I found, mingling with my distaste for him, a vague sense of familiarity, as though this were some kind of disguise that he was wearing. Again, the dream was only vague for a time, with the sense that we were about the embark on a much longer journey, not the same shuffling back and forth between the same few stops, and that this man next to me was somehow in charge of the journey or leading it. I noticed he wore a blue coat with a few metal pins and sewn-on patches and stripes here and then, almost like a military uniform though I didn't recognize it at all. It seemed too big for him, sticking out at the shoulders, so that he seemed like a child wearing his father's clothes, but there was still that intelligent look in his eye and a sense of authority that he carried about him. We were moving along on the journey now, people settled into their seats, and the tunnel beneath the earth seemed to stretch on in front of us forever with no light in sight except for the torch lights mounted every once in a while that passed us as we moved. The man acted towards me as though we knew each other and were good friends, and I had that vague sense of familiarity (though I was out of the dream enough that I couldn't place why I felt I recognized him). As we moved, the train sped up, faster and faster, and suddenly there was a great lurch as though we'd been struck from behind. The man next to me stood up in his seat, gazing back into the darkness past all the other carts, and his face changed briefly, the expression of soft, cheerful idiocy replaced by a hard, intelligent, penetrating look as though the disguise for an instant had fallen away and the full power of his presence came through. I felt, then, that we were good friends, that I did know him (though I still couldn't say how or from where) and that I trusted him completely. He dropped back down into his seat next to me and whispered that a great serpent was following us, quickly catching up to the train. If people realized what was happening, they would start to panic. He was able to call up or get in touch with the person at the very front of the train and instruct them to veer off the track as we passed an opening in the tunnel — because of his inexplicable authority, nobody argued with him. We veered and suddenly the train was plunged into an icy underground river, the carts now floating like boats or rafts all chained together in a long line. The wheels churning the water beneath the carts sped us onwards, faster and faster, taking twisting turns and bends in the rocky tunnel, now without any light but a kind of eerie very dim blue light that seemed to infuse the air and come from everywhere and nowhere. Behind us, the huge serpent was gaining on us and people were beginning to panic. Its eyes glinted like sharp blades in the darkness, its forked tongue flicking, its massive body writhing in the waters behind us.
I feel as though something happened then in the dream, just before I woke up, but it's gone now, I can't remember it. I don't remember waking up frightened at all, though there was a lot of energy coursing through me. I wish I knew who the man was, or what happened at the end of that second dream. It's no coincidence, I think, that both dreams involved a serpent, as well as other people who were in danger and frightened. But I'm not sure I know what either of the dreams mean.
I've been having intense dreams for the past several nights, though most of them have been of a mundane nature. Last night I had two intense dreams.
The first, there was fire and a presence in the heavens, a great god whose laughter mingled with the long rumbling of thunder. Everyone was terrified. The sky was bright, too bright — the white, rolling clouds parted here and there to reveal impossible liquid-fire light beyond them, golden tongues licking the mist-curled sides of each billow of cloud. Lightning dropped like rain, jagged liquid fire, thick and slow, not the usual quick and thin streak of electricity but something else. Some people said it was Jesus. The mighty presence laughed. I recognized some Pagans among the panicked crowds, making offerings and kneeling in supplication to Zeus or Thor. The god laughed again, turning his attention to fall on them like liquid lightning. Squealing, they dodged out of the way as the fire fell, impacting the earth with a huge roar and a blaze springing up where they had stood. Terror ran through me, a fear welling almost to an ecstasy. The god drew spiraling lines in the earth, trailing fingers of lightning along the ground until the rocks trembled and buckled, scorched scars raised in long lines almost as though some burrowing animal were tunneling just beneath the topsoil, pushing up its trail. The liquid-fire lightning dragged along, raising spiraling welts on the earth as people dodged out of the path. The lightning turned and danced, and I found myself caught between converging lines with nowhere to go. I stood rooted in place, willing every part of me — from bone, blood and breath to soul itself — into complete stillness, waiting for the moment of convergence. Then there in front of me was a man, wild grin shining and a noise like thunder. It was — gods forgive me — the Tenth Doctor. (Not actually him, in the dream, but his look — my mind probably seeking for some visual representation of the mingled terror and adoration I was feeling.) I trembled, saying, "But... I know you." And the implication of recognizing this god with a kind of terrifying intimacy bordering on triumph. Somehow, I communicated to him, "You're scaring people, you have to go." He offered me the body of a serpent, bloody and skinned, its scaled hide sparkling with a myriad diamond jewels in the impossible light and the length of its body cut into chunks of wet, red flesh with the white, round center of its spine peeking through the mess. I breathed, and said, "No, I don't eat meat," to the horror of those around me, who were bowed down to the ground and weeping in fear, unable to imagine refusing the god anything. The god laughed again, uproariously, and then he was gone just as suddenly, the whole scene settling like dust into a quiet stillness. And I looked down to see that I was holding a plastic bag full of wet, juicy honeydew melon chunks (one carved in the shape of the serpent's head).
I woke up at this point in a lot of pain, with my legs twitching terribly, and it took a long while to fall back asleep again. Once I did, I had a second dream.
Not as detailed as the first. I was in a cart, somewhat like a cross between a roller coaster car and an open-topped railway train car, with rows of bench seats across it with seat belts. There were carts in front and behind mine, too, in a long chain and the train seemed to be underground in a long, dark tunnel with rough, earthy or rocky sides. The dream is only vague impressions for a while — there were many people in all these carts, loading and unloading as the train went back and forth along the line making stops, and many of the people seemed somewhat young, though not exactly children. I remained on the train the whole time, never getting off, and almost always sitting alone on the bench seat as people shuffled around me. Then, at one point, a man sat down next to me — I could best describe him as a stereotypical redneck hick — his hair was blond and short, cropped in a kind of bowl cut with bangs hanging down across his forehead, and he had large teeth and an overbite, barely a chin to speak of, and when he spoke he had an obnoxious stereotypically southern accent that seemed at once idiotic and overly cheerful. But his eyes seemed sharp and intelligent. He sat down next to me, and again there was a sense among everyone around me that this was somehow an honor bestowed on me. Everyone around treated him with a great deal of respect, almost reverence, and deferred to him as a kind of leader. I found, mingling with my distaste for him, a vague sense of familiarity, as though this were some kind of disguise that he was wearing. Again, the dream was only vague for a time, with the sense that we were about the embark on a much longer journey, not the same shuffling back and forth between the same few stops, and that this man next to me was somehow in charge of the journey or leading it. I noticed he wore a blue coat with a few metal pins and sewn-on patches and stripes here and then, almost like a military uniform though I didn't recognize it at all. It seemed too big for him, sticking out at the shoulders, so that he seemed like a child wearing his father's clothes, but there was still that intelligent look in his eye and a sense of authority that he carried about him. We were moving along on the journey now, people settled into their seats, and the tunnel beneath the earth seemed to stretch on in front of us forever with no light in sight except for the torch lights mounted every once in a while that passed us as we moved. The man acted towards me as though we knew each other and were good friends, and I had that vague sense of familiarity (though I was out of the dream enough that I couldn't place why I felt I recognized him). As we moved, the train sped up, faster and faster, and suddenly there was a great lurch as though we'd been struck from behind. The man next to me stood up in his seat, gazing back into the darkness past all the other carts, and his face changed briefly, the expression of soft, cheerful idiocy replaced by a hard, intelligent, penetrating look as though the disguise for an instant had fallen away and the full power of his presence came through. I felt, then, that we were good friends, that I did know him (though I still couldn't say how or from where) and that I trusted him completely. He dropped back down into his seat next to me and whispered that a great serpent was following us, quickly catching up to the train. If people realized what was happening, they would start to panic. He was able to call up or get in touch with the person at the very front of the train and instruct them to veer off the track as we passed an opening in the tunnel — because of his inexplicable authority, nobody argued with him. We veered and suddenly the train was plunged into an icy underground river, the carts now floating like boats or rafts all chained together in a long line. The wheels churning the water beneath the carts sped us onwards, faster and faster, taking twisting turns and bends in the rocky tunnel, now without any light but a kind of eerie very dim blue light that seemed to infuse the air and come from everywhere and nowhere. Behind us, the huge serpent was gaining on us and people were beginning to panic. Its eyes glinted like sharp blades in the darkness, its forked tongue flicking, its massive body writhing in the waters behind us.
I feel as though something happened then in the dream, just before I woke up, but it's gone now, I can't remember it. I don't remember waking up frightened at all, though there was a lot of energy coursing through me. I wish I knew who the man was, or what happened at the end of that second dream. It's no coincidence, I think, that both dreams involved a serpent, as well as other people who were in danger and frightened. But I'm not sure I know what either of the dreams mean.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Dream - Space Needle Cirque du Soleil
Intense, strange dream last night (or this morning, technically) right before I woke up.
The beginnings of it are hazy. I know that I was exploring some tall building somewhere (I don't think I was myself, but some other character at this point), and one thing that sticks out vividly in my memory is getting into an elevator that, half-way down, went into free-fall. An automated female voice came on over the speakers to calmly inform the passengers (of which I was the only one at that point) to pry open the doors of the elevator as it began to turn and roll onto its back as it fell (so that the doors would be facing up) and be ready to jump upwards just as the elevator hit the bottom of the shaft. Supposedly, this would help minimize the impact somehow - but since I was in a free-falling elevator and had no real choice, I followed the instructions, and somehow it worked, almost as though the bottom of the shaft was cushioned to absorb the elevator box without it smashing apart, while some kind of forcefield was in place to catch and suspend me just as I jumped so that my momentum was slowed and I was able to sort of "swim" towards the opening that was about ten feet up from the bottom of the shaft.
I spent some more time wandering around in the dream, which is now half-forgotten. Somewhere along the way, I met up with other people and the dream became a Volunteer Naturalist training class with Penny and Anne leading us. Once again, I found myself inside the elevator, only this time with a group of people, when it went into free-fall and the same automated voice gave instructions. I had my doubts about how it would work with all of us trying to squeeze through the door and jump at the same time, but somehow it did.
I found myself then heading out of the tall building with everyone and at that point I could see from the outside that it was the Space Needle (although inside it was much more like an office building with multiple rooms and hallways on each floor and the elevator on the inside, not the outside, of the building). Instead of being at the City Center downtown surrounded by concrete and other buildings, the Space Needle was standing in the midst of a huge, grassy field that stretched out on all sides with trees lining the field off in the distance. Some of the SVNs were talking with Penny about the next bit of training for the class, and she was joking about how it would involve capturing, killing and dissecting an animal. I think everyone was a bit horrified at the thought - since these are folks who signed up to protect the wildlife in the parks, not hunt it - but several of the people were trying to put on a brave face for the sake of the training, since they signed a contract at the beginning saying they would complete the training and donate their time to teach afterwards. I made some brief joke, but then said in all seriousness I didn't plan to kill or dissect anything regardless of what I'd signed. I got the impression that that was the right response that Penny had been going for, but she didn't say anything right then.
It must have been our lunch break at that point, because we all wandered off into the field beneath the Space Needle to settle down for a break while Penny and Anne talked together and prepared for the next bit of the training. While we were gathered there in the grass, a show began on the lawn surrounding the Space Needle - like a Cirque du Soleil, except that the performers were giants. They were varying heights, with the shortest group of them being maybe ten feet tall, and the tallest being closer to fifty or sixty feet. They were dressed in all sorts of amazing, intricate costumes - predominating among a certain group of tall, skinny giants about 12 to 14 feet tall with outfits of silk scarves and long draped robes of oranges and reds, with painted faces - and they performed acrobatics and synchronized interpretive dance around the base of the Space Needle almost as though it were some sort of maypole. The performers were of all different skin colors, and one woman in particular with dark skin and the most beautiful dreadlocks seemed to be a kind of goddess-giant moving in an amazing dance of agility - you could see her muscles flexing and her sweat that made her skin glisten along with the glittery body paint she wore. Others around her were of all skin tones, but mostly tall and skinny (though not taller than she was), and there were... littler giants (?) of only about ten feet tall who were in usual human proportions like she was, except bigger.
They performed their acrobatics and dancing around the Space Needle for a while as more and more people gathered in a huge circle on the lawn to watch them, groups of us sitting in clumps here and there, not all of them for the SVN training, but strangers as well who'd been passing by and come to watch. The performers began bringing people in from the audience and the act transformed into a kind of spiritual healing session in which - what might be called "faery darts" but were more like "faery bullets" were shot through people, piercing them and supposedly severing the binds of illness or pain within them. One man eagerly volunteered and dragged his young son into the circle as well, having the boy stand behind him to be pierced by the same invisible arrow/bullet of energy. This struck me as dangerous and unwise, and I began to have a visceral negative reaction to what was going on. Another woman who got up to be healed (or was called up by name, as I think the performers had begun to do) had cataracts over her eyes - when they flung the dart/bullet at her, she collapsed unconscious to the ground. As she regained consciousness, her cataracts began to clear from her eyes, and they told her that what had been causing them was some kind of sickness in her brain that had migrated to the back, to the nape of her neck, where it was now bulging out in some kind of pussy blister or tumor that needed to be lanced and released. But she began to lose consciousness again, and again I felt like what was going on was not okay and wasn't actually helping anyone.
At that point, I noticed odd-shaped white objects in the sky above us, and when I looked closer, I realized they were spinning, open-air discs that were falling from the top of the Space Needle sort of like whirligigs or horizontal pinwheels, or seeds that were riding on the wind. At first, they looked beautiful and amazing - but as they got closer, I realized just how big they were and that they were not actually attached to anything by a cable or guide, so they really were in a free-fall and would land wherever the wind took them. I panicked at this point, seeing these massive wheels of metal whirling down towards where we were on the ground - but everyone else seemed to take it in stride, so I tried to quell my panic. Sure enough, the wheels not only did not crash into one another on their way down (for there were maybe ten or fifteen of them all together), but they all rolled and landed neatly in the grass without landing on either the performers or the audience gathered. As they landed and rolled to a stop, I saw that inside them were people (strapped in with their feet to the edges and their backs against the top of the disc, so that as the discs came to a stop, they were somewhat horizontal with their faces towards the ground) who'd use the whirligig discs as a kind of conveyance-slash-amusement park ride to get down from the top of the Space Needle.
