This vision cannot be enacted unless archetypal persons strike us as utterly real. To experience imaginal reality, a psychic function–the specific function of the imaginative soul–must be active. This soul person is the person of our moods, self-reflections, and reveries, of our sensuous longing beyond the sensately concrete, the spinner of fantasy who is the personification of all unknown psychic capacities that lie waiting, drawing us seductively, uncannily inward to the dark of the uncut forest and the deeps below the waves. Anima means both psyche and soul, and we meet her in her numerous embodiments as soul of waters without whom we dry, as soul of vegetation who greens our hope or blights with symptoms, as Lady of the Beasts riding our passions. She is father’s daughter and mother’s daughter, and my sister, my soul. She is also a worrying succubus drawing off our life’s juice, a harpy with talons, a cold white wraith with mad addictions–but a nurse as well, and a serving maid, a Cinderella nymphet, vague with no history, a tabula rasa waiting for the word. And she is also the Sophia of wisdom, the Maria of compassion, the Persephone of destruction, compelling Necessity and Fate, and the Muse.
The multiplicity of her forms in fictions and lives, and the intensely personified and intensely subjectified reality of her nature, bespeak a world into which she calls and over which she rules.
Clinically, this polycentricity would be condemned as schizoid fragmentation, demonstrating the ambivalence of a center that cannot hold. But mythically we might look for a God in the disease, perhaps Hermes-Mercury or the Trickster. For schizoid polycentricity is a style of consciousness and not only a disease; and this style thrives in plural meanings, in cryptic double-talk, in escaping definitions, in not taking heroic committed stances, in ambisexuality, in psychically detached and separated body parts.
Or this style of consciousness could be given another clinical name: hysteria.” Then we might look for Dionysus and his community, where self division, dismemberment, and a flowing multiplicity belong to a mythical pattern. Again, consciousness is not heroic and fixed to one point, but seeps as if through mystical participation in a processional of personifications, interfused, enthusiastic, suggestible, labilc. Whether schizoid and Mercurial, whether hysterical and Dionysian, there are archetypal patterns at work, Gods affecting our styles of consciousness.
As the latter, anima has a series of meanings." First. (a) she is the personification of our unconsciousness-our stupidities, follies, intractable problems. Then (b) she is a particular personification appearing in a particular moment- call girl, shopgirl, schoolgirl--who presents a precise image of the current emotions of the soul. She is also (c) the feeling of personal interiority. She brings the sense of having an interior life, changing events into experience that means “me." She makes possible the inner ground of faith in myself as a person, giving the conviction that what happens matters to the soul and that one's existence is personal and important." She thus (d) personalizes existence. Anima, moreover, is (e) that person by means of whom we are initiated into imaginal understanding, who makes possible experiencing through images, for she embodies the reflective, reactive, mirroring activity of consciousness. Functionally anima works as that complex which connects our usual consciousness with imagination by provoking desire or clouding us with fantasies and reveries, or deepening our reflection. She is both bridge to the imaginal and also the other side, personifying the imagination of the soul. Anima is psyche personified, as Psyche in the ancient story of her by Apuleius personified the soul.
So the movement into psychological existence proceeds through her in one form or another. The movement through the constructed world of concepts and dead things into an animistic, subjective, mythical consciousness, where fantasy is alive in a world alive and means follows anima. She teaches personifying, and the very first lesson of her teaching is the reality of her independent personality over and against the habitual modes of experiencing with which we are so identified that they are called ego, I. The second lesson is love; shé comes to life through love and insists on it, just as Psyche in the old tale is paired forever with Eros.
Perhaps the loving comes first. Perhaps only through love is it possible to recognize the person of the soul. And this connection between love and psyche means a love for everything psychological, every symptom or habit, finding place for it within the heart of imagination, finding a mythical person who is its supportive ground. The connection between love and psyche means as well bringing a psychological eye to all of love's manifestations-that all its mad and deviate cravings seek ultimately the connection with psyche.
Whether we conceive of this interior person as Anima or as an Angel, a Daemon, a Genius, or a Paredros, or one of the personified souls in the traditions of ancient China and Egypt, this figure is indispensable to the notion of human personality. Some traditions, in fact, have asserted that an individual without his soul figure is not a human being. Such a one has lost soul.
Images of the soul show first of all more feminine connotations. Psyché, in the Greek language, besides being soul denoted a night-moth or butterfly and a particularly beautiful girl in the legend of Eros and Psyche. Our discussion in the previous chapter of the anima as a personified feminine idea continues this line of thinking. There we saw many of her attributes and effects, particularly the relationship of psyche with dream, fantasy, and image. This relationship has also been put mythologically as the soul's connection with the night world, the realm of the dead, and the moon. We still catch our soul's most essential nature in death experiences, in dreams of the night, and in the images of "lunacy."
The world of spirit is different indeed. Its images blaze with light, there is fire, wind, sperm. Spirit is fast, and it quickens what it touches. Its direction is vertical and ascending; it is arrow-straight, knife-sharp, powder-dry, and phallic. It is masculine, the active principle, making forms, order, and clear distinctions. Although there are many spirits, and many kinds of spirit, more and more the notion of "spirit" has come to be carried by the Apollonic archetype, the sublimations of higher and abstract disciplines, the intellectual mind, refinements, and purifications.
We can experience soul and spirit interacting. At moments of intellectual concentration or transcendental meditation, soul invades with natural urges, memories, fantasies, and fears. At times of new psychological insights or experiences, spirit would quickly extract a meaning, put them into action, conceptualize them into rules. Soul sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience. It moves indirectly in circular reasonings, where retreats are as important as advances, prefer- ing labyrinths and corners, giving a metaphorical sense to life through such words as close, near, slow, and deep. Soul involves us in the pack and welter of phenomena and the flow of impressions. It is the "patient" part of us. Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It Is water to the spirit's fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of passions to extinguish its certainty. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury-to use an image from St. Augustine -a confusion and richness, both. Whereas spirit chooses the better part and seeks to make all One. Look up, says spirit, gain distance; there is something beyond and above, and what is above is always, and always superior.
