Queen of Swords

There were lots of tigers in my dreams last night. Very big tigers.

I don't usually have animal dreams. . .


I can't help wondering if this is further evidence that Freya is serious about having me develop a relationship with her at this time, or connects to something else.

Or both, I suppose. . .

I was on the phone with my teacher and Scotty for more than two hours last night, and it was transformative.

The thing about initiations is that once they are underway, you can't stop in the middle of them. (I'm not talking about a ritual you can walk out of, but the deeper processes.) Trying to get back to what you were only traps you in a death state. To thrive, you must move forward into the unknown, newly-birthing new self.

Now that my grieving is over, I've been trying to get back to "normal" -- but defining it in terms of who I used to be, even as I paid lip service to having been through an intense initiation. But I'd only defined that initiation in terms of my spiritual path, not understanding that my entire being has been impacted.

I am not who I was. I don't know yet who I have become, who I am becoming. There is continuity, of course, but so much disjunct in my internal patterns that I am often at a loss, numb. I've been saying "I need to find new ways to be happy" and etc., but part of me has still been clinging to my old self, my style of life. For those of you who know "Once More with Feeling," I've been singing along far too often with "Going Through the Motions" and the first few lines of "Walk Through the Fire." (Why can't I feel? My skin should crack and peel. I want the fire back.)

First I had to grieve the loss of LM and accept the hole in my life where he used to stand.
Then I had to accept and grieve the loss of the future with him which I had been looking forward to.
Now I have to not just accept that I'm becoming someone very different than I was, I have to let go of that old self-image before the new one is fully in place.

There is a sadly ironic element as well. There have been days when I've hated Michael for changing so much after LM's death, but I've been blind and resistant to my own transformation.

When my allies and I started the conversation last night, I had been afraid because of the numbness I've been feeling for the past several months. I had been starting to think about going to a psychiatrist, perhaps asking for anti-depressants. Now I feel hope and an openness to life I haven't felt for quite a while. It's not a finished process. I suspect I will still go through cycles of resistance, grayness, and forward motion, but I feel like this is the key to what I've been suffering for the past few months since the end of my grieving.

This was confirmed by my dreams last night especially the one where LM and I encountered each other as completely different people, but we recognized each other and he kissed me the way he first kissed me in this life: as if he owned me and would never, ever let me go. I woke up with that kiss and its energy still with me like a blessing.

I dreamed last night that I was back at an odd version of my undergraduate theater department. Another student and myself had been called in to a special, closed meeting of the staff and our peers, and we were going to be required to make a choice between two options: to declare ourselves "good" (a kind of artificial, goody-goody "good") or declare ourselves "bad" -- so bad that we were beyond even the grace of the gods to redeem.

What's interesting to me is that what I felt most strongly was disgust: disgust that their version of good was nicey-nice, not robust and meaningful, and angry at the idea of the gods' grace being insufficient to deal with certain types of mortal "badness."

I woke up before I actually had to make a choice in the dream, but I am left with the sense that I would have chosen to identify myself as "bad" rather than live within the constraints of false goodness that would have been required otherwise. I wish I'd had more sense of what would have happened in the dream if I had been able to get past that point of choice.



The idea of being called in front of a committee and forced to declare one's status like that came from the book I'm reading, War Trash, about a Chinese soldier who is a prisoner in an American POW camp during the Korean war. At one point, all the Chinese prisoners were required to declare whether they wanted to be released to Taiwan or to mainland China. The latter meant -- in the minds of the Americans and the strongly political Chinese in the camp -- that they were Communists, even if their only reason for wanting to go back to China was to return home, to family and loved ones. They refused to acknowledge that someone could make a choice like that for anything other than political reasons.

Sometime early this morning I dreamed that I was in an apartment with my mother, my sister/daughter (Wolfling and my sister often seem to be a single person in my dreams), and a young woman who was a friend of my sister/daughter. Something in the conversation made me recall and mention that when I was in the 7th grade my best friend and I would sometimes put chocolate syrup on pepperoni pizza (not because we particularly liked it, but because it was a passion of a character we had created). My sister -- she was definitely my sister in that moment -- turned to me and asked if there might be a time when I didn't tell that story again.