At this point in the dream, I got up and switched where I was sitting, moving to the other side of the group where people I knew were talking. The energy there suddenly seemed to be lighter and the free-floating panic I'd been feeling about various things evaporated as someone made a joke that sent me laughing heartily at something. With the laughter came a great release of tension and I felt so happy to be there, hanging out with friends. Just as the dream was ending, I glanced up and saw A* sitting nearby on the other side of a few people - we made eye-contact briefly, and in that moment it was like I could see his thoughts going that he was both pleased to see me laughing but also confused and somewhat envious that I was off laughing with others, whereas he felt overly awkward and so was only ever very quiet around me. (In retrospect this reminds me of that Ani DiFranco song when she says, "I like you so much I talk to everyone but you.") In the dream, the feeling was certainly mutual and I too felt awkward around him to be able to joke and laugh freely - yet felt that giddy excitement at making eye-contact with him.
* I really need to stop watching this TV show, if A is going to be showing up randomly in my dreams. ::embarrassed::
The beginnings of it are hazy. I know that I was exploring some tall building somewhere (I don't think I was myself, but some other character at this point), and one thing that sticks out vividly in my memory is getting into an elevator that, half-way down, went into free-fall. An automated female voice came on over the speakers to calmly inform the passengers (of which I was the only one at that point) to pry open the doors of the elevator as it began to turn and roll onto its back as it fell (so that the doors would be facing up) and be ready to jump upwards just as the elevator hit the bottom of the shaft. Supposedly, this would help minimize the impact somehow - but since I was in a free-falling elevator and had no real choice, I followed the instructions, and somehow it worked, almost as though the bottom of the shaft was cushioned to absorb the elevator box without it smashing apart, while some kind of forcefield was in place to catch and suspend me just as I jumped so that my momentum was slowed and I was able to sort of "swim" towards the opening that was about ten feet up from the bottom of the shaft.
I spent some more time wandering around in the dream, which is now half-forgotten. Somewhere along the way, I met up with other people and the dream became a Volunteer Naturalist training class with Penny and Anne leading us. Once again, I found myself inside the elevator, only this time with a group of people, when it went into free-fall and the same automated voice gave instructions. I had my doubts about how it would work with all of us trying to squeeze through the door and jump at the same time, but somehow it did.
I found myself then heading out of the tall building with everyone and at that point I could see from the outside that it was the Space Needle (although inside it was much more like an office building with multiple rooms and hallways on each floor and the elevator on the inside, not the outside, of the building). Instead of being at the City Center downtown surrounded by concrete and other buildings, the Space Needle was standing in the midst of a huge, grassy field that stretched out on all sides with trees lining the field off in the distance. Some of the SVNs were talking with Penny about the next bit of training for the class, and she was joking about how it would involve capturing, killing and dissecting an animal. I think everyone was a bit horrified at the thought - since these are folks who signed up to protect the wildlife in the parks, not hunt it - but several of the people were trying to put on a brave face for the sake of the training, since they signed a contract at the beginning saying they would complete the training and donate their time to teach afterwards. I made some brief joke, but then said in all seriousness I didn't plan to kill or dissect anything regardless of what I'd signed. I got the impression that that was the right response that Penny had been going for, but she didn't say anything right then.
It must have been our lunch break at that point, because we all wandered off into the field beneath the Space Needle to settle down for a break while Penny and Anne talked together and prepared for the next bit of the training. While we were gathered there in the grass, a show began on the lawn surrounding the Space Needle - like a Cirque du Soleil, except that the performers were giants. They were varying heights, with the shortest group of them being maybe ten feet tall, and the tallest being closer to fifty or sixty feet. They were dressed in all sorts of amazing, intricate costumes - predominating among a certain group of tall, skinny giants about 12 to 14 feet tall with outfits of silk scarves and long draped robes of oranges and reds, with painted faces - and they performed acrobatics and synchronized interpretive dance around the base of the Space Needle almost as though it were some sort of maypole. The performers were of all different skin colors, and one woman in particular with dark skin and the most beautiful dreadlocks seemed to be a kind of goddess-giant moving in an amazing dance of agility - you could see her muscles flexing and her sweat that made her skin glisten along with the glittery body paint she wore. Others around her were of all skin tones, but mostly tall and skinny (though not taller than she was), and there were... littler giants (?) of only about ten feet tall who were in usual human proportions like she was, except bigger.
They performed their acrobatics and dancing around the Space Needle for a while as more and more people gathered in a huge circle on the lawn to watch them, groups of us sitting in clumps here and there, not all of them for the SVN training, but strangers as well who'd been passing by and come to watch. The performers began bringing people in from the audience and the act transformed into a kind of spiritual healing session in which - what might be called "faery darts" but were more like "faery bullets" were shot through people, piercing them and supposedly severing the binds of illness or pain within them. One man eagerly volunteered and dragged his young son into the circle as well, having the boy stand behind him to be pierced by the same invisible arrow/bullet of energy. This struck me as dangerous and unwise, and I began to have a visceral negative reaction to what was going on. Another woman who got up to be healed (or was called up by name, as I think the performers had begun to do) had cataracts over her eyes - when they flung the dart/bullet at her, she collapsed unconscious to the ground. As she regained consciousness, her cataracts began to clear from her eyes, and they told her that what had been causing them was some kind of sickness in her brain that had migrated to the back, to the nape of her neck, where it was now bulging out in some kind of pussy blister or tumor that needed to be lanced and released. But she began to lose consciousness again, and again I felt like what was going on was not okay and wasn't actually helping anyone.
At that point, I noticed odd-shaped white objects in the sky above us, and when I looked closer, I realized they were spinning, open-air discs that were falling from the top of the Space Needle sort of like whirligigs or horizontal pinwheels, or seeds that were riding on the wind. At first, they looked beautiful and amazing - but as they got closer, I realized just how big they were and that they were not actually attached to anything by a cable or guide, so they really were in a free-fall and would land wherever the wind took them. I panicked at this point, seeing these massive wheels of metal whirling down towards where we were on the ground - but everyone else seemed to take it in stride, so I tried to quell my panic. Sure enough, the wheels not only did not crash into one another on their way down (for there were maybe ten or fifteen of them all together), but they all rolled and landed neatly in the grass without landing on either the performers or the audience gathered. As they landed and rolled to a stop, I saw that inside them were people (strapped in with their feet to the edges and their backs against the top of the disc, so that as the discs came to a stop, they were somewhat horizontal with their faces towards the ground) who'd use the whirligig discs as a kind of conveyance-slash-amusement park ride to get down from the top of the Space Needle.
At this point in the dream, I got up and switched where I was sitting, moving to the other side of the group where people I knew were talking. The energy there suddenly seemed to be lighter and the free-floating panic I'd been feeling about various things evaporated as someone made a joke that sent me laughing heartily at something. With the laughter came a great release of tension and I felt so happy to be there, hanging out with friends. Just as the dream was ending, I glanced up and saw A* sitting nearby on the other side of a few people - we made eye-contact briefly, and in that moment it was like I could see his thoughts going that he was both pleased to see me laughing but also confused and somewhat envious that I was off laughing with others, whereas he felt overly awkward and so was only ever very quiet around me. (In retrospect this reminds me of that Ani DiFranco song when she says, "I like you so much I talk to everyone but you.") In the dream, the feeling was certainly mutual and I too felt awkward around him to be able to joke and laugh freely - yet felt that giddy excitement at making eye-contact with him.
* I really need to stop watching this TV show, if A is going to be showing up randomly in my dreams. ::embarrassed::
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Storyteller Spread Day 2: Dream
I'm on Day 2 of using Dianne Sylvan's Storyteller spread, today pulling the card for the second position, representing The Dream.
This card tells about the nature of the quest itself - it is the gift of a vision or dream about what the hero must set out to do, why she is called away from the Home represented in the first card.
The primary card I drew for this position tonight was the Ace of Cups, which seemed to me immediately to suggest this idea of the "quest for the holy grail." This beautiful goblet is the source of intuition and emotional fulfillment and connection, as well as of dream, creativity, fantasy and vision. The still waters held within the cup are a mirror that reflects the deeper, subconscious patterns of the world from which we can learn, and from the cup spring the sensual, physical manifestations of the senses. Like all Ace cards, the Ace of Cups is a gift that is offered freely, a gift of grace. It is also a card of beginnings, but in this case maybe not so obvious a beginning that might be reflected in the external world - more an opening to love in a broader sense, a going-within to seek for the vision and creative dreaming that allow us to discover self-love and love of life, and through this to discover self-acceptance and joy.
When I meditate on this card, once again I slip into the vision that the card depicts very easily - and the cup seems to be right before me. Unlike the image actually depicted on the card, of the cup set off somewhat in front of the viewer, in my trance work the goblet is right before me as though I'm holding it close between my two hands, peering down into its depths. So close is this cup to me that I can almost feel its waters sloshing and spilling out over its sides to wet my hands and splash me. The cup seems huge and heavy, but not so heavy so that it's hard to hold. Though last night's vision of the cup was of a glowing golden goblet (inspired no doubt by the way the cup was depicted in the Nine of Cups), tonight, the cup is silver and glistening as though illuminated by moonlight. I wonder if this is also an aspect of the quest, the journey I am to undertake - seeking by the light of the moon and stars, the light of night and twilight, the darker, more intuitive "inner light" - rather than by the overt, extroverted, bright and golden light of the noonday sun.
The two supporting cards I drew were the Eight of Wands (again!) and Justice. The Eight of Wands is clearly of great importance right now, emphasizing this message of casting my energy, efforts and hopes to the wind and trusting in the greater pattern of it all. The card of Justice speaks of balance and vision alike - it evokes this idea of justice as the harmony of right relationship, and far from being blind, the figure of Justice in this card can see with a vision that pierces even the darkest obscurity. She holds the feather as though it were a sword - and yet it is light and delicate - as butterflies flock around her and the scales that she holds. This is a card of balance of inner and outer as well, of conscious and subconscious. She holds one hand in towards herself while extending the other to hold out the scales - one of her wings is turned upwards while another turns down. To me, this suggests that an aspect of this quest will be to seek balance between my inner subconscious and my conscious, rational mind that is closer to the surface. I think this is a positive sign that I should not worry overly much about giving in to fantasy or day-dream as merely impractical or indulgent - that exploring the subconscious is perhaps something I have been somewhat remiss in before and the primary nature of the quest, finding that intuitive source and vision, is a process of bringing more balance and openness to my life and my work. Tempering the energy of wands (which are obviously playing a big role in this) and the sometimes harsh light of the rational mind who seeks to assign responsibility (but perhaps can too easily resort to placing blame, especially on oneself) - with the cooler, darker depths of the creative unconscious mind-soul.
This card tells about the nature of the quest itself - it is the gift of a vision or dream about what the hero must set out to do, why she is called away from the Home represented in the first card.
The primary card I drew for this position tonight was the Ace of Cups, which seemed to me immediately to suggest this idea of the "quest for the holy grail." This beautiful goblet is the source of intuition and emotional fulfillment and connection, as well as of dream, creativity, fantasy and vision. The still waters held within the cup are a mirror that reflects the deeper, subconscious patterns of the world from which we can learn, and from the cup spring the sensual, physical manifestations of the senses. Like all Ace cards, the Ace of Cups is a gift that is offered freely, a gift of grace. It is also a card of beginnings, but in this case maybe not so obvious a beginning that might be reflected in the external world - more an opening to love in a broader sense, a going-within to seek for the vision and creative dreaming that allow us to discover self-love and love of life, and through this to discover self-acceptance and joy.
When I meditate on this card, once again I slip into the vision that the card depicts very easily - and the cup seems to be right before me. Unlike the image actually depicted on the card, of the cup set off somewhat in front of the viewer, in my trance work the goblet is right before me as though I'm holding it close between my two hands, peering down into its depths. So close is this cup to me that I can almost feel its waters sloshing and spilling out over its sides to wet my hands and splash me. The cup seems huge and heavy, but not so heavy so that it's hard to hold. Though last night's vision of the cup was of a glowing golden goblet (inspired no doubt by the way the cup was depicted in the Nine of Cups), tonight, the cup is silver and glistening as though illuminated by moonlight. I wonder if this is also an aspect of the quest, the journey I am to undertake - seeking by the light of the moon and stars, the light of night and twilight, the darker, more intuitive "inner light" - rather than by the overt, extroverted, bright and golden light of the noonday sun.
The two supporting cards I drew were the Eight of Wands (again!) and Justice. The Eight of Wands is clearly of great importance right now, emphasizing this message of casting my energy, efforts and hopes to the wind and trusting in the greater pattern of it all. The card of Justice speaks of balance and vision alike - it evokes this idea of justice as the harmony of right relationship, and far from being blind, the figure of Justice in this card can see with a vision that pierces even the darkest obscurity. She holds the feather as though it were a sword - and yet it is light and delicate - as butterflies flock around her and the scales that she holds. This is a card of balance of inner and outer as well, of conscious and subconscious. She holds one hand in towards herself while extending the other to hold out the scales - one of her wings is turned upwards while another turns down. To me, this suggests that an aspect of this quest will be to seek balance between my inner subconscious and my conscious, rational mind that is closer to the surface. I think this is a positive sign that I should not worry overly much about giving in to fantasy or day-dream as merely impractical or indulgent - that exploring the subconscious is perhaps something I have been somewhat remiss in before and the primary nature of the quest, finding that intuitive source and vision, is a process of bringing more balance and openness to my life and my work. Tempering the energy of wands (which are obviously playing a big role in this) and the sometimes harsh light of the rational mind who seeks to assign responsibility (but perhaps can too easily resort to placing blame, especially on oneself) - with the cooler, darker depths of the creative unconscious mind-soul.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Diary - Dreaming the Garuda
I've been under the weather on and off since getting back from our honeymoon, mostly because I've been pushing myself pretty hard with writing and other kinds of work and staying up later than is probably a good idea (also, the time zone shift back to EST was not as easy as the shift to Mountain Time going out, I think). Two evenings ago, I ended up having some sort of stomach/gas pains just as I was going to bed; they lasted through the night (so that I slept only fitfully) and most of the day yesterday, finally going away yesterday evening.