They differ in another way: spirit is after ultimates and it travels by means of a via negativa. “Neti, neti," it says, "not this, not that." Strait is the gate and only first or last things will do. Soul replies by saying, "Yes, this too has place, may find its archetypal significance, belongs in a myth." The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.
I have drawn apart soul and spirit in order to make us feel the differences, and especially to feel what happens to soul when its phenomena are viewed from the perspective of spirit. Then, it seems, the soul must be disciplined, its desires harnessed, imagination emptied, dreams forgotten, involvements dried.?? For soul, says spirit, cannot know, neither truth, nor law, nor cause. The soul is fantasy, all fantasy. The thousand pathologizings that soul is heir to by its natural attachments to the ten thousand things of life in the world shall be cured by making soul into an imitation of spirit. The imitatio Christi was the classical way; now there are other models, gurus from the Far East or Far West, who, if followed to the letter, put one's soul on a spiritual path which supposedly leads to freedom from pathologies. Pathologizing, so says spirit, is by its very nature confined only to soul; only the psyche can be pathological, as the word psychopathology attests. There is no "pneumopathology," and as one German tradition has insisted, there can be no such thing as mental illness ("Geisteskrankheit"), for the spirit cannot pathologize. So there must be spiritual disciplines for the soul, ways in which soul shall conform with models enunciated for it by spirit.
But from the viewpoint of the psyche the humanistic and Oriental movement upward looks like repression. There may well be more psycho- pathology actually going on while transcending than while being immersed in pathologizing. For any attempt at self-realization without full recognition of the psychopathology that resides, as Hegel said, inherently in the soul is in itself pathological, an exercise in self-deception. Such self-realization turns out to be a paranoid delusional system, or even a kind of charlatanism, the psychopathic behavior of an emptied soul.
Many modern methods of psychotherapy want to retain the spirit of analysis but not its soul. They want to retain the methods and forms without the pathologizings. Then the doctor can become a master, and the patient is metamorphosed into a pupil, client, partner, disciple- anything but a patient. Analysis itself is called a dialogue or a trans- action, for "therapy" smacks of pathology. The focus upon inwardness and the goal of integration of the interior person may remain, but disintegration tends to be excluded, without which such integration has no significance. In their view, falling apart is never for the sake of the parts, the multiple persons who are the richness of psychic life; falling apart is but a phase preliminary to reconstituting a stronger ego.
These approaches that would synthesize rather than analyse, integrate rather than differentiate, and keep the therapeutic rituals without the pathological contents, neglect one of the deepest insights resulting from the last century of psychotherapy. The psyche does not exist without pathologizing. Since the unconscious was discovered as an operative factor in every soul, pathologizing has been recognized as an inherent aspect of the interior personality. Freud declared this succinctly: "We can catch the unconscious only in pathological material." And after her last visit to Freud in 1913 Lou Salomé wrote:"... he put exceptionally strong emphasis on the necessity of maintaining the closest and most persistent contact with the pathological material. . .”
Pathologizing is present not only at moments of special crisis but in the everyday lives of all of us. It is present most profoundly in the individual’s sense of death, which he carries wherever he goes. It is present also in each person's inward feeling of his peculiar differentness which includes, and may be even based upon, his sense of individual “craziness". For we each have a private fantasy of mental illness; "crazy," "mad, “insane”- all their substitutes, colloquialisms, and synonyms- -form a regular part of our daily speech. As we cast our internal deviance from us with these exclamations about others, we are at the same time acknowledging that we each have a deviant, odd second (or third) personality that provides another perspective to our regular life. Indeed, pathologizing supplies material out of which we build our regular lives. Their styles, their concerns, their loves, reflect patterns that have pathologized strands woven all through them. The deeper we know ourselves and the other persons of our complexes, the more we recognize how well we, too, fit into the textbook sketches of abnormal psychology. Those case histories are also our own biographies. To put it in sociological language: nearly every individual in the United States of America has been, now is, or will have been in the hands of professional soul care of one kind or another, for a shorter or longer period, for one reason or another.
Discovery of the unconscious has meant the widespread and overwhelming recognition of the psyche's autonomous activity of pathologizing. That discovery and that recognition have led to one even more significant: the rediscovery of soul. But unfortunately and mistakenly we have confused these three interrelated discoveries: the unconscious, pathologizing, and soul. We confusedly believe that everyone needs professional therapy as if that is where soul could be refound. But this is not so. For then we are confusing the rediscovery of soul during the twentieth century with the place where it happened-- therapeutic analysis. But therapy or analysis was not the carrier of that discovery. Psychopathology was. Symptoms, not therapists, led this century to soul. The persistent pathologizings in Freud and in Jung and in their patients- pathologizings that refused to be repressed, transformed, or cured, or even understood- led this century's main explorers of the psyche ever deeper. Their movement through pathology into soul is an experience repeated in each of us. We owe them much, but we owe our pathologizing more. We owe our symptoms an immense debt. The soul can exist without its therapists but not without its afflictions.
Analysis has merely given psychopathology a hearing outside the asylums, prisons, and church institutions where it had been kept; the new therapy provided the only place given secular sanction for a prolonged and intense involvement with pathologizing. Symptoms were the very point and focus of its attention. So analysis offered the vessel into which our unconscious pathologizing could be poured and then cooked long enough for its significance to emerge, for it to make soul. Out of psyché-pathos-logos came the meaning of suffering of the soul, or the soul's suffering of meaning.
Again a confusion beset this experience: a special state of being- “being-in-therapy"- seemed required for this discovery of soul through pathologizing, and so for many people therapy became a religious ritual, even replacing religious ritual. One was “in" analysis, and analysis was “in." There were the initiates: those who had been analysed. And there were the others: those who had never even been in therapy or had not been “properly” or "thoroughly" analysed. To refind the sense of soul one had to "go through" analysis with its regular appointments, its techniques, and its stages of "beginning an analysis." "working through," and "terminating." Inevitably and without knowing it, the ritual of analysis had produced a new cult of soul. Finally, some have taken this religious direction literally, declaring that actually this is what therapy is all about, an expression of the religious activity of the soul: the psychotherapeutic movement is correctly a religious movement; therapists are indeed a new kind of ministers to soul--gurus or priests.