I don't remember now what I said in response, but it was brief and bitter and not very nice -- earning me a rebuke from my mother, despite my 40+ years of age.

I lost it. I have never in my life utterly lost my composure with either of my parents, but in this dream I simply could not take any more. I started with an even more bitter pseudo-apology and then went into a litany of everything I've been dealing with for the past several years, starting with LM's death, then three moves, losing my job. . . In my dream it went on and on, and I didn't hold anything back. It was amazingly cathartic.

At the end of my eruption, my mother was contrite, I acknowledged that I had been snarky with my sister but did not retract my anger. I'm not sure now if I brought up the fact that she had been the first one to be unpleasant.

In the past, I've had what I call "screaming dreams" when I've felt like my boundaries were being violated. There's a confrontation and I start shouting so loudly that I wake up gasping, with a sore throat. Those dreams have always been ones of frustration and even fear, of feeling trapped and helpless. This dream was of a different quality. I felt liberated. Even now, the inside of my chest feels less tight.

I've been more consistent with my practice this week, including almost-daily Middle Pillars, and have been adding a breathing practice Thorn Coyle shares in Kissing the Limitless that includes images of unbinding -- something I've been wrestling with for months. Last night I also finally got to Malkuth in a Qabala meditation cycle in John Michael Greer's Paths of Wisdom. I feel pretty confident that last night's dream is a consequence of the confluence of these practices.

It's taken me well over a month to do the first cycle of Spheres in the above-mentioned meditation. I'm supposed to do one Sphere a day -- which means that a cycle should take ten days. I almost went back and started again after a long break, but it felt important to get through one cycle and finish it rather than keep restarting in an effort to be perfect. I now feel a sense of accomplishment, and am ready to start again with Kether tonight. The instructions say to do four complete cycles before moving on to the next stage. I reviewed the basic instructions again last night, and of course I'd lost track of the details. Starting tonight I'll refresh my memory with the instructions before I re-read the description of the Sphere. But still -- I'm not beating myself up over not having done it "right". I'm celebrating that I persisted and finished, and that I have been experiencing definite benefits, even with my imperfections, and feeling jazzed about starting again. And wow is that a difference for me!

I woke up this morning around 4:30am and could not get back to sleep. I was up until around 6:30, then went back to bed and finally fell asleep after some struggle.

It's now a little over two hours later, but I could have sworn I've been awakened multiple times since then:

One dream about my ex-husband, who had found my LJ, read it, and was (understandably) more than a little pissed at me. He had made a glossy brochure which illustrated the many ways our astrological dynamics were utterly out of synch and left it for me to read, but I hadn't seen it, and/or hadn't realized what it was and so had neither read it nor acknowledged it, which had made him even madder.

At least two dreams about Wolfling waking up, then waking me up, and both of us being so out of synch with our needs that we both ended up upset to the point of tears.

One dream in which the Spanish-speaking painting crew (who have been working around the complex for about a month in real-life) not only woke me by painting outside my bedroom, but then came into my bedroom and then started to stroll through the apartment intent on working on other projects, oblivious to my protests. I finally got one to speak directly to me, but the conversation was very difficult because he didn't speak much English, nor I much Spanish. (Having a bilingual dream was weird!) He finally got the message that no one had told me they would be working inside, we'd had no way to prepare, and that they had to leave immediately.

What finally, truly woke me up was the clatter of an actual ladder against the wall outside my bedroom and cheerful voices conversing in Spanish.

The fact three of these dreams follow very closely on two of the three LJ entries I made earlier today almost makes me wish I hadn't tried to write anything. At the very least my subconscious might have dredged up some pleasantly sexy dream to go with the "Writer's Block: Sexy" entry!

*grump

I seem to still have the headache I did when I first woke up, and I am *not* rested. The painters are continuing to bang ladders and supplies against the walls.

The school clothes shopping expedition scheduled for this morning is going to be pushed back a couple of hours. . .

ETA: Oh, and how could I forget the other dream -- the one about someone trying to mug me in a parking garage! I fought back, but utterly ineffectually. I blame this dream on reading a friend's LJ entry about stalkers around the same time I made my early morning posts today. (I do not blame my friend for writing about stalkers, I hasten to add.)