Last night, I had some intense and odd dreams. I don't remember much of them to begin with, but eventually the dream resolved into me going out to a club or party with friends, and needing to stop by a public bathroom where I began to vomit uncontrollably. The vomit wasn't the usual kind, but a kind of white foam that seemed to be generated near the back of my throat and would drain into my stomach from there, making me queazy, and also threatened to actually choke/suffocate me if I didn't continually spit it up into the toilet. Waking up from this dream was so disturbing and quick, that for a moment I thought I had actually vomited or spit up onto my pillow or that I was about to be sick. Luckily, I hadn't and I wasn't. As I lay there, the intensity of the feeling passed, but I remained somewhat queazy for a while.
Falling back asleep again, this time I dreamt that I was in a kind of rental/summer house. Looking outside from a downstairs room, I saw a hound in the backyard that was trying to escape through a wood fence. It had pried some of the wooden slats apart and was about half-way through, its front end outside the yard and its back legs still on the side towards the house where I could see them. Its one back leg looked all mangled and bloody - and I noticed what looked like a great beast crouched down right near the dog on this side of the fence. It had huge talons or claws and shaggy, feathery fur, and it seemed to be about to attack the dog or like it had just finished attacking it. I shouted out in distress and moved across the room to another window for a closer look, and by the time I looked again, the beast had disappeared - but the dog was on the other side of the fence, whole and healthy.
My yelling had disturbed some people in the house who came running and I told them what I'd seen. At first they didn't believe me... but then (as dreams do) some time seemed to pass and in the confusion it was decided that there was a dangerous beast around. (Sometime during this, I was singing and dancing to "In the Jungle", especially the "ooo-EEEE!" part.) I must have been thinking about what I'd seen during that time, because I reached the conclusion that the beast was not hurting but helping the dog and that, despite its monstrous appearance, it was a healing creature. I tried to tell the other people in the house this, saying its name (what kind of beast it was, not its personal name) was something like Celia or Selena or something. No one would listen. Later, I saw it charging away from a horse stable area out by the side of the house. It looked somewhat like a horse, except beastly and monstrous. Imagine a skeleton without any muscle on it, but with just skin draped over it like a thin silk bedsheet.... except the skin was shaggy with feathery fur that was tangled and matted and seemed worn or rotted away in some places. I saw it running towards me and shouted, and people came out, but it was clear that they couldn't see it. Again there was some confusion and someone was sick or injured in the midst of the people gathered outside. They all thought the beast had done it, but only I could see the beast standing just outside the press of people as though trying to get to the injured person (whom everyone was protecting), as though trying to help them.
Then the beast stood up on its hind legs and seemed to transform from a beast into a woman, except that as a woman she was incredibly tall and thin with elongated arms and legs. I could only really get an impression of her and it was impossible to tell if what I could see of her was her clothing or her skin/fur itself - her legs, though long, seemed to be covered with a thick shaggy coat of hair that bowed out around like M.C. Hammer pants almost, and her arms (at first extended out to her sides) had long sleeves that billowed down and looked like draped wings, like a bat's sort of, that folded in as she lowered her arms to her side. Her head was bowed the whole time, with shaggy, matted hair hanging down so that it hid her face entirely from view. She gave me the impression almost of being like a wild animal that could not come near so much noise and clamor and people, and yet to also have a consciousness or intent or instinct to try to help the injured person. There seemed to be a sadness all about her. (After I woke up, it made me think of something I'd once heard of somewhere where a healer would take a sickness from a person and their injury or illness would become a part of the healer instead, so that the healer's body was always diseased and disgusting - but the healer somehow could sustain the disease and so would not die.)
Again there was some confusion and time passing in the dream, and then it was night time and I wanted to go out to the beach under the moon. My parents were nervous about me going out at night, but I went anyway. I drove a minivan and had trouble with the brakes, which were connected to some huge contraption that half-blocked my view in the driver's seat. When attempting to adjust the contraption, it came apart in my hands. I drove for a while along a highway since I could no longer stop, and realized that it wasn't night at all - it was a bright and sunny afternoon, and the darkness had not been night falling but an enormous storm of black thunderclouds that had blotted out the sun. But the storm was passing over (without doing any damage) and leaving the day sunny and fine. It was around this time that I woke up.
When Jeff came in to see how I was in the morning, I was still feeling pretty queazy and drained. I told him about my dream, and when I got to the part about the M.C. Hammer pants, he interrupted me and said it reminded him of the Garuda, a mythological bird-man creature in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. He went and got a card from his Buddha Tarot deck that had the Garuda on it and showed it to me - the figure had bird's legs that billowed out with feathers before coming in again in skinny, scaled bird feet with talons. The rest, though, didn't look much like the figure I'd seen - but mainly because I hadn't been able to see much of the face of the beast except for a vague impression.
Out of curiosity, later I looked up the Garuda on wikipedia. The wikipedia page says that one of the earliest references to the Garuda was in the Vedas, under the name "Śyena" and that it was a mount for the god Vishnu. It was a being associated with healing and in particular with protection against poisons (especially snake poisons). In Buddhist mythology, the Garuda is described as having enormous wings, so large that when they flap they "create hurricane-like winds that darken the sky." The Garuda is much bigger than a man, but can make itself smaller or larger, and is able to take human form in order to have dealings with people. It can also appear or disappear at will.
Doing an image search on Google, most of them looked more similar to the image of Jeff's Buddha Tarot card - but I did find one here that is somewhat similar to it, being longer and taller, and even the face to some extent though I could only ever get glimpses or vague impressions of it - but in the dream, the creature was much more beastly and frightening-looking, which is something it does have in common with many of the other images of the Garuda I was able to find.
Not sure what to make of this dream exactly, but the images of the storm that came afterwards, the shape-shifting and appearing/disappearing of the beast and its association with healing - especially right after the earlier dream where I was vomiting up white foam of some kind - all seem to indicate some kind of correlation.
In any case, I am going to take things easy and try to rest for today. Or however long it takes for me to recover from this cold that's clinging on.
Last night, I had some intense and odd dreams. I don't remember much of them to begin with, but eventually the dream resolved into me going out to a club or party with friends, and needing to stop by a public bathroom where I began to vomit uncontrollably. The vomit wasn't the usual kind, but a kind of white foam that seemed to be generated near the back of my throat and would drain into my stomach from there, making me queazy, and also threatened to actually choke/suffocate me if I didn't continually spit it up into the toilet. Waking up from this dream was so disturbing and quick, that for a moment I thought I had actually vomited or spit up onto my pillow or that I was about to be sick. Luckily, I hadn't and I wasn't. As I lay there, the intensity of the feeling passed, but I remained somewhat queazy for a while.
Falling back asleep again, this time I dreamt that I was in a kind of rental/summer house. Looking outside from a downstairs room, I saw a hound in the backyard that was trying to escape through a wood fence. It had pried some of the wooden slats apart and was about half-way through, its front end outside the yard and its back legs still on the side towards the house where I could see them. Its one back leg looked all mangled and bloody - and I noticed what looked like a great beast crouched down right near the dog on this side of the fence. It had huge talons or claws and shaggy, feathery fur, and it seemed to be about to attack the dog or like it had just finished attacking it. I shouted out in distress and moved across the room to another window for a closer look, and by the time I looked again, the beast had disappeared - but the dog was on the other side of the fence, whole and healthy.
My yelling had disturbed some people in the house who came running and I told them what I'd seen. At first they didn't believe me... but then (as dreams do) some time seemed to pass and in the confusion it was decided that there was a dangerous beast around. (Sometime during this, I was singing and dancing to "In the Jungle", especially the "ooo-EEEE!" part.) I must have been thinking about what I'd seen during that time, because I reached the conclusion that the beast was not hurting but helping the dog and that, despite its monstrous appearance, it was a healing creature. I tried to tell the other people in the house this, saying its name (what kind of beast it was, not its personal name) was something like Celia or Selena or something. No one would listen. Later, I saw it charging away from a horse stable area out by the side of the house. It looked somewhat like a horse, except beastly and monstrous. Imagine a skeleton without any muscle on it, but with just skin draped over it like a thin silk bedsheet.... except the skin was shaggy with feathery fur that was tangled and matted and seemed worn or rotted away in some places. I saw it running towards me and shouted, and people came out, but it was clear that they couldn't see it. Again there was some confusion and someone was sick or injured in the midst of the people gathered outside. They all thought the beast had done it, but only I could see the beast standing just outside the press of people as though trying to get to the injured person (whom everyone was protecting), as though trying to help them.
Then the beast stood up on its hind legs and seemed to transform from a beast into a woman, except that as a woman she was incredibly tall and thin with elongated arms and legs. I could only really get an impression of her and it was impossible to tell if what I could see of her was her clothing or her skin/fur itself - her legs, though long, seemed to be covered with a thick shaggy coat of hair that bowed out around like M.C. Hammer pants almost, and her arms (at first extended out to her sides) had long sleeves that billowed down and looked like draped wings, like a bat's sort of, that folded in as she lowered her arms to her side. Her head was bowed the whole time, with shaggy, matted hair hanging down so that it hid her face entirely from view. She gave me the impression almost of being like a wild animal that could not come near so much noise and clamor and people, and yet to also have a consciousness or intent or instinct to try to help the injured person. There seemed to be a sadness all about her. (After I woke up, it made me think of something I'd once heard of somewhere where a healer would take a sickness from a person and their injury or illness would become a part of the healer instead, so that the healer's body was always diseased and disgusting - but the healer somehow could sustain the disease and so would not die.)
Again there was some confusion and time passing in the dream, and then it was night time and I wanted to go out to the beach under the moon. My parents were nervous about me going out at night, but I went anyway. I drove a minivan and had trouble with the brakes, which were connected to some huge contraption that half-blocked my view in the driver's seat. When attempting to adjust the contraption, it came apart in my hands. I drove for a while along a highway since I could no longer stop, and realized that it wasn't night at all - it was a bright and sunny afternoon, and the darkness had not been night falling but an enormous storm of black thunderclouds that had blotted out the sun. But the storm was passing over (without doing any damage) and leaving the day sunny and fine. It was around this time that I woke up.
When Jeff came in to see how I was in the morning, I was still feeling pretty queazy and drained. I told him about my dream, and when I got to the part about the M.C. Hammer pants, he interrupted me and said it reminded him of the Garuda, a mythological bird-man creature in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. He went and got a card from his Buddha Tarot deck that had the Garuda on it and showed it to me - the figure had bird's legs that billowed out with feathers before coming in again in skinny, scaled bird feet with talons. The rest, though, didn't look much like the figure I'd seen - but mainly because I hadn't been able to see much of the face of the beast except for a vague impression.
Out of curiosity, later I looked up the Garuda on wikipedia. The wikipedia page says that one of the earliest references to the Garuda was in the Vedas, under the name "Śyena" and that it was a mount for the god Vishnu. It was a being associated with healing and in particular with protection against poisons (especially snake poisons). In Buddhist mythology, the Garuda is described as having enormous wings, so large that when they flap they "create hurricane-like winds that darken the sky." The Garuda is much bigger than a man, but can make itself smaller or larger, and is able to take human form in order to have dealings with people. It can also appear or disappear at will.
Doing an image search on Google, most of them looked more similar to the image of Jeff's Buddha Tarot card - but I did find one here that is somewhat similar to it, being longer and taller, and even the face to some extent though I could only ever get glimpses or vague impressions of it - but in the dream, the creature was much more beastly and frightening-looking, which is something it does have in common with many of the other images of the Garuda I was able to find.
Not sure what to make of this dream exactly, but the images of the storm that came afterwards, the shape-shifting and appearing/disappearing of the beast and its association with healing - especially right after the earlier dream where I was vomiting up white foam of some kind - all seem to indicate some kind of correlation.
In any case, I am going to take things easy and try to rest for today. Or however long it takes for me to recover from this cold that's clinging on.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Savanah's Year: Nwyfre of Earth, Calas and Gwyar of Water
I thought my neglect of keeping notes on our lessons with Savanah was bad back in January, and it's been months since I last updated about our progress! Granted, partly that's because we haven't been able to have regular lessons with her for some of these weeks because of scheduling, work conferences, kids' recitals and so on. But for the past two weeks (last Sunday and today) we've been able to get back into it.
Our final week of Gwyar of Earth work, we focused on the seasonal cycle of the year and the relationship between the sun and the earth in creating the seasons. We spent quite a bit of time talking about the difference between the Fire Festivals and the Solar Festivals and how they embody different ways of relating to the sun, as well as comparing these holy days to the Wiccan sabbats and exploring the differences and similarities. We talked about the cycle of the seasons as a metaphor for birth, growth, maturity, death and rebirth both in the human life cycle and also in how we approach our goals and dreams, taking time to plan and prepare for each stage and doing work that reflects the needs and energies of that stage. For her journal, we asked her to label a diagram of the wheel of the year with the different holidays and write a little blurb about each of them. We also had her pick out two more objects for her altar: one representing the sun itself, and one representing the current season. (To be honest, it was so long ago that I can't remember which objects she chose. I do remember being very impressed by the intuitive nature of the object she chose for the sun, but can't for the life of me remember what it was.) For that week's activity, we asked her to do a creative project to symbolize the wheel of the year and the cycle of the seasons. She used a new Christmas gift to make a woven bracelet with different colored beads representing the four seasons.
