John Burridge

Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997 23:40:30 PST
Subject: What's up?


OK.

First off, I'm fine; the deer is fine; and my car is fine. You can say prayers to the spiritual guardians of your choice. ("Oh blessed Diana, patron saint of Deer and Automobiles...") Or not, as the choice may be.

I suppose that there were two impulses fueling the events of Monday night. On one hand was the need to get to Eugene to pick up my AIDS test and share the results with Mark (ah, dating in the nineties). On the other hand, my Deer Voice (which has successfully warned me about deer in the road twice in the last six weeks) was retelling me the story about when my Mom drove home with a shattered grill on her car after she hit a deer (on the same road I might add).

I've listened to the Voice which reminds me that the deer are migrating and I've driven through Monroe and am just about to conclude that "Oh, this time my Deer Voice must have been wrong" when all of a sudden a deer springs out onto the road from the left and decides to dash across the road in front of me.

I slam on the breaks and veer to the right. The tires screech in the rainy night. The deer tries to outrun me (while still crossing the road). I see it sort of dive on my left—dark eyes, brown coat, no antlers—suddenly bright past the perimeter of my headlights. "This is it," I think to myself, "I'm going to see hoofed feet doing cartwheels across my hood and end up with a deer through my windshield and in my lap." I close my eyes when I hear the BHMPF!

The car and the screeching tires stop.

I'm at the side of the road. I turn on my hazard lights. A car passes me. I get out. I go to the front of the car. No blood. No dents. No deer. I look around.

A large truck comes from the other side of the road and I see the deer lying down on the left shoulder of the road. As the truck gets closer the deer rises in one sustained motion and, as I watch, bounds over the ditch and away into someone's garden, where it apparently begins to munch on someone's harvest as if it hadn't just lost a race with a two ton 'Merican box of metal on wheels.

"Thank you," I say, and continue on my not-quite-so-merry way.

The mad rush to find parking in Eugene, and the wild dash up the stairs before the Health Department closes, and my negative test results, and Mark's negative test results, and the pizza, and Mark's light teasing about people with "agreements" with wild animals, and the discussion about AIDS testing as a form of homophobia, and other events crammed into Mark's 20 minute break are left to your imaginations.

So, I come home on I-5. Despite fog and some stupid drivers, the drive is uneventful. But as I pull in, what should I see dropping out of a tree but a raccoon. This is the first time I've seen a raccoon at our house.

"Aliens disguised as raccoons!" I say to myself, and then remember that the night (6-28-97) when I decided that I would simply just forget about ever falling in love, ever (and die Artistically Single, too). I was "rewarded" with a dream of Machka (my missing cat) leading a raccoon into my house (a weird dream house made of canvass). I didn't want a raccoon in my house because raccoons are wild animals and they might have rabies, and after a few futile attempts to lock the raccoon out of my house, I wound up accidentally killing it. (And what do you think rabies is a dream metaphor for; oh, I don't know, could it be, maybe—AIDS!?)

I watch the real raccoon retreat away from my headlights and into the brush.

"Is this some kind of vision-quest algebra test with power animals?" I ask, and begin to imagine story problems: "Deer gets on a train heading North at 50 mph in Eugene. Raccoon gets on another train heading South at 35 mph in Portland. Assuming they both start at midnight, what time will they meet with John's Car, and how many metaphors will he write about their meeting?"

Because everywhere you look at the intersection of cars and animals another metaphor for emotions and society springs up, begging to be used in a novel or at least some dippy-hippy new aged book by someone named Moonhawk Studmuffin. Animals rushing out of the margins and rebounding after a brush with the bright lights. AIDS. Health reduced to a piece of of paper stamped by the state. Did I say health—did I mean romance? dating? happiness? Masked bandits coming out of the woods and right into your house. Wild animals and domestic animals and cute animals and not-so-cute animals.

I expect that I will dream something very rich and strange tonight.


- John

Dream from November 2024:

I was one of four kings in a play; naturally, I had somehow missed the rehearsals and I was anxious about not knowing my lines. The lines were to be spoken on the slopes of a river bank, and we were on a boat traveling to it.

A bunch of us were in a wooden shack or cabin. The house was in the middle of a dry place, like eastern Oregon. The ground was dry and sandy, but there were pines or cedars growing here and there. I recall a window with a grid of window panes or a grate over it. I think there were curtains or hanging ornaments in the window. I have a sense of arriving at the shack at sunset and spending the night there.

There was a grimoire that I read my name in, but then I lost my place in the book and I kept flipping back and forth through the pages to try to re-read what it said.

There was also, for want of a better word, a witch (like someone’s witchy mom) in the shack.

I think we may have gone shopping for groceries at a Walmart or a Winco or maybe even a Safeway.

I might have dealt with the witch. Who as a result might have revealed there was a troll in the shack; troll’s not the right word, it was a spirit, a guy, kind of large. Sort of like a trailer trash dad.

I was telling the either the witch or the troll they had no power over me.

Near the end of the dream was a small cold sprite or spirit or gnome. It was trying to be brave in the face of the troll. At first this worked because the troll tried to freeze it with winds or just by being scary. But then the troll tripped or tricked the gnome into a warm fireplace and the heat of the hearth singed the gnome’s head painfully.

In the dream, it was something like 5 AM. Mark wanted to go on an outdoor hike, so we hopped into our car, which was a dream admixture of our Ionic and my dad’s Tesla Y: the interior had a screen and controls similar to our white Hyundai Ioniq, but the body and red exterior was more like the Tesla Y. Mark was driving us through the streets of Eugene to a wooded, park-like destination. It was dark; I don’t recall if it was cloudy, but it wasn’t raining. The dream streets and destination don’t really map to actual places in Eugene. I have a sense we drove through a kind of industrial and residential area like West Eugene. After a shortish drive, we arrived at a park on the outskirts of Eugene. I think I might have been trying to dream about Delta Ponds, because the shrubbery was like that, but it wasn’t Delta Ponds; I couldn’t tell you where, exactly we had been driving.