In this movement toward religion pathology now tends to be left behind. By shifting its ground from pathology to self-development, recent analysis no longer recognizes the primacy of affliction. One goes to therapy to grow, not because one is afflicted-as if growth and affliction excluded each other. A gulf has developed between soul and symptom. On the one hand analysis regards itself as a professional contract for solving problems, a variety of medical science without soul, ritual, or mystery. On the other, it imitates the transcendental disciplines, foster- ing ritual, community, and teachings. Pathologizing again foundered upon its old division, illness or sin, and a further division emerged. Now, to be in soul therapy for growth and realization of personality, symptoms are left out; to be in medical or behavioral therapy for relief of symptomatic afflictions, soul is left out. Soul and symptom have broken in two.
This chapter and this book want to mend that division. By retaining psychopathology as a descriptive language of the psyche which indeed speaks to and of the soul, I would keep psyche and pathology close together. If I seem to be making the soul sick again by such stress on pathologizing, I am at the same time giving sickness soul again. By returning symptoms to the soul, I am attempting to return soul to symptoms, restoring them to the central value in life that soul itself has.
At this moment, I am in the middle of my EXACT Uranus opposition……not only that but I have an almost exact natal Uranus/Sun Conjunction in first house Scorpio….so the Sun is being activated at the same time. They are all squaring my natal nodal axis in Leo/Aquarius (a wide orb of 11 degree)….among other transits. I almost always have strong vivid dreamtime and experiences, but over the years I have tracked that there are certain transits that bring very particular energies. And so out of curiosity I started to browse old journals, and noticed the amount of snake/serpent dreams I was having…and realized it was during the time of my Uranus SQUARE natal Uranus/Sun. AT the nadir of my chart. For the past 8 months I have been undergoing rapid transformations once again, reminding me of the period between 2001-2003 when I felt like I was also plugged into a quantum computer…..Kundalini going crazy…..having to ground the energy, feeling my life was at stake. So only using those couple years between 2002 and 2005 as my search vector, I went thru my archives and looked for all the dreams that referenced snakes, and then copy- pasted them here in order. For my own research, and for things I will use in the future as part of a larger project. (I am only up to Jan.21, 2006 date in Dream archive process, of typing all my dream journals into the computer!!!!!! I have 18 years left to transfer….haha….though there were a few large gaps of time wehre I was not keeping dream records, there are many more thick journals filled with adventures to go through. And the later journals get more and more detailed. Such gratitude for having undertaken this discipline so long ago….records of my subconscious alchemical processes for my entire adult life.
April 17, 2002
(Serpent Transformation)
Dreamed of Snakes. AT some point I turn into a snake. It is not a frightening dream but feels spiritual.
October 3, 2002
‘Coiled Snake Explodes’
I can only piece a few fragments together now. At a house with a lot of people, I apparently put out a joint roach in a Large Coiled Snakes mouth; Then I leave the room. As I am walking out, I Know that something is going to happen. I hear an Explosion and go back into the kitchen where the snake had been on the table. There is blood and guts all over everything. I am trying to clean up the mess.
Scene Shifts.
I am in the bathroom in my house and some guys are outside. One keeps opening the door while I am trying to use the bathroom. Finally I go outside and Gracie Ju Jitsu him to the ground!
November 19, 2002
(Focaccia Bread)
I am with mom, granny and Julia for the most part, and together we go many places. Granny is driving. At one point we are in some shop ordering stuff. We have a good exchange with the guys behind the counter. I am saying how the one guy looks like someone I know. They all seem to like us. There is someone else with us too, Julias friend? They seem to know them. I am acting very outrageous…silly and uncaring of what I say or do. The we are in this place again getting food. I ask to see menu and am reading the ‘dream text’. But I am thinking the place was like ‘Zoo’ down the street, with crepes. I ask for a bunch of berries in a sundae or something, but they say they have no water, so they cannot wash the berries! So I ask for spinach and extra feta in a pita or crepe. They say they don’t have it….say thay have focaccia bread. The whole time, I can see them cooking stuff. It is dark outside I go out thinking they are making my food. I get in the car and Julia is like ‘here, drink it quick!’ and has a small portion of milkshake. She acts as if it has alcohol in it, and she doesn’t want mom or granny to know. So we are waiting in the car for my food. Then we see the whole group of people who work there come outside as if they are partying. So we leave after I ask about my food and they have not made it. We are then driving up main street and I say something to the effect that there is nothing exciting or good to look forward to anymore, the way the world is. My mom says that being with Family is worth it. I then agree. We pull into Family Convenience store on the ‘hill’ to get something. I see Mandy Doruth in gas attendant uniform. We go in and it is now a snake place….with cages of snakes everywhere. I walk to the back and am looking at a white and black one. Then there is a loose one, big…and it spooks me and I run to the front, after jumping over another loose snake in the store. I tell the man I am nervous unless I know where the snakes are in relation to me. Seems we leave then. All the time in the dream there are many people around, familiar and unfamiliar. I was very boisterous and loud in dream.
I am in my bedroom and there are other people with me. A snake appears from somewhere/or someone has it with them. It is striking at the leg of the girl but I put my arm down to block the bite, so I get bit on the hand instead. The snake is clinging to my hand and it is starting to swell. It is a rattlesnake and I just know something serious has happened. Then, as if the dream fades for 9 months, I realize I am having a baby. I actually give birth! My mother is there and my sister. I want them to help me with the child. I am nervous about it. But as soon as it comes out and opens its eyes it begins speaking. Not perfectly, but good enough; and it seems it knows another language also. I am thrilled about this because I have been telling mom (in waking life) that babies were going to be born fully conscious, etc. She is amazed. So I have the baby and I am taking care of it. I flip out occasionally, worried I am not taking good care of it. The baby is absolutely beautiful! She has my eyes, they are huge and blue and she seems so spiritual. (I remember at some point looking at my breasts and feeling afraid that I wont be able to produce milk to feed the baby).