The last few days have been extrordinarily intense. For not having felt like much during the ritual itself, the ordination energy continues to whirl around in my life, triggering transformation and raising issues and questions for me to grapple with.

How do I deal with boundaries?
Do I even think about them until a line was crossed that I never realized was there? And what do I do then?

What do I expect from sharing certain things -- and how do I handle it when my expectations don't match those of others?

How I do deal with having power?
What about receiving adoration?

I'm much improved in my daily practices, but do I remember the other stuff when it counts -- like the proper way to respond to two nights in a row of impending-violent-death nightmares?

How do I feel about things, and what do I do when they're taken from me?
Can I actually release when I need to?

If part of my priestessing is going to take place through words on a screen, how do I maintain connection to what's happening between myself and the other person as ordinary life intervenes?
How do I stay on my contacts?

And. . . there's the 'small matter' of the piercing Ereshkigal wants me to get to ground and mark my allegiance to her and to LM.


At the moment, all the questions can wait. I need to take a couple of hygiene-protection steps my teacher suggested, and then I'm collapsing into bed.

Very strange dreams last night.... and evidently was not the only one. . .

I'm not going to include all the details, but in the first one I was with what appeared to be the characters from Pirates of the Caribbean, rowing across the water in three or four longboats. Elizabeth had what looked like an 8-1/2x11 photograph that she kept trying to show me, but I refused to look. I knew that the image on it was that of a drowned woman, and I was deeply afraid to actually see it -- terrified, in fact. I kept myself far away from Elizabeth, refusing to look even in her general direction, or look up at all, lest she force the image on me.

Later I was on either a big boat or a pier, and when I looked down into the water I saw dozens of commercial airliners broken in pieces at the bottom.

I've always had a good relationship with actual water, always loved swimming, boating, being around the water. Elemental Water, however, has been tough, although over the past couple of years I've been making peace with it. After my existential crisis, I developed a deep and intense fear of flying that only lifted again in the past year or so, apparently as a side-effect of my deepened spiritual practices.

The rest of the dreams were not as intense, but remained fraught. queenofhalves was there, kissing another woman in a public market in my city while tourists photographed them. My sister showed up later, and there was an intense conflict about a broken plate. A dog ran away and caused a woman to fall from a low balcony and be seriously injured. My daughter was playing among a large group of dogs and young children, and the adults around them were doing nothing to protect children or dogs from each other's carelessness and recklessness.

All in all, I was glad to get up this morning. . .

Last night, the most memorable moments of a long and complicated dream involved an old man in a dark suit asking if he could look deeply into my eyes. I want to find out if I can see owls there, he said.

When he was finished with his long, deep look, I asked him what he had seen. Pools of gray fire, was his response. I found this kind of odd, since my eyes are green. Perhaps even in the dream I wondered if his perceiving gray was a result of how deeply I was drawn to a mention, on a friends' blog, of "a gray-eyed lass fighting beside her lord."

It was only upon waking that I put owls and gray eyes together and thought of Athena.

He also told me that I too often make decisions based on the circumstances of shallow, temporary events, rather than on the deeper, truer things I am aware of.


Speaking of oracles. . .

Last night was. . . intense.

I had a dream that was so unlike anything I've ever experienced before that I'm still a bit shaken. I'm not trying to be a tease, but I'm not sure if I'm going to discuss it here even after I talk about it with my teacher, but I will say that something big happened. And I wasn't sure if it was a blessing or a nightmare. I'm feeling okay this morning, so I'm tending toward the former, but last night was extremely uncomfortable.


A couple of other folks on this friends list also seemed to have intense evenings. Is something going around?


ETA: Got confirmation that all is well. But my head still feels all stretchy. I'm having a heck of a time keeping my mind focused here at work.

Who am I kidding? I'm not at all focused on my job at the moment. Nor am I likely to be so for the rest of the day. Fortunately, I have a very low-activity schedule today.

Yikes.

oakmouse just pointed out to me very nicely that while yes, last night's dream did indeed show an improvement in my comfort connecting with Water -- it also very strongly re-affirmed my role as Father's Daughter.


I don't mind the fact that changes like this will take some time to work their way through and fully integrate. It does kind of bug me that I hadn't noticed that element of the dream until she pointed it out.