Mark parked the car at a wooden structure with a peaked roof, maybe like a pergola, only long, sort of like a covered bus stop. It was still dark, and I have an image of our headlights shining brightly on the bushes and the bench in front of us. Large bushes, like laurels and rhododendrons, and simple wooden benches dotted a walkway running underneath the pergola. Now that I think about it, the shrubbery was green; so either it was evergreen or else it wasn’t winter. I think the path started out as a simple path, maybe graveled; but during the dream the setting transformed and the pathway gave the sense of being paved.

We got out. Mark had some 80’s or 90’s rock music playing on the car’s stereo, which he left on (in waking life I’m wondering if a newspaper delivery person was driving by with their stereo on). I pointed to a dark car parked a few stalls over and said something to Mark about how the lights and the music might not be appreciated by other people using the park. I don’t recall how, but eventually the lights and radio turned off.

Mark strode down the path to the right and I followed. Eventually, we got separated. I met a middle-aged woman going the other way on the path; this was surprising, because it was 5:30 AM and still dark. I think I knew her, but no one besides Mark in this dream presented as themselves, and instead were a mish-mash of general Eugene folks, who I recognized in the dream, but on waking, weren’t really anyone I know.

I met more folks in knots of two or five. They transitioned from wearing generic grungy/frumpy/shabby Eugene garb to flowing Pagan robes. A creek or inlet appeared. Across the water I saw more people in robes. The day got lighter, but foggier. I realized that we had somehow driven to a pagan fair or ritual.

The folks on the other side of the water formed circles and were dancing. I’m not recalling any music or drumming or chanting, which in waking is odd because they weren’t that far away. The folks on my side of the water seemed to be waiting for other events to begin. I ran into a fourty-something woman with wavy reddish hair (who might have been B.P.) and I think she informed me that the folks on the other side of the water had paid extra for the event and were holding a private ritual. There was a sense that an unnamed someone or someones were trying to undermine Eugene pagans by introducing class resentment.

I continued to walk along the path. At some point I found Mark laying down, wrapped in a warm green blanket (which usually lives on our couch), and napping on a bench. (In waking life, I’m recalling that I saw him yesterday wrapped in our green blanket and napping on our deck furniture during an unseasonably 50F and sunny January day.) I had a vague notion that I should move away from him so any conversations I had wouldn’t wake him.

The covered walkway turned into a interior hallway, like a convention center (or, the more I think about it, the EMU at the UO campus); it was open, and fairly light (or at least the walls were painted a light color and the wood was a light blonde stain. I saw a gay man I knew walk out of a room in a leather harness and a flowing loincloth and join a group of other vaguely-Paganish-vaguely-gay men. They were in a kitchenette or breakfast bar or niche; I remember a small, head-level window that let in foggy, overcast light. I joined them and there was a group conversation about hiking or ritual or something; I think I was trying to dream about the Eugene Radical Faeries and the old Eugene OUTdoor Group and mushed the two groups together.

The group broke up; the man in the harness left (who might have been R.U.) and reemerged from his room in academic-casual wear. I was speaking with someone tall and blonde (who might have been M.H.). Suddenly, I became aware that I had a lot of stuff—like a box of papers, my backpack, my cloak, a shoulder bag, etc.—that I needed to schlep back to the car. Tall-and-blonde said he’d stick around and watch my things; I have a sense that he was putting away dishes and cookware.

I returned to the parking lot. The car wasn’t there. Mark had (presumably) gotten board and left. He had texted me that I could text him and he’d come pick me up. There may have been some more about the dream involving loading up the car, but the dream recall ends here.

---

This dream seems like it wanted to turn into a crossing into another realm dream with the water, but didn’t—thinking about it some more, those dreams usually involve crossing over the water and/or an animal like a white horse or an otter. I think it’s interesting that the car was an amalgam of a red and a white car, which suggests the tarot trump card, “The Chariot” to me. I’m not sure why Mark and I were the only folks in the dream who were themselves; everyone else had a simultaneous I-am-X-I-am-not-X feel.

New Year's Day I dreamed, among other things, that I was trying to fit into an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus.  The sarcophagus was more like a storage crate with a fancy faience and gold lid; it was narrow and short.  I was scrunched up; I have a sense my knees were drawn up against my chest, and I clearly was too large to fit the cover over the sarcophagus.  I think if this had been an anxiety dream, I would have felt claustrophobic, but as it was the tone of this part of the dream was more like, "Well, this isn't going to work."

I woke up for real, wrapped in the sheets and sandwiched between the dog, a cat, Mark, and the edge of the bed, with my left shoulder numb—so I'm pretty sure this part of the dream was inspired by an uncomfortable sleeping position.

I migrated to the couch, because this was about the third time I'd woken up in an uncomfortable sleeping position, and I didn't want my tossing and turning to wake Mark.  Cicero joined me, which was cute, and somehow did not interfere with my rest.

As far as Auspicious New Year's Dreams go, I suppose this means 2025 will be about recognizing gilded, but constricting circumstances.  That and I need to arrange for better sleep.

There was a side-scene where three or four female councillors were discussing my transfer. They were all wearing narrow dresses, in a business-academic style. One councillor was championing me; I forget the details of the discussion, but there were some rules that would have to be relaxed or bent to allow me to go. My champion concluded the argument with “Well, at least my ass has a cleft in it,” (implying that the others were tight-assed), and “Excuse me; I’m being a bitch.”

Back at the beach, I stood on a high dune or loose sandstone cliff about eight feet high overlooking a lower beach and the water. It was twilight; there was enough light to see the sand and the water, but the lights were still on in the distance. I climbed down the nearly vertical embankment and realized that I’d left my backpack in the beach grass at the top. I started to climb back up, which became extra tricky—I moved as if through treacle, the cliff was suddenly extra crumbly, hand and footholds became inextricably difficult. The tide surged in, and I got wet from my feet to my knees.