December 18, 2002 *In Ireland for Visit*
(River of Life)
I am at a river most of the time. There are lots of other people around, all having fun. Reminds me of a picnic. I am in and out of the water. At one point, I am out in the river and an older woman comes out but has trouble swimming…so I get her on some flotation thing and swim her in….halfway there Julia and another girl are swimming out and have brought some long float boards so I transfer the woman onto one of them and float her back to the bank. I am swimming then underwater and It is dark and I swim into a bunch of animals or something, they are furry and I can feel them on my face….they are kissing me! I am telling people about it when I swim back. Also, on a small dock there is something to do with a fat man. Im not sure what he is doing, maybe fishing, but when he turns his back I push him into the water! I am climbing the steep wooded embankment and at the top is a road. I am walking, when Sarah Holsinger and someone, maybe Annie Judy…come up with a volleyball. She hits it to me and I bump it back and we start to pepper with the ball. The ball almost goes down the bank but I manage to grab it. At some point Beefy is on the road with me and someone else, perhaps Julia, and we see a black snake and a copperhead crawling into the bushes. Good energy in the dream.
December 23, 2002 *Ireland for a visit*
(python snake)
Long vivid night of dreams but lost upon waking. All I can recall is that I had a huge python snake, and I can vividly recall the feeling of his scales when I would hold him.
February 9, 2003
(Rickson Commits Suicide)
Rickson, my snake, is in the pocket of my sweatshirt and is squirming around pretty aggressively. I notice him in there and pull him out but he begins to bight me and jump around. He doesn’t seem well, and is breathing hard. I decide he needs water. I put him up to a water bowl and he lifts his head up and is drinking when he stars swallowing his own tail, like the ouruborus! I don’t know how his tail gets in the water but it is. I feel he is trying to kill himself, in a way…..I pull the tail back out of his mouth.
NOTE: Feb. 10th, 2003 Rickson disappeared. I looked everywhere.
Further Note: Never saw the snake again, and went to stay with Liberty In June for her birth. While there, Beefy said Rickson came out of a hole in the bathroom, and was HUGE!!!!! HE had been living in the walls etc I guess, eating stuff. He ended up disappearing again though. Never to be seen again.
March 15, 2003
(Green Mamba)
I am messing with a big green mamba snake. It almost bites me but I catch its head with my fingers…it is moving around chaotically, when finally it slips through and bites my finger. I then start trying to smash its head between my fingers.
*note from the morning(‘the beginning of the great work?)
March 16, 2003
(PJ, Snakes & Rickson)
I keep finding my snake Rickson, and he keeps following me! Something about a huge Black and white snake too…PJ has been sitting in some twigs near a tree and I tell him to move ….that there is a huge snake.
April 14, 2002
(snake swallows fist)
*First part of dream had something to do with me being led in Light Movement or something….filling in some structure????
*I cant recall where we were heading or what we were on our way to do. I keep trying to get Beefy to have sex with me though, when we are at different places. At one point there is a huge snake in the Water near me. It seems I know it, or something(the snake)? It swims over to me and I speak to it! It speaks back. It tells me it/I am warm? Then it puts its entire mouth around my fist, just for a second, then lets go…..it is friendly and gentle and I laugh and joke with it then it leaves. At some point a girl who is with us leaves to go camping with two other lesbian women…one of which reminds me of Susan(Lori&Melissas old friend). The guy who is driving us around is sort of goofy….and he apparently has a crush on me….and thought beefy and I were just messing around/didn’t know we were together. He drove me to the bus stop in Luray and dropped me off, after asking me about Beefy and I tell him we have been together for 3 years and in love. He is sad about that, but seems to hang around still. I am with someone on the dirt road near the bus stop. Then Jeremiah is talking to someone and says he called so-and-so because he likes to hear what they are up to….he says that is why he used to like to call me…???? Then me and Beefy are sitting and eating and Ms.Petefish is there, I am excited…talking about how I am going to win all-state in volleyball….I introduce Ms.Petefish to Beefy as my 9th grade vball coach, ‘the best!’. She speaks with us and asks If I remember her name…..I do…of course.
Beefy and I seemed to get along well through-out dream, flirty and sexual.
April 23, 2003
(Snakes and Crocodiles on my body/Swallowed fist)
*last recorded dream from april 14 also had snake swallowing fist **
I am in a hotel room or some kind of dorm. There are about 5 snakes/crocodiles in there…..seems they keep morphing between the two forms at different times. They are somewhat excited….and very quick, moving around. I am trying to catch them or something. One gets out below the door and I see the tail (crocodile) so I open the door quick and grab it. There are people in the hall, and they see me, and say something. I realize I am naked. I come back in the room and then realize the snakes are in my clothes, and crawling on my body. They take nibbles and touch me with their tongues….which produces a very intense tickling sensation, but pleasurable. I am dressed again apparently, and there is a very large Boa type snake in my shirt, and it swallows my fist….then lets go…..as if it is communicating with me or something. I am learning to control the snakes…..they are more calm now….I am playing with the larger one.
May 2, 2003
(Bit by Rattlesnake)
Dad and I are in his house, in the living room, messing with a beautiful rattlesnake. I am wary of this snake because of its seeming Power. I try to hold it or something….or maybe trying to remove it from house….and it tries to bite me. I am fumbling with it in my hands for awhile, as it tries to get away. I end up being very rough in handling it….and turns out I am bitten twice…just scrapes…on the pinkie and on other hand too. I feel dizziness taking me, and I tell someone I need help because of the bite.
May 11, 2003
(Rattlesnake bite in Heart)
I am in a room with other people and there is a Rattlesnake. It seems aggravated. There is a baby on the side of the couch and I dive for it so It will not get bit….and at that moment the snake strikes someone in the heart! I am not sure who. Dad is trying to handle it and get it away without getting bit, but it seems it did manage to get him….he says he thinks he got bit.
May 22, 2003
(OBE, Litter of Puppies,Teaching Beefy to travel, Snake)
I find myself in my astral body, parting from my physical in the bedroom. I am excited and anxious when I realize what is happening. Something happens that makes me come back to my body……and I awaken inside a dream. There is a litter of puppies- all sizes…miniature…in a little cloth bag on the bed. Beefy had found them first ….as I am trying to explain to him the experience of me being in my astral body….and then waking to find the puppies. We are trying to gather them up. We don’t know what to do with them…..since we are not allowed to have pets in the apt, and are worried about them. Rebecca asks if her and speedy can keep them. There are a bunch of people around then. I run into a man at one point who has a child, and I ask him if he would like a puppy and he says Yes!. I am then being annoying to others around me it seems. I am sitting outside with some people and Becca Quadri shows up. I run over and give her a hug and speak a bit. Then there is something going on with the McGoverns….Beefy is going somewhere with Margot….everything is confusing. There are huge 18 wheeler trucks too……me and someone else is in a box on the hood of one….??? Most of dream is exhilarating and I have good control of my emotional state.