During February, we moved on to Nwyfre of Earth and introduced Savanah to the basic practices of breath meditation, centering and grounding. We began by learning about the physical breath and how it connects us to the world around us in the most intimate and immediate way. We began to connect the idea of the physical breath with the sense of life-force and spirit expressed through the elemental principle of nwyfre, and discussed how the way we breathe (fast or slow, heavy or shallow, etc.) can give us insight into how we are feeling, and help us to calm down and feel better when we're feeling upset. We asked her to journal answers to some simple questions about the relationship between breath and self-awareness (the directed questions that provide a review of our conversations during the lesson are turning out to work really well), and for her activity we taught her the simple breath meditation of bringing focus to the physical sensations of your own breathing (as a first step towards more complex practices). The following week, we moved on to the practice of centering. We discussed the idea of our "spiritual center" as similar to your "center of balance" and talked about different techniques to use to help find your center, that "still place of peace" between breaths. Her activity for the week was to practice the centering meditation and answer some questions in her journal about what the practice was like, how it helped her or what made it seem difficult, etc. The following week, we moved on to grounding, with a brief meditation I wrote using a stone from her altar (as well as some Awen chanting — I feel a bit bad because we didn't take much time to actually talk about Awen itself, since she was already familiar with it from participating in Druid rituals in the past). We discussed how grounding provides us with a connection to both the realm of the gods and the "underworld" realm below us, like a try reaching our limbs into the sky seeking sunlight as well as reaching our roots down into the earth to find stability and nourishment. We talked about the idea of energy exchange, and how grounding can help us release anxiety or anger that is hindering or hurting us, as well as draw energy and support from the earth when we are feeling weak or tired. The grounding exercise was her activity for the week, with some more questions for journaling about the experience and how she felt about it.
Throughout March and April, for the most part we took a break from lessons. The stellium in Aries meant both Jeff and I were kind of going nuts with energy, and work and other commitments dominated our time so that weekends left us pretty wiped. We did have a chance towards the beginning to get into the next month of work, Calas of Water, which was dedicated to learning about communication, connection and emotion in different practices and beliefs of Druidry, specifically through the forms and structures of storytelling, mythology, poetry and music. The first week, we talked about ancient myths and fairytales and how they were used to pass on important ideas and information about the people and the land. We talked a little bit about how stories don't just give us information, but actually give us insight into a whole perspective or worldview. To demonstrate this, we asked Savanah for her weekly activity to choose a myth or fairytale she knew and rewrite it from the point of view of one of the minor characters. The next week, we didn't have time for a full lesson, but we did go over her work — her story was excellent, a retelling of the story about the boy who has to face a giant (I forget the name of it) told from the point of view of the bird he caught. Very creatively done!
Last week, we finally got back on track and combined the last two weeks of Calas of Water work to talk about poetry and music together. This worked out well and tied back into the work on mythology that we'd done previously (so it provided a good refresher) — we told the story of Amergin and the Milesians coming to Ireland and winning the land from the Tuatha de, and read her a (translated) version of the Song of Amergin where he sings to the land to praise and honor her. This provided an excellent example of the blurred lines between myth, poetry and music, and we talked about using "concrete sensory details" in power to give our language power and to evoke feelings and ideas without explaining them in the abstract. We then played her the song, "I Am," by the group Beltaine's Fire, which is a song both praising poetry and rhyme as tools for learning and memory, and also drawing on and re-imagines the Song of Amergin, providing another connection. I spent a lot of time talking about how the vibration of music in our bodies — especially when we sing together or dance to and play music — connects us in a very physical, literal way, making our bodies vibrate in harmony. (This idea seemed to impress Savanah quite a bit, because she asked me if I had memorized my "speech" or just knew it off the top of my head!)
This week we moved ahead into Gwyar of Water and our exploration of dreams, divination and visualization meditations as ways that we can communicate and connect with our subconscious mind, the gods, ancestors and spirits of the land. We'd asked Savanah to keep a dream journal for the past week, so we spent some time going over the dreams she remembered and what they might mean, how they made her feel, etc. We talked about dream interpretation more generally and how the subconscious mind often uses symbols, images and emotions to communicate indirectly, instead of spelling everything out for us logically and rationally. We talked a bit about how dreaming helps us to integrate our waking experiences more deeply into who we are (like water churned up by activity slowly settling and becoming clear again during a period of rest), and that's why we might have dreams about activities that are either new to us or dominated the time we were awake on a particular day.
We also discussed divination techniques and how they worked, using very similar images and symbolic associations as dreams do. (This was originally going to be week two for this month's lessons, but we won't be seeing them next weekend and we're still trying to play catch up, so in order to give her enough work to do during that extra week we decided to introduce the idea of divination now and continue to expand on it when we see her again). Savanah is still struggling to believe that she is capable of doing the work we ask her to do, and will panic (or exaggerate her anxiety) whenever we suggest something that might be a challenge — to overcome this during this lesson, I asked her to try to think of five different divination techniques that she knew of just from reading books and seeing movies and talking to people. Sure enough, she was quickly and easily able to list off five: tarot, runes, palm reading, tea leaves and crystal balls. We talked about how each of these techniques worked, what you did, and why that approach was able to put you in touch with your nonrational/subconscious mind (or the gods — I think when we return to this subject, we'll focus more on how the gods come into it). We also talked about the larger categories that these specific divination techniques fell into and what other types would be included (for instance, looking for shapes in clouds, entrails or even ugly wallpaper is similar to tea leaf reading; gazing into water or a black mirror or even a thumb nail is similar to using a crystal ball, ogham is similar to using runes, etc.).
For her activities for the next two weeks, we've made recordings of the centering/grounding exercise from the Nwyfre of Earth lessons for her to listen to, so that she can practice these meditation techniques each morning. Jeff also gave her a longer relaxation/visualization guided meditation to do next week before she goes to bed in the evening, to get her used to the technique of visualizing before we move on to the third week of this month's lesson. In addition, we've asked her to do three tarot readings using her tarot deck (asking whatever questions she wants and coming up with her interpretations of the cards before looking in the book for their "official" meanings). And lastly, we've asked her to keep on recording her dreams in her journal as well, and to answer a few journaling questions next week on any kinds of patterns that she notices about her dreams.
So the work is going well, really. Every time I go back over the general outline, I'm excited by how much cool stuff we're going to cover over the coming months. I also worry a little bit that it won't all sink in (for instance, discussions we have months ago about using grounding to help siphon off nervous energy are obviously not helping Savanah very much in controlling her panic at times!)… and I wonder if we're trying to do too much too fast. But I think in general it's important to give an overview so that she has some sense of how it all fits together and can go back and explore more in-depth on her own if she chooses to. Since it really is all connected and intertwined, any little bit that "sticks" can eventually lead her back to the rest… and since Jeff and I are pretty well-versed and deep in our practice, there are some lessons that we manage to impart over and over, themes that keep reappearing no matter what specific topic we're talking about. I think those themes are also influenced by Savanah's particular needs — for instance, listening continues to be a lesson we come back to again and again, noting how important it is to listen in order to connect, learn, show respect, calm ourselves and find our centers, and listen to the messages of our own bodies, emotions and minds. I don't think that Jerilynn, for instance, will need as much reminding about the importance of listening as her sister, who is incredibly talkative and active while Jerilynn tends to be quiet and inquisitive. But we may face other challenges with Jerilynn that we didn't with Savanah… it's hard to guess almost two years in advance. I really am looking forward to continuing this work with all the kids, and eventually working this material into a book (or two or three?) at some later point. And it's very good to spend this time one-on-one with Savanah — it's made a big difference in how both Jeff and I relate to her, and her readiness to confide in and connect with us. For that alone, I think it's definitely worth it.
A note on the structure of the course itself… I think overall, it's working well. Now that I'm investigating astrology more and exploring the overlap between the three Druidic elements and the cardinal, fixed and mutable aspects of the four elements in the zodiac… I'm wondering if it might be interesting to experiment with a year-long study similar to the kind TDN has set up with their Perennial Course in Living Druidry. Setting things up so that, for instance, the lessons of Nwyfre of Earth correspond with the cardinal earth zodiac sign of Capricorn (Dec. 21 - Jan. 21) and Gwyar of Water correspond with the mutable water sign of Pisces (Feb. 21 - March 21). It might be interesting to play with the order in this way… though the order and structure I have it set up in right now feels very natural, building on what came before. Mixing things up might make it more difficult… but, on the other hand, it would also "personalize" the year-long study course according to each person's birthday, which might be particularly good for young people. It might force me to simplify the lessons as well, in the same way TDN's course lessons are fairly simple but still profound. I'll explore this possibility as I learn more about astrology and keep it in mind, at least.
Our final week of Gwyar of Earth work, we focused on the seasonal cycle of the year and the relationship between the sun and the earth in creating the seasons. We spent quite a bit of time talking about the difference between the Fire Festivals and the Solar Festivals and how they embody different ways of relating to the sun, as well as comparing these holy days to the Wiccan sabbats and exploring the differences and similarities. We talked about the cycle of the seasons as a metaphor for birth, growth, maturity, death and rebirth both in the human life cycle and also in how we approach our goals and dreams, taking time to plan and prepare for each stage and doing work that reflects the needs and energies of that stage. For her journal, we asked her to label a diagram of the wheel of the year with the different holidays and write a little blurb about each of them. We also had her pick out two more objects for her altar: one representing the sun itself, and one representing the current season. (To be honest, it was so long ago that I can't remember which objects she chose. I do remember being very impressed by the intuitive nature of the object she chose for the sun, but can't for the life of me remember what it was.) For that week's activity, we asked her to do a creative project to symbolize the wheel of the year and the cycle of the seasons. She used a new Christmas gift to make a woven bracelet with different colored beads representing the four seasons.
During February, we moved on to Nwyfre of Earth and introduced Savanah to the basic practices of breath meditation, centering and grounding. We began by learning about the physical breath and how it connects us to the world around us in the most intimate and immediate way. We began to connect the idea of the physical breath with the sense of life-force and spirit expressed through the elemental principle of nwyfre, and discussed how the way we breathe (fast or slow, heavy or shallow, etc.) can give us insight into how we are feeling, and help us to calm down and feel better when we're feeling upset. We asked her to journal answers to some simple questions about the relationship between breath and self-awareness (the directed questions that provide a review of our conversations during the lesson are turning out to work really well), and for her activity we taught her the simple breath meditation of bringing focus to the physical sensations of your own breathing (as a first step towards more complex practices). The following week, we moved on to the practice of centering. We discussed the idea of our "spiritual center" as similar to your "center of balance" and talked about different techniques to use to help find your center, that "still place of peace" between breaths. Her activity for the week was to practice the centering meditation and answer some questions in her journal about what the practice was like, how it helped her or what made it seem difficult, etc. The following week, we moved on to grounding, with a brief meditation I wrote using a stone from her altar (as well as some Awen chanting — I feel a bit bad because we didn't take much time to actually talk about Awen itself, since she was already familiar with it from participating in Druid rituals in the past). We discussed how grounding provides us with a connection to both the realm of the gods and the "underworld" realm below us, like a try reaching our limbs into the sky seeking sunlight as well as reaching our roots down into the earth to find stability and nourishment. We talked about the idea of energy exchange, and how grounding can help us release anxiety or anger that is hindering or hurting us, as well as draw energy and support from the earth when we are feeling weak or tired. The grounding exercise was her activity for the week, with some more questions for journaling about the experience and how she felt about it.
Throughout March and April, for the most part we took a break from lessons. The stellium in Aries meant both Jeff and I were kind of going nuts with energy, and work and other commitments dominated our time so that weekends left us pretty wiped. We did have a chance towards the beginning to get into the next month of work, Calas of Water, which was dedicated to learning about communication, connection and emotion in different practices and beliefs of Druidry, specifically through the forms and structures of storytelling, mythology, poetry and music. The first week, we talked about ancient myths and fairytales and how they were used to pass on important ideas and information about the people and the land. We talked a little bit about how stories don't just give us information, but actually give us insight into a whole perspective or worldview. To demonstrate this, we asked Savanah for her weekly activity to choose a myth or fairytale she knew and rewrite it from the point of view of one of the minor characters. The next week, we didn't have time for a full lesson, but we did go over her work — her story was excellent, a retelling of the story about the boy who has to face a giant (I forget the name of it) told from the point of view of the bird he caught. Very creatively done!
Last week, we finally got back on track and combined the last two weeks of Calas of Water work to talk about poetry and music together. This worked out well and tied back into the work on mythology that we'd done previously (so it provided a good refresher) — we told the story of Amergin and the Milesians coming to Ireland and winning the land from the Tuatha de, and read her a (translated) version of the Song of Amergin where he sings to the land to praise and honor her. This provided an excellent example of the blurred lines between myth, poetry and music, and we talked about using "concrete sensory details" in power to give our language power and to evoke feelings and ideas without explaining them in the abstract. We then played her the song, "I Am," by the group Beltaine's Fire, which is a song both praising poetry and rhyme as tools for learning and memory, and also drawing on and re-imagines the Song of Amergin, providing another connection. I spent a lot of time talking about how the vibration of music in our bodies — especially when we sing together or dance to and play music — connects us in a very physical, literal way, making our bodies vibrate in harmony. (This idea seemed to impress Savanah quite a bit, because she asked me if I had memorized my "speech" or just knew it off the top of my head!)
This week we moved ahead into Gwyar of Water and our exploration of dreams, divination and visualization meditations as ways that we can communicate and connect with our subconscious mind, the gods, ancestors and spirits of the land. We'd asked Savanah to keep a dream journal for the past week, so we spent some time going over the dreams she remembered and what they might mean, how they made her feel, etc. We talked about dream interpretation more generally and how the subconscious mind often uses symbols, images and emotions to communicate indirectly, instead of spelling everything out for us logically and rationally. We talked a bit about how dreaming helps us to integrate our waking experiences more deeply into who we are (like water churned up by activity slowly settling and becoming clear again during a period of rest), and that's why we might have dreams about activities that are either new to us or dominated the time we were awake on a particular day.