After some effort, I made it back to the top of the sand embankment and my pack. I looked back down at the beach below. Suddenly, three white horses with rippling manes were on the sand below; I have the impression that they came out of the waves. They wove back and forth in front of me; they whickered at me, pulling back their white lips and showing their not-quite-as-white teeth. They wanted me to come with them, but there wasn’t a way for me to climb down and I told them so.

I was wearing my purple and black cloak, and I used it to fly up alongside of one of the buildings; I must have gone up something like twenty stories. At some point in the dream, I'm not sure when, I noticed the hem of my cloak was very tattered (it's fraying in real life). I'm not sure how, but the flat roofs of the building and its neighbor somehow joined together. Maybe I flew through a slot, or maybe the buildings were at an angle that allowed the roof decks to join.

There's a break in the narrative, and it turned out I was in LGL's apartment. I had come to visit him for his birthday. (In waking life, LGL had just mailed me a bracelet I accidentally left at his home, and his birthday is in a few days.) In the dream his apartment was two stories, with dark shag carpets and wood panelling and stairs and possibly conversation pits. I was early to the party, but some other folks appeared. I don't recall a whole lot, but at one point LGL and I were speaking and he went to his balcony, opened the sliding patio door (in waking life he has no patio, but apartments across the way do), and we stepped out. With great alarm, I noticed the balcony was under renovation and there was no railing (shortly after waking, or possibly just before I woke up, I realized I was still wearing my cloak and could presumably still fly, so the railing's absence shouldn't have been a big deal).

The dream was in progress; events had been happening in a in a cabin, but I don't recall them.  I started out talking with a guy -- I want to say he was in his 30s or 40s. I'm not sure where we got a blob of lava, a fist-sized blob glowing yellow and orange, but through the magic of dream plot it was available. I decided that I would use the lava to make tea.  I had a vessel, a kind of large snifter, made of clear thick glass.    The lava was boiling water in the snifter for my tea.  

There was a dream shift and I was in a large lake, or possibly an ocean.  Below me in the water was the large snifter and the lava blob.  I don't remember how I was able to bring the glass to the surface of the water, but somehow I did.  There was a sense that I was still making tea in the snifter with the lava, and that the snifter was containing the heat of the lava.   

As I looked down through the water, I saw a group of people swimming, almost as if they were flying.  One of them was in a trench coat and carried a stereotypical black English umbrella in his left hand.  It was P.G. I must have called to him, because P.G. came up to the surface.  We might have had a short discussion along the lines of "Look, I'm making tea."

I decided I wanted to post a selfie of myself making tea in a large snifter with lava. I placed the glass on a convenient near floating table.  My cousin, J.S. was suddenly there, floating in an inter-tube, and we had a short conversation along the lines of "Look, I'm making tea with lava."  My phone was suddenly available and I called up the camera function.

The sun was beginning to set, and it cast red-gold light along the water.  I don't recall if the selfie ever got taken before the dream moved on to other things.

---

In the second dream, all I remember was that we were at some sort of ocean side resort.  It was twilight, and I was on some concrete steps overlooking the ocean, leading up from the dunes with a bunch of other (random dream) people. We looked up and there was a missile coming straight at us—it just hung in the sky, getting larger and larger as it hurtled closer. I threw myself to the landing of the steps and covered my head.

Through dream-perspective, I watched the missile, which was about the size of a table, whiz over our heads and crash into the beach below.   Mostly sand exploded up into the air; it was loud, but probably not a loud as a real attack missile would have been.

The sky was dark blue and orange, and the missile was a dark lump near a large puddle of water on the beach.  I decided that I wanted to post a selfie to social media, so I took out my phone.  While I was composing a picture of myself along the steps and dunes, in the phone's screen I saw a man reflected in the puddle.  This was alarming, and I turned around to see him directly; he wasn't there, and I concluded that I'd seen myself in the reflection (in waking life, I'm not sure how this could be, as I would have seen the reflection of the back of my head).  

I woke up thinking that I'd dreamed about posting selfies to social media twice.

The weather has been a rollercoaster this last week.  Earlier, we spent an enjoyable weekend basking in the sunny 50F weather; this last few days we've had snow and this morning it's 22F outside.  I'm not sure what the hummingbirds think about all of this as ruddy sunlight creeps into our backyard and I imagine they're in a torpor right now.  

Weird and vaguely erotic dreams this morning led to a Reed Dream.  There was a sequence in a dorm or similar student housing.  I was changing clothes?  and noticed that water from the leaking roof had made bulging trails behind the ceiling's and wall's paint/plaster.  At one point during the dream, I commented on the oddness of being a practically sixty-year-old college student, but this did not result in the dream becoming lucid, and instead there was a muddled moment wondering how I was paying for my housing if I wasn't exactly enrolled in classes.  

There's a break in my recall.  I was in a large, dark, brick hall, it may have been a library.  At one point there was a Christmas tree in the middle of the room.  Along one wall were a series of arches, stairs, and balconies.  I had an iPad, which I had been using to write.  A renaissance ensemble was singing a Mysterium (I forget the name of the piece, except that it has a boy soprano part that sometimes is sung with helium).  They were singing it straight, and a woman in a blue period dress was singing the super-high part. She was having a theatrical interaction with one or two male choir members, and I'm not recalling the plot.  

During all of this I was going to RollerBlade.  A middle-aged collegiate woman advised me I should put away my iPad, as there had been a rash of iPad thefts.  As I was putting the iPad into my canvas bag, it slipped out, dropped about two feet onto the brick/concrete floor, and cracked.  At first I thought it was just the safety case around the iPad, but it was the glass front, which fractured and offered sharp edges to my fingers.  I put the iPad back into my bag and started to strap on my RollerBlades.  Now that I'm thinking about it, these were my original black-and-neon-yellow RollerBlades.  I had difficulty getting the bindings snapped in place, as they kept crossing and doing phyics defying things only possible in a dream muddle.  I never managed to get both RollerBlades on, and only imagined gliding around the Christmas tree to the sounds of a celestial choir.