Then I am singing in the back of a truck with others….on our way to somewhere unclear now. I am then trying to show Beefy how to Mentally Travel. We are standing and we hug each other. I have a small Joint. I tell him to concentrate and picture himself going up in the air. He does, and we float. I then tell him to picture the place he would like to land. When we actually land, he has morphed into Rick Sloan, and Ive lost the joint. I am asking and looking for it, but Rick says not to worry about it. He has weed. Seems we are at Elliottes house in Page Valley by now. I climb or float up to a bird nest in a pine tree and there is a baby snake in it…so I grab the snake. When Im back on the ground, the snake has become Huge, and wrapped around my left arm/wrist…..black snake….It bites my thumb but I just stroke its head and transfer love to it and it lets go. Then Rebecca or someone takes him from me, but isn’t being gentle and I think she gets bit. Seems we have some big purpose in the dream. Very sequential.
June 6, 2003
(Pot& Cops, Jaguar Chase, Coiled Snake)
I am in some store and trying to pick out an outfit…it is an adorable black and white skirt with pleats and a shirt etc. The lady only has size Small and I need a larger size. So I eventually leave the store. I am in a car with some people….with a bag Full of pot, and a smaller bag too. We get stopped by the cops. Somehow I sneak both bags into bookbag and give to Tish to take as she is getting out of the car to go home. The cops look but find nothing. They leave. I grab the pot and pocket it?? We see two girls, who help us with something. I give them a huge bud of pot.
Scene shifts. I am near some road/forest and walking along….I see a big cat, like a huge bobcat or a Jaguar. I begin to run and it is chasing me…I am running so fast!!!! It is closing in on me. I am not terrified but I know that I do not want it to catch me. I try to divert it and go up a tree but it doesn’t work. I do not know how I finally escape.
I am then walking in the forest with some people and see two young children crouched down in a path leading up the mountain. There is a rattlesnake curled up with mouth open ready to strike. The kids know better than to move…..and I start walking up to see them, but they yell to stop me. That’s when I see the snake in the path. I distract the rattlesnake until it sorta chases me down the hill and away from the kids. I throw a stick on it and then put my boot on it. It seems to be a small baby rattlesnake. I reach down and pick it up by the head. I remove the snake from everyones presence and we continue on our way. The kids are grateful.
I felt confident.
June 18, 2003
(Notes/fragments)
*Mom cutting fingers off herself in someones beautiful kitchen
*Issabella bit by snake, the neighbor says…..but she was really bit by Jacob, and had to get lower lip removed.
*Tattoo ladys office
*Drive somewhere….see ship sailing in the sky….across the moon (like ET)….I try to take black&white photo but someone who is driving (mom?) keeps backing up and pulling forward and I cant get pic
*Cop passes us
*Can see girl climbing in the window of a huge house
July 2, 2003
(Lester talks about Dad and Pig/Snake)
I am on a bus with others, and Lester Addison is complaining that Dad is more willing to mess around with and possibly get bit by a rattlesnake than play with his pig? Apparently Lester gets a whole big issue started over this.
Then I am in a store with Mom, and bus is waiting outside for us. I am acting very outrageous and silly because I realize I am dreaming.
July 12, 2003
(Garter snake swallowed by cobra/kidnap)
Many people and much activity. I fly a lot in the dream, doing tricks in the air etc. I find a baby garter snake and catch him. He stays with me and is licking me like a cat. It leaves some kind of residue on my hand. Then he is crawling and I follow him and he gets swallowed by a large white cobra snake!
Scene shifts.
There is a man kidnapping an old rich woman in her car……he has a gun to her head…and he asks another man and woman from another car for a ride….?? They realize something is wrong though, and try to drive off. I am perceiving from another perspective though……birds eye….3 cars all wired together??
Scene shifts.
I am in Luray high school and going to the bathroom….it is a single room bathroom with 3 or 4 toilets and a mirror. A girl comes in talking about someone….last name ‘Darnell’…and I say that I know her….a Reporter……she verifies and says the girl came up to her and knew everything about her, even which kind of moisturizer she wears. Then we leave the bathroom and there is an empty shopping cart I am pushing. I joke about being an old bag lady, then I go downstairs on the back of the shopping cart….everyone laughing. I seem to be popular and well esteemed.
July 16, 2003
(Rickson Needs Food)
Dreamed about Rickson, my snake. He seems to change sizes throughout dream. He seems to be weak also. I remember thinking it must have been a really long time since I had fed him….then I am looking for something to feed him. We are listening to some guy speak somewhere outside…..there are a lot of people around. I am digging up potato bugs and grubs and stuff, throwing them in his cage, but he will not eat them. I stick my face close to him and he kisses me! He is talking to me also, but what he says is unclear. He also bites my finger at one point, but not out of maliciousness….and he lets go quickly. I feel anxious to feed him, and a bit sad.
Dreamed about my snake Rickson. I am near Jeremiahs old camper at dads house. I see him partly beneath the ground and I move the dirt and pick him up. Seems he has some sort of blisters or bubbles on his head. Then later I get him again from the ground and he is really fat in some spots as if he has just eaten. Again he doesn’t seem to be completely healthy.
Something about the show Jeopardy. A woman contestant on the show….has brought about 6 of her best girlfriends. They are all very beautiful. Then as if I am watching movie, they are rollerblading down these huge steps like a coliseum or something. I think how dangerous it is and how good they are at it. One is rail sliding all the way down. At the bottom they are asking if everyone is there. It is a sandy beach now. Then it seems we are on a very small island. Liberty is there. She is pregnant. Also something building. Dad is there building some sort of little house with stones or something. I can see the island birds eye view at one point and think how small it is. I am then with Liberty and we are trying to find some place for her to give birth…but first I find a toilet so I can use the bathroom. It is in a room that Tom Petty had stayed in on vacation. Liberty ends up laying down on a table a has someone pull out an egg from her…..it is about the size of two fists. She is relieved. It is on an umbilical cord. She breaks the shell and wipes off the yellow and white stuff inside and a tiny baby is inside. She is saying he felt better now, and it would be easy now. The baby is curled up with umbilical still attached. She lays him on her lap and rests. It is beautiful.