We also discussed divination techniques and how they worked, using very similar images and symbolic associations as dreams do. (This was originally going to be week two for this month's lessons, but we won't be seeing them next weekend and we're still trying to play catch up, so in order to give her enough work to do during that extra week we decided to introduce the idea of divination now and continue to expand on it when we see her again). Savanah is still struggling to believe that she is capable of doing the work we ask her to do, and will panic (or exaggerate her anxiety) whenever we suggest something that might be a challenge — to overcome this during this lesson, I asked her to try to think of five different divination techniques that she knew of just from reading books and seeing movies and talking to people. Sure enough, she was quickly and easily able to list off five: tarot, runes, palm reading, tea leaves and crystal balls. We talked about how each of these techniques worked, what you did, and why that approach was able to put you in touch with your nonrational/subconscious mind (or the gods — I think when we return to this subject, we'll focus more on how the gods come into it). We also talked about the larger categories that these specific divination techniques fell into and what other types would be included (for instance, looking for shapes in clouds, entrails or even ugly wallpaper is similar to tea leaf reading; gazing into water or a black mirror or even a thumb nail is similar to using a crystal ball, ogham is similar to using runes, etc.).
For her activities for the next two weeks, we've made recordings of the centering/grounding exercise from the Nwyfre of Earth lessons for her to listen to, so that she can practice these meditation techniques each morning. Jeff also gave her a longer relaxation/visualization guided meditation to do next week before she goes to bed in the evening, to get her used to the technique of visualizing before we move on to the third week of this month's lesson. In addition, we've asked her to do three tarot readings using her tarot deck (asking whatever questions she wants and coming up with her interpretations of the cards before looking in the book for their "official" meanings). And lastly, we've asked her to keep on recording her dreams in her journal as well, and to answer a few journaling questions next week on any kinds of patterns that she notices about her dreams.
So the work is going well, really. Every time I go back over the general outline, I'm excited by how much cool stuff we're going to cover over the coming months. I also worry a little bit that it won't all sink in (for instance, discussions we have months ago about using grounding to help siphon off nervous energy are obviously not helping Savanah very much in controlling her panic at times!)… and I wonder if we're trying to do too much too fast. But I think in general it's important to give an overview so that she has some sense of how it all fits together and can go back and explore more in-depth on her own if she chooses to. Since it really is all connected and intertwined, any little bit that "sticks" can eventually lead her back to the rest… and since Jeff and I are pretty well-versed and deep in our practice, there are some lessons that we manage to impart over and over, themes that keep reappearing no matter what specific topic we're talking about. I think those themes are also influenced by Savanah's particular needs — for instance, listening continues to be a lesson we come back to again and again, noting how important it is to listen in order to connect, learn, show respect, calm ourselves and find our centers, and listen to the messages of our own bodies, emotions and minds. I don't think that Jerilynn, for instance, will need as much reminding about the importance of listening as her sister, who is incredibly talkative and active while Jerilynn tends to be quiet and inquisitive. But we may face other challenges with Jerilynn that we didn't with Savanah… it's hard to guess almost two years in advance. I really am looking forward to continuing this work with all the kids, and eventually working this material into a book (or two or three?) at some later point. And it's very good to spend this time one-on-one with Savanah — it's made a big difference in how both Jeff and I relate to her, and her readiness to confide in and connect with us. For that alone, I think it's definitely worth it.
A note on the structure of the course itself… I think overall, it's working well. Now that I'm investigating astrology more and exploring the overlap between the three Druidic elements and the cardinal, fixed and mutable aspects of the four elements in the zodiac… I'm wondering if it might be interesting to experiment with a year-long study similar to the kind TDN has set up with their Perennial Course in Living Druidry. Setting things up so that, for instance, the lessons of Nwyfre of Earth correspond with the cardinal earth zodiac sign of Capricorn (Dec. 21 - Jan. 21) and Gwyar of Water correspond with the mutable water sign of Pisces (Feb. 21 - March 21). It might be interesting to play with the order in this way… though the order and structure I have it set up in right now feels very natural, building on what came before. Mixing things up might make it more difficult… but, on the other hand, it would also "personalize" the year-long study course according to each person's birthday, which might be particularly good for young people. It might force me to simplify the lessons as well, in the same way TDN's course lessons are fairly simple but still profound. I'll explore this possibility as I learn more about astrology and keep it in mind, at least.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Diary - Dream & Manannan
Sun: taurus (fixed earth), 6:03am - 8:30pm
Moon: *full moon, scorpio (fixed water)
Earth: gray, drizzly, rainy and cool all day
I woke up this morning (around 5 AM) from a very intense dream once again involving a sea god or man deeply connected with the sea, who I'm almost sure is Manannan.
This dream started out as similar to a dream I had a few weeks ago focused on anxiety about the upcoming wedding. In this dream, like the first wedding dream, I was stressed out about the wedding happening "too soon" and thus our wedding guests not taking it seriously — but "too soon" in the dream meant not our set wedding date in September, but right now, this instant. In the dream, I was not engaged to Jeff but to some other man. I don't think I ever saw him in the dream, but I had an impression of him being shorter and stockier than Jeff, darker in hair and complexion and rather rough and harsh. I was set to marry him "in May" (in other words, within the next few weeks), and I was somewhere resembling something like a beach house with my parents and a number of other people, some of whom were my family members and some not.
While there, I met a man and fell passionately in love with him, in the kind of deep-longing-to-be-together-but-never-really-consummating kind of way. The magnetism or connection between us was palpable, as it was in my previous dream about being mistaken for a priestess of the sea god. I felt like my heart was breaking open, but not exactly in sadness. We spent time together on the beach, and during the course of our conversations it became clear that if I tried to enter into some kind of friendship or relationship with him — even if it could not be a romantic one — this would fundamentally change my relationship with my fiancé. I wanted desperately to delay the wedding until the appropriate time (in September) so that I could spend the next months exploring my connection with this man of the sea, and I knew that if I did that, then the man I eventually married would be changed — I would not marry the dark, short, stocky man that I might marry "in May," but would instead end up marrying Jeff as I actually know him — but this was not because the person I was marrying would literally change and I would marry someone else… it was as though the darker man would somehow transform into Jeff through my relationship with the sea god.
This was all very confusing, but I knew that I wanted to explore the relationship with the mysterious man that I felt such a connection to. Still, I couldn't bring myself to let my family know or tell anyone, so I just tried to think of reasons to delay the wedding. I would meet him covertly, among other friends, as though he just happened to be a mutual acquaintance. Once, when out swimming in the ocean, he caught up to me in the deep waters where we could be alone. He said he had a gift for me, then dove down into the depths, not resurfacing for a long time. When he did finally resurface, he was pulling up from beneath the waters a huge ship, its wood creaking and spilling water from it. Friends from shore saw the boat and came out to see, so that soon everyone was clambering on board to explore (while I still stayed treading water next to him in the ocean). On one part of the deck of the ship was a hole in the boards which was covered over and seemed almost to be surrounded by dirt mounded up with bits of grass growing around it. It looked very much like a well of some kind, like you might find on land. Someone asked about it, and the sea-god-man warned them not to open it — they thought it was just a hatch down below deck, but he said (or made me to understand, at least) that it wasn't. Actually, it was a well, a kind of portal that dropped straight down into the depths of the ocean/underworld. He made me to understand that I could stay and live with him on the ship out on the ocean, but even there, I couldn't always be with him. Everyone once in a while, he would have to open the cover of the well and drop down into the very depths, where I could not follow him, and we would be parted. The notion of being parted from him was painful, but in a way that seemed like a noble sacrifice that was well worth it.
Soon after understanding the purpose of the well on the ship, I woke up.
So a great deal to mull over and contemplate in this latest dream (including the question of why I seem to be able to connect with Manannan so much better in dreams than during my ritual times with hi — or, I guess, why he chooses to show up at one time instead of another).
Part of what fed into this dream, I think, was my emotional state last night, spurred on by (yes, I'm a nerd) finally watching the Doctor Who specials from the year between the end of the fourth season and the beginning of the fifth with the 11th Doctor (that obnoxious actor guy who isn't David Tennant). David Tennant as the Doctor saw me through some pretty brutal, lonely times during those years of solitude and poverty — as well as the first few months of my budding romance with Jeff when we finally met in person for the first time (we spent several nights curled up on the futon watching Doctor Who, and then lapsing into make-out sessions while the TARDIS churned on the DVD menu screen ;). For the two or so years since then, I couldn't bring myself to watch the final episodes of Season Four (when the Doctor definitively loses both Rose and Donna, his best friend) for a second time… until just a few weeks ago when Jeff and I decided to go ahead and do it because we were going to start watching them over again with a friend of ours during a weekly "Night of Doctor Who" get together. Just last night, we watched the Special when the 10th Doctor dies. I cried like a baby. Like, we're talking sobs.
Several hours later, when we were settling into bed, I started crying again in a kind of odd mixture of sobs and laughter…. I can't describe exactly why I was crying, but it wasn't just about some silly TV show. I was remembering who I was during those years of deep, wrenching loneliness, and in some ways, I felt like I was mourning that Alison who had to live through those years. I rarely think about that time of my life these days, and my life now seems full of lots of little stresses and anxieties… and yet, now I am so amazingly happy and grateful that it's almost like I can't really allow myself to fully feel that joy, or I'd just be wandering around like a grinning idiot all the time. So there was this weird, sublime tension between my deep grief for that Alison of memory who is, in some ways, always going to be there, in that past, alone and weeping… and at the same time realizing how utterly ridiculous I was for not opening more fully to the joy of my present life. The only way I coped with those years of heartache was to embrace that loneliness and learn to grieve openly and cleanly, so that grieving became a process of healing and an affirmation of life. Now, I have so much to be grateful and joyful about… and yet I'm busy pushing myself, always striving, and beating myself up for not accomplishing more, not moving my career forward as quickly as I want to, not being as good a stepmom as I want to be, etc. All these stresses that, really, aren't that big a deal. Last night, it was as if I was again that sorrowing Alison of memory, only now I was looking forward at my life today… and laughing at how silly I can be, never cutting myself any slack or letting myself enjoy a rest. The whole metaphor of "regeneration" in the Doctor Who series, and this idea that the new Doctor is not really the same even if he has all the same memories… that's kind of what I felt like. Except, I don't want to forget the sadness and grief and loneliness of who I was before. I want to honor the lessons that sorrow and solitude taught me, and be more present to the very real joy in my life right now.
So before going to bed, I had resolved to develop some meditative/ritual practice to help me cultivate my joy and offer it as a gift, as I once did with my loneliness, to my gods and to Spirit and the Song of the World. I didn't know exactly what kind of practice this would be, but I wanted to pursue it. So it's not that much of a surprise to me that this kind of intense emotional turmoil and catharsis last night brought on dreams once again of Manannan. He always seems connected, for me, to that liminal state between sorrow and joy, grief and gratitude. The longing to be with him — and the wrenching awareness that I can't ever be, not really, not permanently — is a theme in so many relationships in my life (and one reason I think I found the Doctor so resonant and moving as a character). That I'm in a good, happy, stable relationship now doesn't really change that. In some ways, Manannan is reminding me, I think, that even with those we love, there are dark places we cannot touch and depths to which we cannot follow, and that as close as I feel to Jeff, I cannot take our relationship for granted. If I do, then the person I am marrying won't really be Jeff, but some shallower version of him more prone to my projections, more of a stranger than the man I love. But if I work to cultivate my joy and my gratitude and my love, especially in the depths where all becomes liminal and the autumn mists rise, then in the coming months my relationship with Jeff will deepen and blossom even more, and our marriage will truly be one of souls in love. I remember in the dream, understanding that it was important to wait until September, and spend time with this Man of the Sea, so that when the time came for me to marry, my marriage would blessed by the cool mists of autumn.
~
Ellen on the LotS SIG asked what I do during a "Seakeeping" shift with Manannan, so I thought I would share my response to her here.
Moon: *full moon, scorpio (fixed water)
Earth: gray, drizzly, rainy and cool all day
I woke up this morning (around 5 AM) from a very intense dream once again involving a sea god or man deeply connected with the sea, who I'm almost sure is Manannan.
This dream started out as similar to a dream I had a few weeks ago focused on anxiety about the upcoming wedding. In this dream, like the first wedding dream, I was stressed out about the wedding happening "too soon" and thus our wedding guests not taking it seriously — but "too soon" in the dream meant not our set wedding date in September, but right now, this instant. In the dream, I was not engaged to Jeff but to some other man. I don't think I ever saw him in the dream, but I had an impression of him being shorter and stockier than Jeff, darker in hair and complexion and rather rough and harsh. I was set to marry him "in May" (in other words, within the next few weeks), and I was somewhere resembling something like a beach house with my parents and a number of other people, some of whom were my family members and some not.
While there, I met a man and fell passionately in love with him, in the kind of deep-longing-to-be-together-but-never-really-consummating kind of way. The magnetism or connection between us was palpable, as it was in my previous dream about being mistaken for a priestess of the sea god. I felt like my heart was breaking open, but not exactly in sadness. We spent time together on the beach, and during the course of our conversations it became clear that if I tried to enter into some kind of friendship or relationship with him — even if it could not be a romantic one — this would fundamentally change my relationship with my fiancé. I wanted desperately to delay the wedding until the appropriate time (in September) so that I could spend the next months exploring my connection with this man of the sea, and I knew that if I did that, then the man I eventually married would be changed — I would not marry the dark, short, stocky man that I might marry "in May," but would instead end up marrying Jeff as I actually know him — but this was not because the person I was marrying would literally change and I would marry someone else… it was as though the darker man would somehow transform into Jeff through my relationship with the sea god.