On the sky front, we had a break in the clouds and I managed to snap some photos of the Moon and Jupiter (and its moons), as well a Venus

I had a strange dream the other night.  A woman was doing divination from chicken breasts.  She would take a large wooden mallet and smash the breast bone.  The breast bone was a dream construction, a kind of grid of bones over a coin-sized sternum bone.  The woman would smash the grid of bones, which would pop out a kind of bench-shaped or pi-shaped bone.  Where the bone piece landed on the sternum piece was significant.  Somehow the number 23 was involved.  I don't recall if the actual number appeared on the sternum, or if the popped-out bone landed in the 23rd position (or both).  

I spent the day wondering if the number 23 would make a significant appearance, but so far no.

This morning's dream involved traveling by boat and car (I'm thinking ice was involved), and an abandoned art deco tour of a city that might have been New York, or might have been Astoria, Oregon.  Mark and I were touring in a group through structures that had been abandoned, but were simultaneously a hotel.  We started out in a kind of shuttle station which was located underneath the latticed deck of a large cast iron bridge.  Train cars, sort of like what they have at the Old Electric Station restaurant, were on either side of a causeway.  Lots of rusting Art Deco triangles.  

We walked to a five story building.  Instead of stairs, there was a kind of looping metal pipe (maybe it was a pole?) one had to climb.  It involved lots of reaching and swinging; one had to reach out and grab a loop of metal, then hook one's foot in anther loop on the other side.  Mark could climb it, but I was having difficulties.  The building itself was otherwise like a McMineman's Hotel:  vaguely art deco in style, and about a hundred years old.  

I'm going to guess this was inspired by some photos of an Edwardian church and newly released video of the Titanic.

We join the dream in progress.  Mark and I were at a kind of conference or festival, a combination of OryCon, a LGBTQA retreat, and a pagan celebration.  Mark and I were in a small motel room with lots of moonlight  through the window, white sheets, and white curtains [hot sex scene redacted, but I will keep the joke "up periscope!"].

Early in the morning, a man in his late twenties or early thirties knocked on our door.  He was an amalgam of various people I know, clean-shaven, short curly hair, earnest.  He wore a sheet or a toga.  "Oh good," he said when we answered the door.  "I wanted to check in on you to see that you hadn't disappeared and let you know that last night Todd [editor's note, Todd is a random name] and I were walking around last night Todd saw you naked in the window, and I turned and I saw you, too.  You want to be careful."   The implication was that the conference center was in a rural area and we risked harassment at the least.

There was a break in the narrative.  I was sitting at a long formica-top table in a darkish conference center cafeteria.  A group of us might have been sitting in a booth.  There were clumps of people walking by, and my sense is that it was morning... but it might have been evening.  Three generic "townie" guys were at one end of the table (in waking life they remind me of the 19 year old "townie-hood-wanna-bes" who used to hang out in downtown Northfield, Minnesota, only in the dream they were super-generic, bland, middle-Americans), and six or so folks of diverse gender and orientation were at the other.  The two groups were at the same table, but sort of pretended the other wasn't there... or more accurately, the guys were pretending to be part of the gay/pagan conference, and everyone else was pretending to be taken in.  

The leader guy pulled out some hand written notes out of envelopes and started reading the letters.  I wondered how he'd gotten a hold of them.  The letters were things like coming-out stories and poems.  It wasn't exactly a doxxing, because he didn't know exactly who the authors were, but he was reading them to his friends and saying things like, "Can you believe this?" and other judgmental statements.  I worried that he might have something I'd written.  A discussion started between the lead guy and one of the diverse women, and it seemed like one of the generic guys was not as convinced of his moral superiority as he had been.

There was a break in the narrative.

I was in a brightly lit conference room, like a conference center ballroom divided down the middle by a movable partition.  I was waiting by a raised floor or stage, about fifteen feet on a side.  It was a square grid of white squares about two feet wide, either a dance floor or else some kind of Dungeons and Dragons game.  Stairs on the grid led up to a second raised dais with a blocky throne.  I was wearing large black boots, more than motorcycle boots, but less than Glam Rock boots a group like Kiss might wear, and I held a large hammer (it wasn't Thor's Mjölnir, the shaft was like a sledgehammer's, but the head was a large rectangular hunk of metal).  A woman in a white dress, along with everyone else, was waiting for "Steve" (I've forgotten what his name was in the dream) to show up, so the presentation/conference could begin.

Finally, I said, "Well, I've got the boots and I've got the hammer, so I'll just start things until he get here."  I hopped onto the stage, went up the stair, and sat on the throne.  The presentation hadn't been going on long when some townies came in and glared at people.  I shrank back a bit on the throne hoping to remain inconspicuous.   

There's another break in the narrative.

It was dusk.  I was moving along a mostly straight path set along grassy and lightly wooded hills.  In waking life, the motion was similar to RollerBlading, but in the dream I was walking quickly.  The path was made of a dark red marble, with quartz veins and inclusions.  I supposed that either a heavy dew was falling or it had rained because the surface was shiny.  I held a long-handled rake, or squee-gee, or hockey stick in front of me, which I used to clear the surface of the path as I raced along.  I cleared off fallen miniature maple leaves that had fallen from some of the trees that the path sometimes passed through.

There were townies in the hill, but they had changed into fantasy raider armor of a vaguely Nordic type with thick helmets, with down-pointing bull horns on either side.   Sort of like the Knights of Ni, but I am only making that association many hours after waking.  They never got onto the path, but there was a sense that they might pull me off of it as I went speeding by.  I swooshed through miniature maples overgrowing the path, managed to avoid them, and raced before them.