September 30, 2003
(Beach and Pool and Stallions)
I am with Beefy at a beach surrounded by a forest. We meet a man and woman who seem really cool. I find at one point that I am away from them and trying to find Beefy, but I have a backpack and I find it really hard to walk…..especially up a large hill that I am struggling with. I eventually find them again. Brandi Majeski is there with them now. Her and Beefy are talking to the couple we met about Hash, and how much money could be made by sending some to Jeremiah to sell. They are talking weights and money etc. I am annoyed for some reason. I feel like I am mad at Beefy and giving him a bit of the silent treatment. At one point I see a man working in the weeds, and I go down and there is a Coral Snake or similar, half buried in the grass. I just look at it and note its beauty and the red marks/pattern on it.
Scene shifts.
We are now at mom and dads house and there is a swimming pool in the spot where Jeremiahs camper used to be. There are a lot of people around now, wanting to swim. We are swimming and I get aggravated for some reason and leave. I then go into moms house after smoking a joint. I hear mom say that Julia is a bitch when she doesn’t get her way, or something like that. I want to go talk to Julia so I go outside. I have a joint roach in my hand and throw it down. I am then over in the weeds doing something, and I lose my black shirt??….in the brush….but I am weary of digging around because there may be snakes. So I am hanging on a tree reaching down when a man playing an instrument of some kind, brings the shirt to me from the brush below! I say Thank You and then go to look for Julia. She is at the pool. We are swimming, joking around about throwing each other in. I am going to do some flip or something , but jump off diving board and just land feet first. Then Julia jumps and lands outside of the pool on her side, she jumped right over the pool. She says ‘that’s sorta dangerous, huh?’
Then there are tons of people around again. There is a fat girl there too. And the couple we had met at the beach, who are laying on the diving board in the way. Which upset me for some reason. I am then chasing someone, I believe it is cindy doruth, through the forest, for doing something.
Somebody drops an orange in the pool and I jump up and dive straight in and grab it with my foot, and swim back up laughing…and give it away. I am moving people away from the diving board, telling them that they must respect the rules since we are responsible if anything happens. The people are somewhat mad at me.
Something happens and I am trying to get a huge white stallion untied….he is outside our house. I get him loose somehow but I am afraid of him. So I climb fence where piggles pen is, but there is a huge dark stallion in the cage. I climb high up near a tree but he is standing on the fence and is huge….right next to me. There must be some kind of mission or something, because the Dark Stallion says he will ride with the White Stallion….and off they go.
January 1, 2004
(Copperhead and Rickson)
Julia has a pet copperhead snake. It seems tame, but I hold it and it bites a few times. We know it is a symbol of Power and Transformation. The bites do not hurt, and I ‘know’ that I can ‘handle it’. It is an amazing creature. We decide it must not be poisonous anymore…? Julia has a glass aquarium for the snake, and I see that Rickson is laying in it. I am excited because I missed Rickson the snake!
April 10, 2004
Partying at Mansion with friends and family/Man with Snake/Some Lucidity
I am in some kind of city, partying or something. I am in a house that is either Beefys, or a relative of his…we are staying there. Our room is near the attic…..up the stairs and around and around. It is a huge mansion of a house. There is a man, an uncle to Beefy?, but he never comes down to talk to us. I am waiting for Beefy to get dressed so we can go out. Marya Williams and Chrissy George show up. Everyone is drinking and smoking and having a laugh. I go outside somewhere to meet Julia and Jeremiah and PJ and others. They have also come to visit and want to go out. PJ has his head shaved, as does Julia….and Me!!! We all look much the same…..haunting beauty….but PJ has some kind of glass patch over his eye…with a painted eye piece on one part. If you look through the glass you can see that behind it is a torn up eye. I ask him about it, and he says you can see through to his skull if he doesnt wear the patch. He is tall and very handsome. I ask Chrissy and Mayra if they think we look alike…they say ‘exactly’. I feel I have to keep an eye on Julia. I keep warning her to stay with us, and to be careful with who she associates with. We are somewhere walking, but some of us have roller skates on while out on the town! I am a bit Lucid throughout the dream. We are going up the road, next to a house, and those of us in the back can see all the way up front that there is a truck pulled over. WE can see the man has a gun and Seamy is handing the man his wallet into the truck….he is being robbed!So I scurry around the other side of the truck…as if I dont know anything is going on. I see the license plate. At first I think I will try and punch the man but then decide he may shoot someone, so I get his license number….there are only three characters…W(3)R or something…The guy pulls away. There are lots of people around who had seen what happened. I repeat the tag number and ask if anyone has any change so I can phone the cops or something. Someone comes out and hands me a big bill, but I need change…and remember I have change in my purse. So I am fiddling with change etc There is a payphone next to me. I drop 5p and then try to look for it. Not sure if I ever managed to phone.
Scene shifts
We are back at the house we are staying at, or somewhere else. We are asking the barman there for drinks etc. Everyone is getting along great…having fun. Mayra and Chrissy are looking for gay clubs or something. Julia is wanting to party more too. There is something weird about Jeremiah. At one point he is sitting in a chair, giving me something out of his pocket, and it almost seems he is someone else. He is very quiet. Brandy is there too and at one point I have to make her quiet down because she is being so loud and obnoxious. Then I am out messing around the house by myself…Lucid at this point. There is a burrowed hole sorta on the right side of the house at the back…I am curious as to what it is used for….I have a sense of knowing that it has something to do with pedophilia. I nearly slip over the edge and down the hill but manage to climb over and get around to the other side. At this point the man in the truck has come back and he has a Snakelike thing…and the thing somehow had gotten Gollum down in the swamp behind the house. I go back to the house to get someone, perhaps Mayra, and show her how to Lucidly get down the cliff…by creating energy rope or something. We are down there …I see loads of animals down in the water and woods. I see the snake thing on the other side and I make my way over to it. Gollum cannot get away. I grab the snake thing and it seems to have rubber teeth?! Im wrestling with it…….then I become aroused and am thinking of it in sexual terms…the teeth become sharp and hard and trying to bite me but I get it in my hands. I get Gollum…..and tame the snake. By this time I am getting even more Lucid.