This was all very confusing, but I knew that I wanted to explore the relationship with the mysterious man that I felt such a connection to. Still, I couldn't bring myself to let my family know or tell anyone, so I just tried to think of reasons to delay the wedding. I would meet him covertly, among other friends, as though he just happened to be a mutual acquaintance. Once, when out swimming in the ocean, he caught up to me in the deep waters where we could be alone. He said he had a gift for me, then dove down into the depths, not resurfacing for a long time. When he did finally resurface, he was pulling up from beneath the waters a huge ship, its wood creaking and spilling water from it. Friends from shore saw the boat and came out to see, so that soon everyone was clambering on board to explore (while I still stayed treading water next to him in the ocean). On one part of the deck of the ship was a hole in the boards which was covered over and seemed almost to be surrounded by dirt mounded up with bits of grass growing around it. It looked very much like a well of some kind, like you might find on land. Someone asked about it, and the sea-god-man warned them not to open it — they thought it was just a hatch down below deck, but he said (or made me to understand, at least) that it wasn't. Actually, it was a well, a kind of portal that dropped straight down into the depths of the ocean/underworld. He made me to understand that I could stay and live with him on the ship out on the ocean, but even there, I couldn't always be with him. Everyone once in a while, he would have to open the cover of the well and drop down into the very depths, where I could not follow him, and we would be parted. The notion of being parted from him was painful, but in a way that seemed like a noble sacrifice that was well worth it.
Soon after understanding the purpose of the well on the ship, I woke up.
So a great deal to mull over and contemplate in this latest dream (including the question of why I seem to be able to connect with Manannan so much better in dreams than during my ritual times with hi — or, I guess, why he chooses to show up at one time instead of another).
Part of what fed into this dream, I think, was my emotional state last night, spurred on by (yes, I'm a nerd) finally watching the Doctor Who specials from the year between the end of the fourth season and the beginning of the fifth with the 11th Doctor (that obnoxious actor guy who isn't David Tennant). David Tennant as the Doctor saw me through some pretty brutal, lonely times during those years of solitude and poverty — as well as the first few months of my budding romance with Jeff when we finally met in person for the first time (we spent several nights curled up on the futon watching Doctor Who, and then lapsing into make-out sessions while the TARDIS churned on the DVD menu screen ;). For the two or so years since then, I couldn't bring myself to watch the final episodes of Season Four (when the Doctor definitively loses both Rose and Donna, his best friend) for a second time… until just a few weeks ago when Jeff and I decided to go ahead and do it because we were going to start watching them over again with a friend of ours during a weekly "Night of Doctor Who" get together. Just last night, we watched the Special when the 10th Doctor dies. I cried like a baby. Like, we're talking sobs.
Several hours later, when we were settling into bed, I started crying again in a kind of odd mixture of sobs and laughter…. I can't describe exactly why I was crying, but it wasn't just about some silly TV show. I was remembering who I was during those years of deep, wrenching loneliness, and in some ways, I felt like I was mourning that Alison who had to live through those years. I rarely think about that time of my life these days, and my life now seems full of lots of little stresses and anxieties… and yet, now I am so amazingly happy and grateful that it's almost like I can't really allow myself to fully feel that joy, or I'd just be wandering around like a grinning idiot all the time. So there was this weird, sublime tension between my deep grief for that Alison of memory who is, in some ways, always going to be there, in that past, alone and weeping… and at the same time realizing how utterly ridiculous I was for not opening more fully to the joy of my present life. The only way I coped with those years of heartache was to embrace that loneliness and learn to grieve openly and cleanly, so that grieving became a process of healing and an affirmation of life. Now, I have so much to be grateful and joyful about… and yet I'm busy pushing myself, always striving, and beating myself up for not accomplishing more, not moving my career forward as quickly as I want to, not being as good a stepmom as I want to be, etc. All these stresses that, really, aren't that big a deal. Last night, it was as if I was again that sorrowing Alison of memory, only now I was looking forward at my life today… and laughing at how silly I can be, never cutting myself any slack or letting myself enjoy a rest. The whole metaphor of "regeneration" in the Doctor Who series, and this idea that the new Doctor is not really the same even if he has all the same memories… that's kind of what I felt like. Except, I don't want to forget the sadness and grief and loneliness of who I was before. I want to honor the lessons that sorrow and solitude taught me, and be more present to the very real joy in my life right now.
So before going to bed, I had resolved to develop some meditative/ritual practice to help me cultivate my joy and offer it as a gift, as I once did with my loneliness, to my gods and to Spirit and the Song of the World. I didn't know exactly what kind of practice this would be, but I wanted to pursue it. So it's not that much of a surprise to me that this kind of intense emotional turmoil and catharsis last night brought on dreams once again of Manannan. He always seems connected, for me, to that liminal state between sorrow and joy, grief and gratitude. The longing to be with him — and the wrenching awareness that I can't ever be, not really, not permanently — is a theme in so many relationships in my life (and one reason I think I found the Doctor so resonant and moving as a character). That I'm in a good, happy, stable relationship now doesn't really change that. In some ways, Manannan is reminding me, I think, that even with those we love, there are dark places we cannot touch and depths to which we cannot follow, and that as close as I feel to Jeff, I cannot take our relationship for granted. If I do, then the person I am marrying won't really be Jeff, but some shallower version of him more prone to my projections, more of a stranger than the man I love. But if I work to cultivate my joy and my gratitude and my love, especially in the depths where all becomes liminal and the autumn mists rise, then in the coming months my relationship with Jeff will deepen and blossom even more, and our marriage will truly be one of souls in love. I remember in the dream, understanding that it was important to wait until September, and spend time with this Man of the Sea, so that when the time came for me to marry, my marriage would blessed by the cool mists of autumn.
Ellen on the LotS SIG asked what I do during a "Seakeeping" shift with Manannan, so I thought I would share my response to her here.
Honestly, at this point, my practice with Manannan is still in its infancy, taking many stumbling baby-steps. My basic pattern for ritual work is the same I use for Brigid during my Cauldron Cill Flamekeeping shift. I begin my shift at sundown of the appropriate day, opening with a small, simple ritual of welcome.
For Brigid, I have prayers that I use to more fully invite her presence into my life and to charge/consecrate anew the flame pendant that I wear during my Flamekeeping shift. I light a physical candle during this ritual, even if I'll only be able to keep an LED one "burning" during the shift itself, and I pass the pendant above the flames while chanting, "Fire and Water in the Earth of my body, I keep your Sacred Flame." I don't really have a similar thing to do for Manannan, though I've been thinking for a while of finding either a shell pendant to wear, or a ring made of shell (like those hokey ones you can get at beach tourist gift shops). Instead of lighting a candle, I have a blue pitcher that I fill with water which I'll hold between my hands to charge, then pouring libation into my offering bowl (and taking a sip to honor the Spirit/god within). I do have a large whelk shell that was a gift from the sea when I was down at the beach last fall that I also bless. Afterwards, for both Flamekeeping and Seakeeping, I spend some time in meditation and prayer, maybe doing some trance work if I have the stamina for it, and usually concluding the ritual with a divination. During the next 24ish hours, I keep/carry/wear the symbol of my shift with me (and for Brigid, keep either a real or LED flame burning) as a reminder and object of focus for my shift. The next night at sundown, I do a closing ritual where I thank the god/dess for the gifts they've brought into my life, and basically do a kind of "unwinding" (for Brigid, this kind of takes the form of a metaphorical "smooring the fire" for safekeeping until my next shift).
This works very well for Brigid… but I'm finding that for Manannan, it's not jiving as well. For one thing, the metaphor of the flame or fire as something that requires tending (and then can be "smoored") means that the activity of the Flamekeeping shift is actually, well, active, even if only in a metaphorical sense. I feel like I'm actually doing something during my Flamekeeping shift, and usually my creativity feels a bit heightened. During my Seakeeping shifts, though, I've more often felt at a loss for what I was supposed to be doing… There was kind of a sense of the ocean not really being something that needs tending or "keeping," and lighting a candle just feels more active then filling a bowl with water (which will slowly evaporate over the next month, whether I pay attention to it or not). I think this may be one area where I need to rethink the Seakeeping shift and how I approach it. I'm exploring the idea of incorporating some ritual practice that's more about opening myself up to receptivity and relaxing into the presence of Manannan, and not so much about the active engagement and honoring that I do with Brigid during my Flamekeeping… if that makes sense. Some kind of ritual bath would probably be good in this case, but not always possible depending on where I am and what my schedule is.
Like I mentioned already, what I'd really like is to be able to develop some unique rituals for each of the Flamekeeping and Seakeeping shifts, particular to the energies of those deities, but then have one or two practices that I do during both that kind of connect or help to integrate them in some way. (I'm thinking, for instance, of the "Running the Iron/Pearl Pentagrams" in Feri, though I know very little about that other than their names, or the Turning the Three Cauldrons meditation that I've heard about here and there.) So that's where I'm at right now. Trying to find some kind of ritual that is simple enough and practical enough that I can actually commit to doing it regularly… but is also effective and ritually/symbolically meaningful and fitting…. So, lots to think about and experiment with.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Diary - Dream
Sun: pisces (water/mutable), 6:45am - 6:18pm
Moon: waxing crescent, aries (fire/cardinal)
Earth: sunny and cold, hovering around freezing for most of the morning and then warming into the afternoon, but the sun is golden on the snow and spring is coming
I had meant to type this dream up this morning, but didn't have a chance. I'm not sure exactly when or how it started, other than the usual "wandering around some place with old friends." In this case, I believe Ellen and other high school friends were with me. At some point, we were rushing through an airport, having just landed and disembarked the plane, when we came across Joe in a security officer's uniform (or police, I'm not sure which). I recognized him as we approached him, and he recognized me, confusion and amnesia in his eyes. This is not the first time he has appeared in my dreams as a go-between of the dead, as has Freddy since he died. This time in particular, his skin seemed dark, and he had the look about him of Hispanic-African American that Freddy had, though his height, body and build were his own and I knew him as Joe, calling him by that name in the dream itself. I walked up to him, seeing how bewildered and confused he was, not knowing he was dead and not knowing how he had gotten there. I felt overwhelmed with a kind of sweet grief and compassion for him. He looked at me and asked me where he was, what was going on. I explained that we were in an airport, that my friends and I had just gotten off our plane. He asked, "Is that the way I came to be here, too?" And I held my hand up to his face, touching his temple with my fingertips, and said, "No, baby, I'm sorry. You didn't come the way we came." (Considering that I would never call someone "baby," and in fact it's a pet peeve of mine, the naturalness with which I addressed him that way struck me as strange after I woke up.)
Then we were moving on, out of the airport, and we were in the College Landscape again - not the campus where I actually went to college, but a landscape that's a mash-up of several different campuses I've been to, all kind of heightened to an archetypal level. Huge, cinder-block dorm buildings stretched up around one part of campus, and academic buildings in another. Ellen was dragging me along to a play that some of her friends were in, and just as we were entering the posh-looking theater lobby, I realized I was carrying around the heating pad I use when I'm having bad cramps. I also didn't have any purse or bag with me, and I stopped her and asked if we could run back to the dorms so I could drop it off. When she insisted no, we were going to be late and it was my own fault for carrying it around with me, I replied, "Well, I was in pain, and if you had warned me we were going to a play, I would have at least brought my bag along to put it away." In the end, I think we decided to skip the play after all, because soon both of us ended up back in the dorm building section of campus.
I realized that I did not actually have a dorm room, yet, but had to choose one (as it was moving-in day for everyone, with the first arriving able to snatch up the nicest rooms). I lost track of Ellen at some point as we each went off to search for our rooms — I think she went off to a hall or suite where a bunch of her friends were already rooming together. I found a house-like section of a dorm building (much like the honors students' house I was in in college), and decided to try to find a room there. I had been explaining to someone earlier (perhaps Ellen), that I had tried for an MFA once before, but just could not find the right fit for me and so I had decided to leave the program. This time, however, I was enthusiastic that my grad school experience would be much better. As I wandered this section of the dorm building, I found a stairwell curving up in one part of the house, and I followed it up. It seemed there was a room in the very peak of one of the gables, and I thought it might afford some privacy and a nice view... but as I climbed the stairwell, it got smaller and smaller, until I could barely squeeze through it. At the top, there was a tiny trap door just barely big enough for me to wriggle my shoulders and hips through, and then a room hardly bigger than a bathroom, half of which was taken up by a huge porcelain claw-footed tub, and another part by a desk, with only half a mattress on the floor to sleep on. I recognized this as the room I'd stayed in before during that semester of MFA work, and understood suddenly why I hadn't brought a purse with me to the play — there was no room for anything but me to fit through the door, not even a purse, let along a backpack or laptop or pile of books. I remembered hating going back to my restrictive room and never feeling like I could get things in or out easily. Then I understood that this was why grad school had never "fit" before — I had literally been too cramped and isolated up in the attic. There was some impression that this was supposed to be "my" room, but I decided, fuck that, and turned and walked back down the spiral staircase from where I'd come. Reaching the second floor, I found that one of the rooms was still free and unclaimed there — it had huge double doors leading into a spacious suite with a half partition, and huge windows overlooking the campus. The central hallway of the floor, where the steps came up from the floor below, was more like a sitting area, wide open with several groups of furniture (couches and comfy chairs) arranged for lounging and socializing. For a second, I felt a rise of panic when I realized that, if I chose that room right in the middle of everything, there was no way I could avoid people, I would definitely be mingling and socializing much more. But I squared my shoulders and decided that this was necessary, if I was going to give myself the space I needed to stay sane and healthy (and be able to accessorize with large purses for books and heating pads, and gaze out those huge windows to the horizon).
It was about then that I woke up.
My impression of this dream, which was quite vivid and visceral, was that it reflects to some extent the change in attitude I've had towards my writing recently, and deciding to embrace the idea of a "writing career" instead of turning my nose up at teaching and such as a distraction from writing. A couple weeks ago, I had two nights of dreams in a row that involved me wandering around huge, mansion-like houses with many rooms and winding hallways — getting lost in them and discovering strangers and folks in unexpected rooms where someone was holding lessons or leading choir rehearsal, things like that. I've come to think of these "house" dreams as being about my own personality (or perhaps, more specifically, my mind). When I was teaching myself how to draw several years back, I had a bunch of intense dreams in a row about being in in my "house" and pulling aside empty boxes or clutter to discover whole empty rooms I'd never known about, and the excitement of realizing that I had more "space" in which to live and enjoy than I'd known about before. This seemed almost too obvious a metaphor for "discovering new talents" by exercising a skill I had never realized I had. These recent dreams, centering on strangers being in the house and how I react to them, seems like it has to do with my ego sorting out its attitudes towards developing a more "public" face for my work... and the fact that these have all centered around or involved teaching or group gatherings in some way makes me think that it's particularly that aspect of my career that I've been trying to incorporate. It's hard to find a better metaphor for my experience of grad school before, and how my attitude has changed since then, than this idea of living up in a tiny, cramped attic with a door almost too small to fit through — so that I feel both as though I don't have a home and as though it's impossible to bring things "out" to share with others (or make my life easier, like having a purse so I could carry necessary items with me without being exposed and awkward). Moving down to the second floor and accepting that I will be interacting with others, but doing it for the spaciousness and accessibility, is a pretty good metaphor for my change in perspective recently. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, hedged in and vulnerable, I feel up to the challenge, knowing I'll also have a real "home" to come home to at night.