Ahead in a canyon, there was a large group of mostly men having a dance contest.  It was night, but there was enough light from overhanging lights, and possibly a fire, to see bright red costumes of two men spinning around each other in a kind of tango or lindy.  In waking life I'm pretty sure this was inspired by a dance routine I'd seen earlier in the day.  More people came walking in procession along the path.

I was there to announce the end of the dance contest so that the contestants could be chosen and the next festivity could begin.  I rapped the butt of my rake in a four-four rhythm against the marble path, which made a loop around the dancing ground, and began to chant (iambic octameter?) in a language unknown to me: 

Oh-be Bárðarbunga nachtan
Oh-de Bárðarbunga nacht !

[editor's note, the chant is an approximation; the words Bárðarbunga and nachtan were not actually used, but something like that - there was certainly a ð in the mix.]  The crowd joined in and it became a call-and-response.  The energy of the chant grew until a hairy, burly man wearing nothing but a large, brown leather kilt rumbled a sustained and deep tone which ended it.

I woke around here; there was another scene where someone needed a special balloon inflation rig before the dance awards ceremony could start, but mostly I lay in bed and tried to fix the syllables of the chant in my mind.  

I'm trying to figure where this dream is coming from.  I was fatigued from a COVID booster and Cedar Creek Fire smoke, so the Full Moon ritual this time around was harping before moonrise in the backyard circle, scratching Cicero while an orange moon rose over the hills, and smooching Mark (once I got him outside).  This was followed up with various electronic word games with Mark, a small libation of tequila in honor of the moon, and the season one finale of Lucifer.  

The first part of the dream feels like typical privacy anxiety.  In the back of my mind I'm always wondering how well drawn bedroom blinds are and just how sound-proof everything is.  Mark at a convention, let alone a gay paganish one, would have been a sure sign I was dreaming if I had stopped think about it.  I think the convention is a lite version of "back at Reed" motif. 

The second part of the dream I suppose is a continuation of being out anxiety.  Mark dropped out of the dream.  I'm making some plans for traveling to a big city pride, and maybe this is connected somehow.  Though I am not sure where the generic straight rural townies are coming from.  They weren't "townies" per se, more just super-generic middle America dudes.  

The third part of the dream is puzzling.  I don't know what is going on with the boots and hammer.  The dream became more "Norse" as it progressed from this point.  The only thing I can think of is that earlier the previous day I had used a (smallish) hammer to drive some rebar into the ground in order to place gardening crooks for the sun and moon around the back yard ritual circle.  Oh, right... and recently I'd come across a 1902 painting of a "Young Germanic Warrior Looking at a Roman Helmet," by Osmar Schindler

The forth part of the dream is a fairly textbook otherworld transition material -- I'm surprised there wasn't a horse or a river involved, but the motion along the path (which did have a watery sheen) would count as crossing a boundary into an other realm.  Even if the waking world backyard circle of bricks transformed into the dream dancing ground, the hammer transforming into a rake/hockey stick still seems a little odd.  

The dream started in bright moonlight, transitioned to day time interior spaces, and returned to night time light by fires.  I don't know why by the end of the dream everything had become a kind of Heathen-fest.  I would have expected Greco-Roman or Egyptian or something more Arthurian.

We join the dream in progress...

(Sexy bits with naked men redacted.)

I was with a group of (presumably) gay men staying at a lodge in the forest and who were going to go into town for breakfast.  The meal was supposed to be excellent in a rustic setting—gourmet, but not pretentious; fulfilling, but not greasy or heavy; simple, but not unrefined.  I think we bussed (or rode a van) to a town that was on a large rocky outcropping (the entire town was built on one gigantic rock).

At the town, we entered a large, bright room where a circle of older women sat.  They were our breakfast hosts, and we thanked them for having us and they had a grandmotherly "aren't these fine young men" moment.  

We filed up some stairs carved into the rock.  The stairway was darker and labyrinthine; at times we were in rocky tunnels.  I found myself in a procession of people, mostly men, walking up through twisting stairways.  The way doubled back on itself, and I briefly glimpsed M.H. in his old red and black cloak as we passed by each other (this was apparently his cameo as he hadn't been in the dream until this point and didn't reappear later).

There's a break in the narrative.  I was either at the edge of a very large pool of water or floating in it.  There might have been stars in the deep twilight sky, but I couldn't tell you if it was dusk or dawn.  A pale hand—I couldn't say if it was mine or someone else's—held a lit lighter about an arm's length in front of my face.  At times the lighter's flame reflected above the surface of the pool, at other times the lighter's flame shone from under the water.  There was a circle of mostly youngish women around the pool's edge.

A chorus of women's voices began to sing (in waking life, they sounded like Bananarama singing a cover of "Spooky"; in 2/2 time):

They / say the moon / in the sky / is a lake / that would rather be a river //
They / say the moon / in the sky / is alive / so love her like a lover.  

A woman (at the water's edge?) began to speak, but at that point the house cuckoo clock in the kitchen began to count 6 AM.  I tried to stay in the dream and remember what she said, but the second cuckoo brought me into the waking world.

---

When I was relating the dream to Mark, he said the lighter sounded like a tarot card; I agreed, and added something about the Lady of the Lake.  Fire and water together primarily makes me think of the King of Cups tarot card, or secondarily the Queen of Wands.  I suppose it could be the Ace of Flames, or Lighters, but I'd have to meditate more on what it might mean beyond just being a cool image.

Thinking about the previous evening, before going to bed I'd been snacking in my Writer's Grotto, with a solar powered lamp underneath a circular glass deck table (one of four bought to be outdoor ritual tables), so that might have powered all of the circular imagry, as well as suggesting the Ace of Lighters Unquenched by Water.