I am in a huge field…I am in charge of cultivating it and plowing it etc. Beefy is with me. At some point I am walking through the field….(is seems to be dark outside)…and I trip. While in the field I realize that it is very overgrown and there are brambles etc. I have neglected it I guess. I am sitting in tangles of weeds etc, which are flattened from use of the field. I think I see a snake moving under the grass. So I lay down very quietly and try to not move, so the snake will just pass me by. I am laying there and it is crawling alongside me. I can see a shadow of its head sorta sniffing around my face….but it just leaves. I get up and go on my way.
2nd dream: (Football on the hill/yoga and digestion/prizes/waiting to go home)
I am with my mom and dad and others, we seem to be sorting through foods and things….I use the ice cream scooper to scoop out some ice cream to take with me and back to beefy. I notice there are several types of scoopers in among moms spoons. They have funny tips that seem to be for draining water. I put ice cream in a tub for Beefy for later. Then I am playing with an american football….but we are throwing it around on the side of a very steep incline/hill….with forest at the bottom. Someone is making jokes about me. I throw the ball once and it doesnt spin right so it doesnt go very far. I say to someone I am definitely NOT going all the way down the hill to retrieve the ball. Then there is something involving a tanning salon….it is next to us…..there is a whole crowd of us sitting and waiting for prizes or something. While we are waiting, someone asks me if yoga does anything for people food-wise?? I go into a dissertation on how Yoga speeds up the metabolism and actually strengthens the digestive system. While I am telling the person this (a male), I say that Yoga is more of an internal beauty aide as opposed to salons and all….which are meant for external beauty. Something is said about Tan, and tanning studio, but unclear what. Then Martina Hoye is there, she is pouring tea for our table/group of people. I am sitting with Beefy. We are being handed out prizes for something. I am asking which ones I should get….and give to dad…which ones will he like? There is a mini-billiards table that folds out…and also a triangular billiard type game….a model of a ship/yacht….and an Old Clock….as well as other stuff. I want the Ship, for my dad. Then Beefy and I are talking about passports…I am looking at mine and realize I had been given two….each a bit different, but both are valid. One of them is brand new, and I show it to Beefy, and we decide to keep it and share it. It is very exciting news. I cant wait to ‘get home’ because I had saved food from moms house.
December 4, 2004
(snakes and spiders and bugs)
I am in mom and dads old bedroom in their cabin…it is the way they used to have it years ago. There are all these pet-style boxes and cages all stacked on top of each other on the old dresser that is sitting in the corner. It seems I am looking for all my creatures to put back into their glasses/cages etc…they are a in the bed and under the bed and all over the place. I keep looking for my snakes and then see one climbing under the covers , and pick it up. None of the creatures are ‘bad’, they all seem important to me, as well, and I am worried about leaving on out and it getting hurt or something. One of the worms is like a grub hybrid GlowWorm with yellow and it seems to have bright green on it as well. I know someone has grabbed him from the bed at some point, and I dont want to lose anything else. The spiders are like two siamese twins or something…attached somehow…two different halfs…they are all fuzzy like tarantulas and very big. They had been fed something that looked like cat food and had thrown it up. I am looking at it and thinking I need to clean it , but then I see they are eating the vomited food, but kinda fighting over it, strangely as they are still attached to each other. I feel very close to the creatures and playful, especially with the snakes, there are many and they are small. The room is dark and I cannot really see what colors they are.
December 30, 2004
(Fenrir the Wolf/Serpent Earrings/Old Man)
I am out in the forest, the trees and leaves are colored lovely. I can see a wolf running up this very steep hill and I hear a voice explaining to me about the speed and strength of the Wolf. I see that it notices me and comes running over. My first reaction is to assume it will harm me, so I climb a big tree with a long limb reaching out from the top. I climb up and the wolf seems to jump right up to where I am. Something happens and I end up on the ground, but the Wolf is a friend and is licking me and is a very beautiful grey wolf. I am thinking What a splendid creature it is. I keep thinking of Fenrir the Wolf.
Scene shifts.
I am in a room in a building and there are things laid out , as if it is a shop. I am walking around looking at the stuff. I see a pair of Golden Serpent Earring clips…..I pass them but then go back and grab them and put them in my pocket. The hang and together make two zigzags almost like lightening bolts. I think they are Special. I am then leaving and I hug this old white haired man who seems to have helped me, and who is my friend, very familiar. I go and sit with a circle of people then.
February 25, 2005
(Scouting for Sex Place/Snake/Arguing)
Beefy and I are walking up the street at night, trying to find a place to have sex. We find all these wee nooks etc, but I dont even consider them. They are just not up to comfort standard. In one, like a barn, we see what looks like a snake, but I think it cant be because there are supposed to be no snakes in Ireland….. But then we see that indeed it is. I am wearing my winklepickers boots. The snake appears to be a rattlesnake but it is dark so I am not sure. It crawls out and looks at us, righ tnext to my feet. I am sorta nervous but then I telepathically communicated to it that we rae not going to bother it and that we are on our way out. We leave. We keep looking for places and I feel like Beefys being an asshole to me…disrespectful. I realize while walking down the street that I only have my black underwear on and the winklepickers. I ask Beefy for the hat he is wearing and I use something else too to cover up my boobs and ass. We pass all sorts of people coming home drunk from somewhere. Beefy is talking to them and they all are looking at me. I feel like Jodi Marsh and it bothers me and I end up sorta going fof on Beefy for treating me with disrespect. AT one point I punch him in the stomach/chest and say in tears ‘I hate you’ but know that I dont and am just being melodramatic, which lasts awhile.