I'm not sure what role Joe played in all this, other than to be there for me as a guided into that deeper dream state. Perhaps I am feeling to some extent a "death" of some kind, too, a dying to the old self and a rebirth, though it is different from his literal dying. The fact that, when he was alive, he held a position of authority in my life, which he held lightly and with humor, and was also acting selflessly as a volunteer when he died, means that he's always been a kind of gentle, but forthright guide for me in these kinds of dreams (often seeming to involve life-and-death, like the dream about my unborn son-that-never-was)... even if we never were all that close when he was alive.
Moon: waxing crescent, aries (fire/cardinal)
Earth: sunny and cold, hovering around freezing for most of the morning and then warming into the afternoon, but the sun is golden on the snow and spring is coming
I had meant to type this dream up this morning, but didn't have a chance. I'm not sure exactly when or how it started, other than the usual "wandering around some place with old friends." In this case, I believe Ellen and other high school friends were with me. At some point, we were rushing through an airport, having just landed and disembarked the plane, when we came across Joe in a security officer's uniform (or police, I'm not sure which). I recognized him as we approached him, and he recognized me, confusion and amnesia in his eyes. This is not the first time he has appeared in my dreams as a go-between of the dead, as has Freddy since he died. This time in particular, his skin seemed dark, and he had the look about him of Hispanic-African American that Freddy had, though his height, body and build were his own and I knew him as Joe, calling him by that name in the dream itself. I walked up to him, seeing how bewildered and confused he was, not knowing he was dead and not knowing how he had gotten there. I felt overwhelmed with a kind of sweet grief and compassion for him. He looked at me and asked me where he was, what was going on. I explained that we were in an airport, that my friends and I had just gotten off our plane. He asked, "Is that the way I came to be here, too?" And I held my hand up to his face, touching his temple with my fingertips, and said, "No, baby, I'm sorry. You didn't come the way we came." (Considering that I would never call someone "baby," and in fact it's a pet peeve of mine, the naturalness with which I addressed him that way struck me as strange after I woke up.)
Then we were moving on, out of the airport, and we were in the College Landscape again - not the campus where I actually went to college, but a landscape that's a mash-up of several different campuses I've been to, all kind of heightened to an archetypal level. Huge, cinder-block dorm buildings stretched up around one part of campus, and academic buildings in another. Ellen was dragging me along to a play that some of her friends were in, and just as we were entering the posh-looking theater lobby, I realized I was carrying around the heating pad I use when I'm having bad cramps. I also didn't have any purse or bag with me, and I stopped her and asked if we could run back to the dorms so I could drop it off. When she insisted no, we were going to be late and it was my own fault for carrying it around with me, I replied, "Well, I was in pain, and if you had warned me we were going to a play, I would have at least brought my bag along to put it away." In the end, I think we decided to skip the play after all, because soon both of us ended up back in the dorm building section of campus.
I realized that I did not actually have a dorm room, yet, but had to choose one (as it was moving-in day for everyone, with the first arriving able to snatch up the nicest rooms). I lost track of Ellen at some point as we each went off to search for our rooms — I think she went off to a hall or suite where a bunch of her friends were already rooming together. I found a house-like section of a dorm building (much like the honors students' house I was in in college), and decided to try to find a room there. I had been explaining to someone earlier (perhaps Ellen), that I had tried for an MFA once before, but just could not find the right fit for me and so I had decided to leave the program. This time, however, I was enthusiastic that my grad school experience would be much better. As I wandered this section of the dorm building, I found a stairwell curving up in one part of the house, and I followed it up. It seemed there was a room in the very peak of one of the gables, and I thought it might afford some privacy and a nice view... but as I climbed the stairwell, it got smaller and smaller, until I could barely squeeze through it. At the top, there was a tiny trap door just barely big enough for me to wriggle my shoulders and hips through, and then a room hardly bigger than a bathroom, half of which was taken up by a huge porcelain claw-footed tub, and another part by a desk, with only half a mattress on the floor to sleep on. I recognized this as the room I'd stayed in before during that semester of MFA work, and understood suddenly why I hadn't brought a purse with me to the play — there was no room for anything but me to fit through the door, not even a purse, let along a backpack or laptop or pile of books. I remembered hating going back to my restrictive room and never feeling like I could get things in or out easily. Then I understood that this was why grad school had never "fit" before — I had literally been too cramped and isolated up in the attic. There was some impression that this was supposed to be "my" room, but I decided, fuck that, and turned and walked back down the spiral staircase from where I'd come. Reaching the second floor, I found that one of the rooms was still free and unclaimed there — it had huge double doors leading into a spacious suite with a half partition, and huge windows overlooking the campus. The central hallway of the floor, where the steps came up from the floor below, was more like a sitting area, wide open with several groups of furniture (couches and comfy chairs) arranged for lounging and socializing. For a second, I felt a rise of panic when I realized that, if I chose that room right in the middle of everything, there was no way I could avoid people, I would definitely be mingling and socializing much more. But I squared my shoulders and decided that this was necessary, if I was going to give myself the space I needed to stay sane and healthy (and be able to accessorize with large purses for books and heating pads, and gaze out those huge windows to the horizon).
It was about then that I woke up.
My impression of this dream, which was quite vivid and visceral, was that it reflects to some extent the change in attitude I've had towards my writing recently, and deciding to embrace the idea of a "writing career" instead of turning my nose up at teaching and such as a distraction from writing. A couple weeks ago, I had two nights of dreams in a row that involved me wandering around huge, mansion-like houses with many rooms and winding hallways — getting lost in them and discovering strangers and folks in unexpected rooms where someone was holding lessons or leading choir rehearsal, things like that. I've come to think of these "house" dreams as being about my own personality (or perhaps, more specifically, my mind). When I was teaching myself how to draw several years back, I had a bunch of intense dreams in a row about being in in my "house" and pulling aside empty boxes or clutter to discover whole empty rooms I'd never known about, and the excitement of realizing that I had more "space" in which to live and enjoy than I'd known about before. This seemed almost too obvious a metaphor for "discovering new talents" by exercising a skill I had never realized I had. These recent dreams, centering on strangers being in the house and how I react to them, seems like it has to do with my ego sorting out its attitudes towards developing a more "public" face for my work... and the fact that these have all centered around or involved teaching or group gatherings in some way makes me think that it's particularly that aspect of my career that I've been trying to incorporate. It's hard to find a better metaphor for my experience of grad school before, and how my attitude has changed since then, than this idea of living up in a tiny, cramped attic with a door almost too small to fit through — so that I feel both as though I don't have a home and as though it's impossible to bring things "out" to share with others (or make my life easier, like having a purse so I could carry necessary items with me without being exposed and awkward). Moving down to the second floor and accepting that I will be interacting with others, but doing it for the spaciousness and accessibility, is a pretty good metaphor for my change in perspective recently. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, hedged in and vulnerable, I feel up to the challenge, knowing I'll also have a real "home" to come home to at night.
I'm not sure what role Joe played in all this, other than to be there for me as a guided into that deeper dream state. Perhaps I am feeling to some extent a "death" of some kind, too, a dying to the old self and a rebirth, though it is different from his literal dying. The fact that, when he was alive, he held a position of authority in my life, which he held lightly and with humor, and was also acting selflessly as a volunteer when he died, means that he's always been a kind of gentle, but forthright guide for me in these kinds of dreams (often seeming to involve life-and-death, like the dream about my unborn son-that-never-was)... even if we never were all that close when he was alive.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Diary - Dream
Sun: pisces (water/mutable), 7:07am - 6:01pm
Moon: waning gibbous, libra (air/cardinal)
Earth: early in the morning, still, but the weather forecast is calling for a chill, gray day with chances of a rain-snow mix later this evening
Last night, I had several intense dreams about the ocean, one after another as I woke and then fell back into sleep again. The first were more mundane — images of being at the beach, waves rolling, strolling along the sands, sun shining down — I suspect because high winds recently have sounded very much like waves during the night, and we're also reading a book at the moment that takes place by the ocean, though it's a rocky coast in Cornwall. A bit later, the dreams became more erotic in nature, with Jeff and I racing along the sands, chasing one another, catching one another up in passionate embraces and rolling, tumbling along in our lovemaking. (You can tell these were dreams, because the sand wasn't a bit irritating!) During this dream, there was at least one scene that took place in a kind of hotel room or small apartment furnished with lush décor and rich colors. Out one window, a scene stretched away far below (as though I was looking from the tenth story of a building) of rolling dunes and hills tumbling up over themselves into mountains — yet, facing the other direction, the room opened up onto the beach itself, right at sea level, the walls and floor slowly fading, giving way to sand and horizon, the ceiling stretching out and out like an awning that eventually became a drape of cloth that could be pulled away. The apartment had a sense of being cozy and enclosed within, and yet there was no discernible break between inside and outside where it met the waters running up the shore.
After waking up from this dream in very early morning, about two hours before sunrise, I fell back asleep to have another dream about the ocean, even more intense than the last. In this, the ocean's size seemed magnified, the waves huge and deep, harboring enormous sea creatures like whales incredibly close to shore, their slick, dark backs arching up out of the blue waters as they leapt and splashed. Above the ocean on the horizon, it seemed there was a god — the god of the sea himself — who would pull away and withdraw like an outgoing tide, and when he did, there seemed to be this great, overwhelming noise of... gathering, gathering in, not a sucking exactly, but a rumbling, gathering cacophony among the clouds, and in the sky there appeared a kind of expanding sphere of inward-collapsing cloud and light that pinched in, almost the way an hour glass might, or a funnel, as sand slowly drains from the top — the faster it falls away, the larger the sinking hole around it becomes. This sphere of pinched, withdrawing sky seemed to undergo a color shift, along with the terrible, tremendous noise, that shaded it the colors of sunset — reds and oranges and rose into deeper blushed-purples.
I witnessed this happening twice, standing within the lushly-furnished room from the dream before, and after the second time, once the sphere collapsed and the great noise was replaced by sudden silence, it seemed the sky turned into paper confetti, bits of cloud shredded up and falling, drifting down in bits of white curls of thin paper, and other pieces of sky in huge, flat papery circles that were on one side the colors of sunset and on the other side the bright blues of a sunny day, these circles that drifted and fluttered down past the windows, some of them five or six feet across. Of course, the sky itself was still there, it wasn't as though the paper confetti was the sky itself — only, bits of the sky that fluttered down after the noise and change in the sky had ended.
After this second time, the sea god returned to the room, which seemed to be his room or temple in some way, and he was in human form, or at least, that was the impression I had, or that he left. I had been with someone else, an older woman, in the room, but she was gone now and there was only me. I remember the vague sense of intrigue and accident, as though I were not supposed to be there and it seemed the sea god mistook me for someone else in how he greeted me with familiarity and intimacy (though at another level, it seemed to me that he must know who I really was and that there was no mistake, for he was a god, after all, and had to know these things). I was wearing garments of shimmering, sheer, sparkling blue and green in the flowing robes of a priestess, and he came to me as his priestess and drew me down beneath him and we began with an embrace, touching and caressing each other, our mouths searching each others' out. His body felt as heavy and wide as the ocean.
Through this intimacy, I could feel a sense of mystery flooding me, overwhelming me, the mysteries of the ocean that were only known and kept by his true priestesses. And because I was not a true priestess of his, I felt that rush of power and revelation and eager excitement, but also a kind of growing, intense fear as though I might drown. He could sense it, too, and seemed suddenly to realize that I was not his priestess (though, again, it seemed he had known this in some way all along) — and he pulled away, and we parted. He disappeared, went off again somewhere I did not know, and I was alone for a while in the room, thinking on the experience and the mysteries I had barely glimpsed. Watching out over the sea from the room where I sat, I could see the deep waters roiling, the winds above them pacing back and forth and churning up whitecaps — the sea seemed restless and an expression of his restlessness and reckless energy stirred up by our embrace. There was about the whole scene a kind of uncertainty about how to proceed, and a sense that I had "gone too deep" already to turn back now, and that once having glimpsed the mysteries I had to commit myself to pushing forward, moving on to become a priestess myself. As though a seed of mystery had been planted in me that I would have to honor and nurture, or it would one day rise up suddenly to drown me nonetheless.
I forget exactly how the dream ended, but I think he came to me one last time. I had walked out of the room and onto the open beach beneath the sun, bare feet teasing along the edges of the waves lapping up the shore. There he returned, found me again, and walked with me for a while. I don't remember what we spoke of, or if we spoke. The dream just faded away, with no real ending or conclusion, only a strong sense of his presence there by the ocean, and an intense longing almost more powerful than I could bare to touch him again, to be with him — a longing I felt echoed and returned from him.
Honestly, I'm not sure what to make of this dream. I have always had intense dreams about the sea, and maybe that's all this is: a combination of memories of the ocean stirred up by the book we're reading, and some sexual desire, and some other emotional tides. On the other hand, I have also felt drawn to the Celtic sea god Manannan (or, in Welsh, Manawyddan) for quite a time, now, and that draw has always held a sense of the erotic in it in some way, as he has seemed to me in meditations not as an old man, but as younger, wilder, both more playful and more dangerous. I wonder if this dream is a call from him to take seriously the invitation to become his priestess.