The labyrinthine caves is a reoccurring dream motif, and I haven't figured out the precise meaning.  In this dream they were a transforming boundary separating the bright circle of elder women from the dark circle of younger women.  I used to have dreams where I would cross a boundary of water and into a magical zone, and lately twisty tunnels have taken on that role.  Sometimes caves turn into Caves of Wonder showing tableaus; maybe M.H. showing up was an attempt in this direction.   Sometimes tunnel labyrinths feel constricting, but this one wasn't. 

I don't know where the song came from.  This was the most lyrics I've dreamed since the 1950's-esque "In Corvallis" dream with the floor-show song, or the French burlesque song and routine "Va-vooom!"  both from decades ago.  Maybe I've been listening to "Agatha All Along" too much (having recently discovered it), but the song sounds more like "Spooky" -- the word play is fun.

Ugh.  I don't know if I ate something wrong, or if my stomach was upset, or if I doom-scrolled too much before going to sleep, or what, but I had the most unpleasant nightmare I've had in some time.  I've only read a synopsis of "The Squid Game," (thankfully) and this dream felt like that, with the added thrill of being called into some kind of final death-match even after I'd already been crushed to death by a falling object.  I suppose it was like being in a Hieronymus Bosch hell.

So I woke up around 4.  My usual response is to mentally cast a protective circle and invoke the four directions until I can drift back to sleep.  I keep hoping this will let me slide into lucid (or at least magical) dreaming; nothing so far, but it does have the benefit of keeping my mind from either focusing on what woke me up or doing the liminal-dark anxiety tizzy.

Dream fragment.

Mark and I lived in a house near the top of the hill where my family lives.  I recall more about the location of the house than I do the actual house, which was a little south of the crest of the hill.  I was outside the front door, possibly in the front drive, and I might have been floating.  It was a sunny afternoon and the trees were green and leafy.

Mark came out of the house.  He had an 8.5 by 11 inch paper (or papers) that he'd set on fire, and as the paper burned, it turned to black, curled, ashen fragments.   The paper was white, and curled slightly at the top; I don't recall if anything was written on it, or if it was old mail, or a bill, or what.  The fire was along one edge of the paper, and blackened it.  The ashes flowed off of the smoldering page and formed a ring of black ashes floating around me at a little over an arm's distance.   The point-of-view changed to a slow orbit around me, just outside the floating clumps of ash.

In the dream I thought this was cool, and I wondered exactly I might use a circle of black ash in my next ritual.

And then the dream went on to other things beyond my recall.

     I was at a party on a barge owned by Zack Pinsent and his boyfriend, Alex Zarlengo (I've never met either,--Pinsent is an Instagram influencer who tailors English Regency clothing; Zarlengo is a dancer/baker/fashion writer with a degree in neuroscience).  There were lots of people, dressed in costume (flappers, Regency, Ascott opening day, animal), pressed into narrow halls or congregated in the white and beige kitchen or a carpeted living room / lounge.   

In the lounge, where people were gathered into several knots of conversatin, a woman handed me a goblet of hot chocolate. The goblet continuously changed its form (although I wasn't exactly aware of this during the dream).  I sat on a low cushion or the floor and presently noticed a small dot of chocolate on the hem my white slacks (I was dressed all in white, in slacks, shirt, vest, and short coat).  When I examined the goblet, which had grown three crude, cylindrical mug handles, I discovered three pinprick holes in the goblet.  I tried to tilt it so the hot chocolate wouldn't spill, and discovered more holes.  I tried covering the holes with my fingertips, and ended up with chocolate on my hand and more chocolate on my hem.

I was relatively relaxed about this, and figured I would wash everything out.  I don't know what happened with the setting or the other people.  Water rose in the room.  I can't recall if I poured water onto my pants or if it simply rose from the floor.  The image is water rising over the stain, which diffused and lifted off of my pants.  The water became chocolaty.  More water rose and cleared -- I have an impression of my bare foot and white pant leg lightly billowing under crystalline clear water.   

Break in recall.

I was an otter or a mink or a weasel going through a series of tunnels.  I was following someone (?another animal?) through the tunnel, my sense is that it was a rescue / get to the princess operation (possibly meeting the woman who gave me the goblet earlier?).  The tunnels were dry and angular, made of concrete, as if they were steam tunnels (only not stifling) or set into the foundation of a building.  There were workers in the tunnel, working on wiring or steam lines.  The tunnels were dark.  At one point, I was hiding around corners, trying to stay out of sight of the workers as they did their ethernet line or optic fiber maintenance.   They weren't expecting me to be there, so as long as I stayed in the shadows and moved quickly, there was a good chance they would question whether or not I had really been there (in a "there's no way an animal could be down here, so it couldn't have been one" way).   I remember having to jump through a square opening about three feet off of the ground.   As I was scampering around, I found a worm, and pawed it with the intention of eating it.   During the course of the dream, I ended up a wolf. 

I had a strong feeling that I had done this before, or that this was a complete movie / story that I was viewing again.

As a wolf, I made it into a suite of rooms.  This was a movie set.  An actress--who may have been Nichole Kidman as Satine--was being filmed.  I bounded into her room, possibly a bedroom, (which wasn't the Elephant Room from Moulin Rouge!), which was a brightly lit and layered with cream and beige textured fabrics.  

It's possible there was a discussion here between the actress and the rest of the crew.

Somehow, we left together, and she drove us through (New York City?) streets in her convertible (possibly a Jaguar).  A very large, full moon rose in the cobalt dark sky and I raised my head and voice in a greeting howl.   The moon in the sky, the dark buildings towering on either side of the street, the wind in my ears and mane as we drove.  After the third howl, the actress glanced at me from behind the steering wheel -- I was sitting in the passenger's seat -- and said, "Wow, I guess you really are a wolf."  

 

Break in recall.

