Category Archives: Dreams

What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been


The truly brilliant and always-grounded Athenae has up a great weekend post asking people to discuss the most transformative trips they've ever taken. What a great question!

One thing that amazes me is how, for most of her commenters, the important trips were trips into nature. Oddly, one of my most important trips, much as I always push a connection with nature, was a trip from the mountains and woods to a city.

As I answered at Athenae's blog, one of the most transformative trips that I ever took was when I was five and my family moved from rural Colorado ("my city of mountains, stay with me, stay") to Washington, D.C. For that little, impressionable Pisces, walking off of the train into a city of marble monuments and heroic statues was completely transformative. My entire conception of what the world was and could be changed when I moved from wooded mountainsides to a city full of architecture and gardens devoted to an heroic archetype of democracy. I fell madly in love (and fifty years later, I am only that much more devoted) with every carved marble wheat sheaf and arrow, every faux-Grecian column, every naked woman representing some high-minded ideal (bite me, John Ashcroft, no, really), every amazing painting calling to me from the walls of a museum. I gave myself all the way to the United States Botanical Garden, to the National Arboretum, to the fountains (Lit! At night! I'd never seen a fountain before, not to mention imagined that they could be lit up at night! Kennedy was in the WH, it was Camelot in DC, the entire city seemed, to me, full of sparkling fountains that shone all night long. And there were ladies in pillbox hats and amazingly-constructed dresses w/ princess seams, wearing 3/4 length gloves! 3/4 length!).

I still love to retreat to the mountains, although, now, for me, five decades later, it is the Allegheny and Appalachian mountains that soothe my soul. I haven't been to the Rockies for forty years. And I've been v happy during some long, long trips to the California coast. But in my dreams, I am still, most often, in a very wet city on the edge of a river, a city full of marble monuments and archetypical statues.

Just last night, I dreamed that there was a wonderful arts program inside the Capitol, run by a brilliant and energetic young woman. I was hosting a young teen-age woman interested in government and art and, finding ourselves downtown with a bit of extra time, I decided to drive her to the Capitol to check out the arts program. We drove past statues that, while they do not exist in the "mundane" D.C., most certainly do exist in the archetypical DC: statues of heras, and feminine beasts, and deep principles. My (long dead) mother and I walked our guest into the Capitol which turned out to be, as only the not-so-"mundane" Capitol really is, full of open skylights that a young woman might step through and hurt herself and large bookshelves that she could climb on and pull over on herself. And, yet, we got our guest up to the front to meet the young hera running the history and arts program and, when I awoke to put myself magically back into the dream and started to soothe over the dangers, my young guest showed up in my not-awake-not-asleep dream and said, "Please, don't. I like it better like that." She's right. So do I. I love this city best with all of its dangers and pitfalls. Especially the ones that people mean when they sneer about "inside the Beltway."

I opened up and embraced them half a century ago when I was five. One of the first dreams that I ever had of this city was when I was six and dreamed that I was swimming in a fountain at the pool of Blessed Mary's feet, just outside Union Station, looking up and watching her nod to me. (There is no such "real" place in the "mundane" city, not even at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, which somehow transposed itself with Union Station in my dream.) When I was six, Mary was the only image that I had for the divine feminine. Today, I see that ancient dream as my first attempt to connect to (swim in the water of) Columbia's symbolic city. May I swim here until I die. May you dream yourself into your own most important landscape.

How would you answer Athenae?

When you bring a child to a magical place, you can't be surprised if she spends half a century or so living there, both physically and in her dreams. Where will you take the most important child in your life?

Picture found here.

Deep in the Cellars of the Tower


Maybe it's the slowly-growing light. Maybe it's the mystically epic winds that have been blowing new ideas all over my snug little cottage. Maybe it's the way that the still-long-dark nights dance in my consciousness, but, whatever the reason, my dreams lately have been far more capable of making an impression than normal.

A few nights ago, I dreamt that my mother and my sister-the-antagonist were teaching G/Son an evilly racist form of Asatru (and, believe me, neither of them ever even imagined anything such as Asatru) devoted to Horus (I know. What can I say? It was a dream). In particular, they were teaching him a set of movements designed to mimic water-birds and to invoke some (in my dream) particularly racist form of Horus/Asatru worship. I was almost beside myself with anger, and I called them out on their behavior. I stormed outside to the front of my childhood home, where they had hooked my car up to their dilapidated car in an attempt to repair theirs. There was a license plate removed from their car (that I can almost see, but can't remember) that held the entire message of the dream. I got in my car and drove off, unhooking my car from theirs, and lecturing the First Ex-Mr. Hecate about just how angry I was. I always pay attention to the dreams where I tell him that.

Then, last night, the serious winds woke me up and made me realize how cold and bitter it was outside and how safe and warm I was inside. Maybe it was that I'd been thinking about Thalia's gift from her sister and how much I've been thinking about gifting myself with Jung's Red Book, but something drew me off into a dream about a red-stone house beside the road with a huge round turret out front. At first, I was, in my dream, driving past the house, just admiring the turret and the ornaments set around it. Then, I realized that, from my car, I could see right into one of the 4th story windows, and I thought, "That would be my bedroom, visible to all who drove by." In a moment, like Alice through the looking glass, I was inside the windows and realized that, no, this wasn't a bedroom, it was a lovely drawing room. There was a party beginning, and many of the guests had brought with them mask-faced guards out of a chess game. I wandered in and greeted the hostess, aware that she wanted to sell the house. I wound down the steps, a bit less enchanted with each level of the underworld that I explored. Wow, her kitchen's not as good as mine, by a long shot. Her bedroom's not nearly as nice as mine. I could make this kitchen good, but when I mention to her that I'd turn that low, industrial sink into a fireplace, she says to me: "Of course, you can't." She tells me that the house is selling for "75," but I can't figure if she means $75,000, $7,500,000 or what. I exit the home at the very ground level and begin climbing back up the outside steps. I realize that there are shrubs blocking each of the steps, and I like the outside garden a lot more than I like the inside lower levels. As I decided when I bought this cottage, the outside has more potential than it shows. Sheesh.

And I wake to write down the dream and realize that I'll spend a few years figuring it out.

Do you have dreams like this in the cold wind? Do you record your dreams? What magic work do you do with them?

Picture found here.