Yet at the same time, I find myself resisting that call, if that's what it is. I am so far away from the ocean here, it seems impossible to be a priestess of a sea god landlocked surrounded by hills and mountains! Not to mention, I'm not sure how I would handle that relationship and my relationship with Brigid Star Fire — after years of practice being monotheistic, I feel at most comfortable with the idea of henotheism: belief in many gods, but devotion to just one. I'm not sure how I could possible be a priestess of two gods, when both could make such a claim on me. I feel as though, to go deeply into the mysteries, I would have to be devoted primarily, if not exclusively, to one alone. How would I handle my daily devotional work to balance a relationship with more than one god? How would I work with each in ritual — would they work together in a single ritual, is there any basis in the lore for such a thing, would they be compatible, would they expect rituals devoted solely to them for each of the holy days, or more?
In my astrology, Neptune is opposite my sun, and forms a great triangle along with Saturn and Pluto conjunct. The watery connection of the moon, too, plays a part, and I had already been talking to Jeff about setting up a schedule of regular meditation and journaling in preparation for my upcoming Saturn Return. I was even planning on doing another journal entry today or tomorrow to explain the details of this work, since my first meditation is scheduled for tomorrow (and then approximately once a month when the moon is conjunct Saturn both in the sky and in my natal chart). Perhaps I am meant to work with Manannan as a guide to my Saturn Return in some way. He is considered by some to be a kind of psychopomp figure, a guider of souls back and forth between the mists of the world, across the sea into the west and the Otherworld.
As my first Saturn meditation is scheduled for tomorrow, I'll look into it then, I think. For now, I wanted to record this dream, since it was so very strange and intense.
Moon: waning gibbous, libra (air/cardinal)
Earth: early in the morning, still, but the weather forecast is calling for a chill, gray day with chances of a rain-snow mix later this evening
Last night, I had several intense dreams about the ocean, one after another as I woke and then fell back into sleep again. The first were more mundane — images of being at the beach, waves rolling, strolling along the sands, sun shining down — I suspect because high winds recently have sounded very much like waves during the night, and we're also reading a book at the moment that takes place by the ocean, though it's a rocky coast in Cornwall. A bit later, the dreams became more erotic in nature, with Jeff and I racing along the sands, chasing one another, catching one another up in passionate embraces and rolling, tumbling along in our lovemaking. (You can tell these were dreams, because the sand wasn't a bit irritating!) During this dream, there was at least one scene that took place in a kind of hotel room or small apartment furnished with lush décor and rich colors. Out one window, a scene stretched away far below (as though I was looking from the tenth story of a building) of rolling dunes and hills tumbling up over themselves into mountains — yet, facing the other direction, the room opened up onto the beach itself, right at sea level, the walls and floor slowly fading, giving way to sand and horizon, the ceiling stretching out and out like an awning that eventually became a drape of cloth that could be pulled away. The apartment had a sense of being cozy and enclosed within, and yet there was no discernible break between inside and outside where it met the waters running up the shore.
After waking up from this dream in very early morning, about two hours before sunrise, I fell back asleep to have another dream about the ocean, even more intense than the last. In this, the ocean's size seemed magnified, the waves huge and deep, harboring enormous sea creatures like whales incredibly close to shore, their slick, dark backs arching up out of the blue waters as they leapt and splashed. Above the ocean on the horizon, it seemed there was a god — the god of the sea himself — who would pull away and withdraw like an outgoing tide, and when he did, there seemed to be this great, overwhelming noise of... gathering, gathering in, not a sucking exactly, but a rumbling, gathering cacophony among the clouds, and in the sky there appeared a kind of expanding sphere of inward-collapsing cloud and light that pinched in, almost the way an hour glass might, or a funnel, as sand slowly drains from the top — the faster it falls away, the larger the sinking hole around it becomes. This sphere of pinched, withdrawing sky seemed to undergo a color shift, along with the terrible, tremendous noise, that shaded it the colors of sunset — reds and oranges and rose into deeper blushed-purples.
I witnessed this happening twice, standing within the lushly-furnished room from the dream before, and after the second time, once the sphere collapsed and the great noise was replaced by sudden silence, it seemed the sky turned into paper confetti, bits of cloud shredded up and falling, drifting down in bits of white curls of thin paper, and other pieces of sky in huge, flat papery circles that were on one side the colors of sunset and on the other side the bright blues of a sunny day, these circles that drifted and fluttered down past the windows, some of them five or six feet across. Of course, the sky itself was still there, it wasn't as though the paper confetti was the sky itself — only, bits of the sky that fluttered down after the noise and change in the sky had ended.
After this second time, the sea god returned to the room, which seemed to be his room or temple in some way, and he was in human form, or at least, that was the impression I had, or that he left. I had been with someone else, an older woman, in the room, but she was gone now and there was only me. I remember the vague sense of intrigue and accident, as though I were not supposed to be there and it seemed the sea god mistook me for someone else in how he greeted me with familiarity and intimacy (though at another level, it seemed to me that he must know who I really was and that there was no mistake, for he was a god, after all, and had to know these things). I was wearing garments of shimmering, sheer, sparkling blue and green in the flowing robes of a priestess, and he came to me as his priestess and drew me down beneath him and we began with an embrace, touching and caressing each other, our mouths searching each others' out. His body felt as heavy and wide as the ocean.
Through this intimacy, I could feel a sense of mystery flooding me, overwhelming me, the mysteries of the ocean that were only known and kept by his true priestesses. And because I was not a true priestess of his, I felt that rush of power and revelation and eager excitement, but also a kind of growing, intense fear as though I might drown. He could sense it, too, and seemed suddenly to realize that I was not his priestess (though, again, it seemed he had known this in some way all along) — and he pulled away, and we parted. He disappeared, went off again somewhere I did not know, and I was alone for a while in the room, thinking on the experience and the mysteries I had barely glimpsed. Watching out over the sea from the room where I sat, I could see the deep waters roiling, the winds above them pacing back and forth and churning up whitecaps — the sea seemed restless and an expression of his restlessness and reckless energy stirred up by our embrace. There was about the whole scene a kind of uncertainty about how to proceed, and a sense that I had "gone too deep" already to turn back now, and that once having glimpsed the mysteries I had to commit myself to pushing forward, moving on to become a priestess myself. As though a seed of mystery had been planted in me that I would have to honor and nurture, or it would one day rise up suddenly to drown me nonetheless.
I forget exactly how the dream ended, but I think he came to me one last time. I had walked out of the room and onto the open beach beneath the sun, bare feet teasing along the edges of the waves lapping up the shore. There he returned, found me again, and walked with me for a while. I don't remember what we spoke of, or if we spoke. The dream just faded away, with no real ending or conclusion, only a strong sense of his presence there by the ocean, and an intense longing almost more powerful than I could bare to touch him again, to be with him — a longing I felt echoed and returned from him.
Honestly, I'm not sure what to make of this dream. I have always had intense dreams about the sea, and maybe that's all this is: a combination of memories of the ocean stirred up by the book we're reading, and some sexual desire, and some other emotional tides. On the other hand, I have also felt drawn to the Celtic sea god Manannan (or, in Welsh, Manawyddan) for quite a time, now, and that draw has always held a sense of the erotic in it in some way, as he has seemed to me in meditations not as an old man, but as younger, wilder, both more playful and more dangerous. I wonder if this dream is a call from him to take seriously the invitation to become his priestess.
Yet at the same time, I find myself resisting that call, if that's what it is. I am so far away from the ocean here, it seems impossible to be a priestess of a sea god landlocked surrounded by hills and mountains! Not to mention, I'm not sure how I would handle that relationship and my relationship with Brigid Star Fire — after years of practice being monotheistic, I feel at most comfortable with the idea of henotheism: belief in many gods, but devotion to just one. I'm not sure how I could possible be a priestess of two gods, when both could make such a claim on me. I feel as though, to go deeply into the mysteries, I would have to be devoted primarily, if not exclusively, to one alone. How would I handle my daily devotional work to balance a relationship with more than one god? How would I work with each in ritual — would they work together in a single ritual, is there any basis in the lore for such a thing, would they be compatible, would they expect rituals devoted solely to them for each of the holy days, or more?
In my astrology, Neptune is opposite my sun, and forms a great triangle along with Saturn and Pluto conjunct. The watery connection of the moon, too, plays a part, and I had already been talking to Jeff about setting up a schedule of regular meditation and journaling in preparation for my upcoming Saturn Return. I was even planning on doing another journal entry today or tomorrow to explain the details of this work, since my first meditation is scheduled for tomorrow (and then approximately once a month when the moon is conjunct Saturn both in the sky and in my natal chart). Perhaps I am meant to work with Manannan as a guide to my Saturn Return in some way. He is considered by some to be a kind of psychopomp figure, a guider of souls back and forth between the mists of the world, across the sea into the west and the Otherworld.
As my first Saturn meditation is scheduled for tomorrow, I'll look into it then, I think. For now, I wanted to record this dream, since it was so very strange and intense.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
The Astrology of Me, New Year Edition
More insight from the stars about the coming year. Jeff says during 2011, Jupiter and Uranus move into my 6th House (Jupiter and Uranus do funky things for everyone this coming year, bringing intense energies with their conjunction, but which house they appear in will depend on each person's individual natal chart). What does this mean? Jeff explains:
He also sent me a link to a fascinating article, in which the author, Dana Gerhardt, discusses the effects of the 6th house in more detail. She writes:
How long can I expect this to go on? Jeff tells me:
Jupiter is kingship, power, will; Uranus is trickster, surprise, sudden collapse, anti-heirarchy. The two together are like a trickster-king. So imagine this trickster-king moving into your life in the realm of health, work, daily routine, etc. It could manifest in many different ways.For Jeff, Jupiter and Uranus will be doing their star-studded dance in his 3rd house, "which is communications and mental activity. It might be a super-big project at work, some new relationship I [Jeff] have to navigate, or something."
He also sent me a link to a fascinating article, in which the author, Dana Gerhardt, discusses the effects of the 6th house in more detail. She writes:
The 6th refers to daily time and how we spend it. Here most of us defer to the cultural norm—which is to do time mechanically. We fill it with productive activity: We work. Most of us have no choice. This could indeed be the “bad fortune” the ancients were talking about! However, most of us would admit that working is not entirely bad. There is something in us that likes a regular structure in our days. Studies have shown that the most depressed individuals are not the ones who have nine-to-five jobs, but the ones who don't—the unemployed, the infirm, the retired—those who have nowhere to go and nothing to do. The ancients said that action-oriented Mars “joys” in this house. Our 6th house likes to be in motion.Gerhardt goes on to explore how we can cope with and compensate for the heightened energies of the 6th house:
Merriman was suggesting that to balance the 6th, we should look to its opposing house, the 12th. This is the house belonging to the invisible world. It is Neptune’s territory. To keep Mercury’s efficiency in proper measure, we can evoke more Neptune—imagination, spirituality, the unconsciousness of dream. Just as our dreams carry images from our days, we might allow our days to remember images from our dreams.She continues:
Jung teaches there are two roots to psychological disease: the gods we forget to honor and the gods we overdo. Too much of Mercury’s “doing” without Neptune’s “floating in the empty spaces” makes "stress" a common 6th house syndrome. When Neptune is forgotten, this uninvited and quietly vengeful guest lies in wait, to throw us under his spell. Driving the freeway home, we suffer brief comas, waking up just minutes before the off-ramp arrives. We forget why we opened the refrigerator or entered the bedroom. Our bodies working like efficient machines, we go numb to the day. When we lose touch with our present, we fall prey to addictions. It's dishonored Neptune who puts the drink, the cigarette, the remote control in our hands.
What I discovered was that most people move through the day in the style of their Ascendant. I’ve got Virgo rising, which means I adore planning, making schedules and lists. "An hour for Tibetan prayers, another for reading, then onto my work," I’ll tell myself. But then there are phone calls, emails to answer, the electrician who doesn’t come when he said he would. Aquarius is on my 6th house cusp. Aquarius more accurately describes the unpredictable rhythms that I meet. Despite my best intentions, my Virgo plans usually break down. If the chart describes one’s daily rhythm, its formula goes more like this: The Ascendant shows how you want the day to happen. The 6th describes how it actually does.My Ascendant is in Libra, and my 6th house edge is in Aries. When I asked Jeff what this might mean for me, he explained that, "This means you want a measured day, balanced energies and all; but what you get is a day full of passion and energy that may sometimes careen out of control." That does sound like me. When I asked him about balancing my 6th house with my 12th, he continued:
You have a Libra 12th, with the Moon in it. This means that your emotions often come from somewhere you can't identify - they arise and disappear rather mysteriously - but they're not random; they're direct connections with Spirit, which knows more about what's going on than you do.He says that I tend to follow Gerhardt's advice quite well already. I may begin the day with a plan, but I hold it loosely and if emotionally I feel "called" to some other work, I usually follow that leading and go. Still, this has become an increasing struggle for me lately, and in some ways it's refreshing to have this interpretation of astrological events serving as both an affirmation of the patterns I've been perceiving, and a reminder about how best to handle these greater currents sweeping through my life.
How long can I expect this to go on? Jeff tells me:
Right now they're slowly approaching Aries. They're still in Pisces, but they're close to your 6th house and almost conjunct, so - yes, you should already be feeling the effects.More specifically:
It's something rather long-term. Jupiter will be in your 6th house for about a year, and Uranus for several years. There will probably be a lot of the energy this year, especially in the spring, and then as Jupiter moves on past Uranus things will settle down.
Jupiter enters your 6th house on Feb 2nd. Uranus will enter your 6th house right around the middle of April. ... Actually, now that I look at the actual dates, it looks like the influence is probably strongest very soon: Tuesday of next week! After that, Jupiter moves very fast and leaves Uranus behind, and by May Jupiter is already on to your 7th house. So... as far as Jupiter is concerned, not such a long-term thing.
Uranus will stick around for a few years, but its main effect will just be to make your daily schedule unpredictable. Uranus in the 6th house can indicate major health issues, but usually only in people who have other major problems (like high stress or whatever).
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