We drove through New York City, until we came to an end of Manhatten Island.  In real life I think we'd be near Battery Park, because the Statue of Liberty was near, but we drove up a ramp and were on the high end of New York (where white, shining buildings arced upward to the sky and extended out into the calm blue ocean).  

Break in recall. 

I was myself.  I had been using a techno-bracelet and a laptop to work on a website.  Part of the website involved ordering portrait-orientation images of (mostly) people into rows of five (in waking life I'm reminded of a card game or a directory).   I was working with a group of people, and I think someone was making a movie / documentary.   We were working in a brightly lit series of rooms (like an office suite or a bunch of classrooms -- I recall a long hallway).  (I'm noticing the similarity between the barge and the actress's suite... And this was different, but might have been the actress's suite... It did have a slight high school/college hall feel it it).   I had set my equipment down somewhere, and lost track of it, but I could make it beep through the main computer I was working on.

I kept signalling my peripheral devices to try to find them, but this wasn't working.  

There was a producer / director there, and I asked him if anyone on his team had picked up my bracelet or laptop; my sense is that no one had.

Break in recall.

The City of Poseidon at the top of a dam (it's possible the far-end of Manhatten Island became the city Poseidon).  There was a less glamorous town at the base of the dam.  There may have been a wedding reception happening here.  ?Something about groomsmen and lava?  Or scrambling over the scree along the top of a water outlet?  

I was in a brightly lit room.  There may have been torchères or standing lamps and urns in the room.  One end of the room was open to a wide terras, and late afternoon sun streamed into the room.  A woman (the actress?) and a black cat (Cicero?) was photographing me as I vogued.   I think a divan or low couch was involved.  She would photograph me and then we'd review images.  My recall is not good; I might have been dressed in a flowing ?white? robe; I might have been dressed in loose casual clothes.  I might have had a turban or hat?  

The last session was me, barefoot, ritualistically walking on an orange or red and black pattered  Oriental rug -- it wasn't a tiger skin because it was too red, but I'm put into mind of one (I'm also put into mind of flame).    I might have had a talisman or lamp or censor in my hands, or I might have been holding my hands up in some sort of gesture of presentation.  

I'm not sure if it was the Easter candy or something else, but I had a series of odd dream images the following Monday morning.  

The setting was a mix between a college campus and an outdoor shopping mall.  I was skating around (although I wasn't wearing skates), on a long, rectangular, frozen pool.  As the dream progressed, the pool became less icy and more a long, narrow paved walkway with a lightly ornamental edge (which had been the curb of the pool).  

A professor and about three assistants were at one end of the pool, levering molten metal in a crucible on a very long pole to a kind of dark metal platform on the far end.  The platform was surrounded by a network or scaffolding of poles.  This turned out to be a kind of giant, oscillating, telegraph machine (?the glowing crucible was on a swinging arm, striking the cold, dark platform/anvil ?), but it was never fully constructed during the duration of the dream.

Through a dream-transition, the pool was covered by a white tent, and a crowd of people stood inside, along the edge of the pool.  There was much more, but my recall isn't so good about it and this part seemed the most intersting—usually when I dream pools, they are more like hot tubs and there's a low level of sexual tension in the dream; this is the first time that I can recall the pool being frozen over (to the extent that it became a wide sidewalk).  

The telegraph machine is new; I'm not sure if it's a version of the Vision the Cosmic Machine or if it is a signaling device the Professor Figure is attempting to use to tell my normal waking conscious something.  

Strange mash-up dream:  I was Vaneyl Askeveron--sort of, since I was still mostly me with some powers of levitation and not a brooding Herald-Mage.  I appeared at a game that was vaguely Quidditch, only now that I'm recalling, it was more on the ground, like soccer.  My recall is muddled.  One team declared me their captain (they all seemed to know me and were very enthusiastic; they did not remind me of anyone), and I attempted to sort out their game skills and positions; they all seemed to be teenagers, and the goalie may have been younger.  

The playing field dream-transformed from a large soccer field with white netted goal areas into a large enclosed area, surrounded by castle curtain walls and with tower-like barbicans capping either end.  Someone had a large locomotive they were attempting to navigate up stone steps, which was holding up the start of the game (somehow the locomotive was part of our team?).  

There was a dream shift, and I was in a collegiate setting, possibly the lobby of a library, surrounded by a knot of people—folks had brought their children to watch, so possibly it turned into a kind of Country Faire performance.  I was in a mutable state of undress, ritually pouring water over myself, soaping up, and rinsing, all while singing "Station of the Sun."  As the washing progressed, it became less of a personal ritual and more of a public performance, like a between-acts show of some sort.

I am not sure what this dream signifies other than possible performance anxiety of some sort.

Yesterday was a vet day:  I loaded both cats into carriers and drove them to the vet's for their vaccinations.  The theory was if they were both going at the same time, they'd keep each other calm.  Based on the syncopated caterwauling, I'd say it was a bogus theory.  

The cats eventually forgave me for stuffing them into cages and taking them to That Awful Place -- Smokey was over it about ninety minutes after we got home; but Cicero held out all afternoon and refused to come into the house, even when it was hailing.  To be fair, he had hidden under our bed when he heard Smokey wailing from his cage, but I had coaxed him out and then immediately thrust him into a small loaner carrier.  

That evening, I read the synopsis of Dion Fortune's contribution to Neo-Paganism in Ronald Hutton's "Triumph of the Moon," as a kind of counter-balance to some other readings.

So, naturally, I dreamed...

I was on an island research center.  The island was rocky and temperate -- there were fir trees instead of a jungle, and it wasn't icy.  A group of us entered the center, which was blocky and reminiscent of classical architecture.  The more I think about it, the more I am realizing that it was based on the architecture of the Lighthouse of Alexandria.

