Queen of Swords

Two nights ago I had an intensely bad dream that, upon waking, seemed to have been designed explicitly to give me a few insights into an issue I'm working on. What had been fairly frightening to experience now looked like a training scenario which offered insights I could take with me, and a test -- which I failed.

Last night, as part of an email conversation with my teacher and Scotty, he made the comment, "Your greatest skills are your greatest blocks." (He was referring to me specifically, not making a general observation.) I asked him to elaborate, and he said:

Well, for example, lass, your independence is a great asset, but it also leads you to kick against the pricks when you've got a regimen to follow. And that's not such a good idea when the regimen's to your benefit.

I sat there looking at those words and tried very hard to remember when anyone else had labeled me as "independent," -- and if in doing so they had made it an asset.

My ex-husband and not a few ex-lovers probably called me independent, but they certainly weren't comfortable with that quality. ("You're a great deal of trouble, Mrs. Pedecaris!" usually followed such an observation.)

My parents have always said that I "do what you want to do," with a sigh of resignation.

I've been called "outside the box" with varying degrees of appreciation and bewilderment.

For several years now I've struggled to come to terms with the fact that although I'm not comfortable within mainstream spirituality, it's been hard to release a desire to be accepted there. I've also realized that I don't fit within any of the 'name brand' Pagan paths (and I don't use that term disparagingly, only to say that there is no easily recognizable name for what I do).

I've felt like an outsider, felt defensive about "not fitting in" because I was raised to fit in, to seek approval and then build on it within official, codified structures. Instead, I'm out toward the corner of the map that says Here be dragons.

But "independent". . . that's an adjective I can embrace, and I'm stunned that I never really applied it to myself before. "Different", "outside the box", "edge-walker", "solitary", "unusual", "unique". . . I'd owned all of them, but never entirely comfortably. "Independent" is a gift.

And then last night I had a series of dreams in which I engaged my first daimonic figure, then people from work, and finally my father and my female ancestors, and each time I resisted their authority and their hold over me. I walked away from the first two and then confronted father and ancestors and explicitly claimed my own power in my own place.

Independent. Yes.

I've had another two nights of similarly-themed dreams -- although not the same themes as the last two dreams I recorded.

These dreams involved binding -- but by very different beings.

I can't share the details of the first, but I have reason to believe it was a faery initiation. I was bound and ball-gagged by a lovely (female) stranger and led to a place I'd never been before, then shown myself in a mirror that revealed surprising things.

The one last night was darker, and involved being taken underground. The other participants seemed to be my two husbands from my Journeys, but with a third shadowy figure who would not take any name I tried to give him. They bound me and took me from our shared house through a secret underground passage (previously unknown even to me) to a complex of secret rooms they had built for this purpose. I understood that I would always be blindfolded or hooded when taken here, and would never know where the entrance was. It was very mysterious, but fully consensual, and I was disappointed when I was awakened by my phone ringing.

On reflection, I suspect that the energy of the "two husbands" was a mask for the actual participants, one of whom was almost certainly LM. In that case, the other could have been his afterlife comrade who has become a friend of mine -- but I'll have to wait to get verification of that. I have no idea who the third is, but he(?) too wore a mask of someone from my personal experience.