There was something about riding an elevator, which, paradoxically, seemed to be lowering (there was some sort of shuttling motion in the rafters of the elevator car as if a cable was being unwound), but we travelled up to one of the upper floors.  There was also something about entering a defunct part of a library -- in my dream's eye, I saw a floor schematic of the complex, and we entered a greyed out portion.  This had been under the prevue of an unnamed country, but they had withdrawn from the research center for reasons that were never revealed in the dream. 

Somewhere around here in the dream, Cicero was with me.  We were in a kind of card catalog hall, with lots of shelves of unread books.  The room was large and airy, but dim, as if only every third light worked.  Leaning up against a shelf was a pile of books which included Dion Fortune's "Moon Magic," "The Sea Priestess," some other books of her fiction, and some sort of book on antiquities that belonged to my parents (their names were written on the inside cover of the book.  The sense was that since this section of the research center was closed, if we wanted to, we could take some of the books.  I wanted some of the books I saw, especially the one that had been my parents' -- in the dream I supposed that the book had been left behind when they left the Mangla Dam Project, but I couldn't figure out how it had ended up in a foreign government's library.  I had a sense that this was my, or at least my family's, book, and that I had every right to it.

The ownership of the books didn't resolve, and the group left the library.  There was something here about going down a level or two to a kind of utility or engineering floor filled with lots of unused machinery.  At this point, Cicero got away from me (he'd been good up until then) and I had to coax him out from between collections of shelved tools and conduit that he'd crawled into.

There was probably more to the dream, but that's all I recall.  What strikes me about this dream is that it could have turned into an elevator anxiety dream, but didn't; it could have turned into a lost in a twisty, constricted place, but it didn't; and that it was set in a conflation of the Lighthouse of Alexandria and the Library of Alexandria.  

 

It's new moon.  This last one has been somewhat typical in that instead of feeling the Currents of Nature Flowing through the Secret Station of Regeneration, I've just felt fatigued.  

Lately I've been trying to use social media less and journal by hand more.  I'm doing this to recondition my brain to go through the mechanics of writing and composing, to help with focus, and also to improve my dream recall.  One advantage of journaling is that I don't have to censor it or make it as publicly performative as much as I would for an on-line post.  

It's hard to tell if it's working, but I at least I have had some interesting dream images appear over the last two weeks.  Significantly, I had a "Return to Arcosanti" dream the other day that was different on three counts.  Instead of being there by myself, Mark was with me;  instead of feeling stuck there and anxious about travel back, Mark said, "We're not in a hurry. Why don't we spend the night?", and; instead of the canyon being filled with a giant lake, there was a glowing, crystal structure at the base of the southern mesa facing the site.   

On the reading front, I set aside Jung while I read a fluffy book about Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune.  I guess I've been spoiled by Ronald Hutton, because I was disappointed by the second- and third-hand anecdotes and speculation in the book.  At 160 pages, it was a quick read  filled with trivia.  The central theses are that Crowley and Fortune might have worked together, that they were geniuses, that they lay the astral groundwork for the queer (Crowley) and women's (Fortune) movements through sex magick, and taken together they represent balanced polarities working in the magical European landscape of the mid 1900's.  While the book did read like the author's notes on other books,  I did think that working with a reverse-chronology and beginning the book with the two's deaths was a clever choice.  I'm not sure if I would hang onto the book it, but the book could be an interesting source for writing magician characters.

We join the dream in progress...

I went backstage to a performance of "King Lear" (although it might have been a different king).  Barack Obama was playing the titular king.  He came out in renaissance garb, with a mustache and goatee.  There were three or four generic dream important people (heads of state?) also backstage, but renaissance Obama walked over to me, much to my surprise.  He may have said something to me, but I can't recall it.  

Through a dream switch, I was playing the titular king.  I've never seen or read "King Lear," although I know it's about an old king and his three daughters.   I was anxious because it was opening night and I had no recollection of rehearsals or my lines (which is typical for my dreams).   In the play, I was following my twenty-something wife, who had long dark hair and wore a loose, gauzy, flowing white dress, up a series of stone steps.  The stage and steps were dark.  I was spying on her, in an Othello kind of way.  I've only seen an opera of Othello, but I know in a fit of murderous jealousy, he kills his wife.   I'm confused about the exact staging, because I think we walked up the theatre aisle, which turned into a wide stairway, which then branched.  The branching allowed me to get ahead of her and crouch behind some kind crenelated platform.  I watched two men come out of the shadows, stab her, and then flee.

This was my cue to descend the stairway and deliver a speech.  Someone off-stage buzzed a buzzer, which was supposed to prompt me.  I came down to her side.  I wasn't able to recall a line, and may have improvised something.  In my mind I wondered what my parents, who were in the audience, might think--and I could imagine the negative reviews of the play in the papers. 

The actress playing my wife was telepathic.  :What's going on, boo?:  she asked. 

:I'm blanking out on my lines.: I replied, also telepathically.

She said something along the lines of :You call for help.: 

A guard and an advisor appeared on the scene.  

There were a few more wildly improvised Shakespearian speeches about Love and Death while my wife artistically bled to death on the steps.  At one point I looked at the advisor and said, "Prompt," and he led me through a flowery soliloquy.

The dream transitioned out of a play and into an in-world fantasy.

I was the bitter king grieving from his mountain kingdom over his recently slain wife. 

After months of moping around, I was going to have my revenge on Europe.

Anachronistically, I and my peasants loaded up a convoy of semi-trucks, drove down narrow, winding, mountain roads and set up a gigantic carousel gambling house called, "The Deceit of Venice."    Yes, it was a casino; yes, it slowly spun around; yes, I was going to get everyone's money.

Snakes were in this part.  I don't recall the specifics other than a small white snake crawled over to me and bit me on the mons pubis (in real life I had to urinate? or the dog kicked me?).   At another point, I and a group of minions walked by a long sequined tapestry of a peacock, which looked like a bejeweled version of our peacock tile coaster, which turned into a very large, glimmering, scaled snake after we had passed it.