June 16, 2005
(Lucid /Young Boy/Sex with Footballer then Beefy/Snake)
I am being shown all kinds of images of a house, different ‘views’ of it. I become Lucid and go to a house, with a small boy, who looks like PJ did when little. We are in the house I had seen. I recognize the views and the fireplace. Seem the house is in some way related to Rita? Me and the boy are looking through a drawer and desk….for ??? We go through a jewelry box and find loads of earrings etc. We put it back. We are going through other wee boxes of stuff. A group of people come in, unsure who they are or why the are here. I decide Id like to have sex, because I am Lucid and have high energy arousal. I leave the young boy and end up at a high cliff overlooking a sea. It is stormy feeling. The people that were in the house somehow ‘bring’ me this massive Frankenstein style man…..we end up talking up on the cliff. I have been Lucid since entering the house, but I decide Id like to be more lucid or OBE, so I lay back and stretch and concentrate and focus on leaving my body. I am then plunging into darkness at a great speed and building my focus and diving straight down….gaining Lucidity. I eventually am ‘nearing the ground’ at a big city and next thing I know I am walking down the street. I see a bunch of guys playing football and I walk over and end up grabbing one and ‘flying him away’. I tell him I am dreaming and just want to have some sex. He is confused, but up for it. I pull him under a pine-like tree that is like a canopy and a wee cave, like in Lurgan Park. This is behind a big building. I go down on him and he says something about the Nerves in his body and head have never been that awake. I end up leaving him then and find Beefy, who had been eating spicy food somewhere. I hug him and tell him he is in my dream. He is nervous, and I then am standing in grass. He says ‘where did that come from’ and points to a black snake in the grass. I do something with my hand and the snake ‘comes to me’ through the air and is In my hand. Beefy is amazed and now believes me that he is in a dream with me. I bring the snake over to show my and convince him. I want to have sex with him. We do, and it is great. The energy is wonderful. I know I am dreaming and dont care who sees us., out int the middle of the park. Then I am masturbating over a railing and grab a shampoo bottle, a wee one, and use it to masturbate. Then I wake up.
Note* Same young boy I dreamt of many times, thinking it was either young pj or jacob…….i am sure was Oisin, who ended up looking very similar to them at young age.
July 20, 2005
(Dream 1: Tattoo of Head and Shoulders)
Beefy and I are in a strange apartment which is painted blue inside and shaped funny, very angular. I am drawing a picture of Beefy with Dreadlocks. Randy Arvallo from SF is there and is talking about heroin and his habit and explaining stuff to us. He shows us a new tattoo he got on his left forearm. It is part of a big muscley man. He is then explaining the tattoo he wants to get…right above it and sorta mixing in with it. I say it could be like the Head to go with the tattoo he has of the shoulders?Weird. I remember thinking I have done a good job on the picture drawing of Beefy.
Dream 2:
(At the Pond Bad Girl Smothered by Thorn Snake)
Beefy and I meet up with Fiona…but she is a hybrid of her and Becky Millman, but also a bit different than both?? We end up riding in the back of the truck to their house in the country. I am talking with her and others about all sorts of stuff. I see 3 CDs for a computer…they are all some kind of encyclopedia disks. I think she must use them for school. I go into a back room and Beefy and her father are leaning over into a cubby like space pretending to fix something….but really they are sniffing coke. The man is apparently in rehab but sneaking it behind his familys back. HE gets up and starts to leave the room and I see he has coke dust under/in his eye and I stop him and wipe it off so it is not obvious to others. I then go to Beefy and I am angry because he is sniffing coke. We have a small argument about it. I am then back in talking to Becky/Fiona girl, but it is now more Becky. She asks if we want to go swimming and we say Yes. We get ready and are going to an indoor pool but then decides to go to outdoor pool/lake because she says it is better…..snobby people go to indoor pools. She insinuates some of her friends are in that category. We are then swimming in the pond behind Christian Goebels old cabin. She is talking about some of her guy friends who like her more than ‘just friends’, but she does not return the adoration. Something strange is going on this whole time too. We end up in the back of the truck again with her father/family and down by the river bank. We see an old lady sitting and looking at the river. She has crisps etc to sell…we had seen her earlier in the dream also, but somewhere else. I see the father get a bundle and throw it in the river…and I realize it is a small black baby…apparently dead. I know they are up to some shady shit. I jump out of the truck and begin to walk away, up the hill which turns into Daryl Skinners road. Someone is with me and we are talking about what we have seen. We end up back down at the pond again. There is a girl sitting in a tree. She is ‘bad’ in some way, and behind all the negative stuff. There is a big green Snake with thorns all over it, and it begins to wrap around her smothering her. WE are kinda glad. WE run to tell the others. She ends up getting loose, and there is a Lion, a Tiger, and a Bear etc, all these ‘huge wild animals’ and they are friendly with me and some of the others but seem intent on destroying the girl??? This all takes place on the bank of the pond. It is all very strange. The feeling of petting the animals is amazing.
September 23, 2005
Dream 1: (Storm coming/Cloud Serpents)
I am at mom and dads house. There is a storm brewing. I feel it is going to be abad one. Dad is asking my opinion. I tell him we should leave because if we dont, the storm will hit directly and we might not survive. We had been planning to all drive to Harrisonburg, so I suggest we go and by the time we get back maybe the storm will have passed. It is very foreboding. No one listens though and everyone stays. I point at the sky which is getting very dark and covered by black storm clouds. This geos on a bit and then I go outside and look into the sky and see three cloud-like serpents…parallel…a blue, red, and green one. They seem to be ‘racing’ each other. It seems important, and, still foreboding. I run in and tell dad and everyone goes out to see. Then I am watching birds-eye view as truckers on a big highway are ‘chasing’ the cloud serpents…….as if they can catch them!?!
Dream 2: (Smashing Pumpkins and Letting Go)
I am as if in highschool again. I feel I am a bit gaudy and geeky. I meet the Smashing Pumpkins, and am hanging out with them. I seem to be good friends with D’arcy, and I have a big crush on Billy Corgan. Darcy is trying to hook us up, but she tells me maybe if I was fitter he would go with me. I know its just for a shag anyway. I am then in my underwear running down the dirt road, as if exercising. I am about to hook up with Billy Corgan…..but then something happens and I am grabbing hold of a truck that goes by on the road. I know I need to Let Go and jump off into the grass but I feel it is going too fast and I am nervous but also realize the vehicle is going to wreck soon. The Smashing Pumpkins are yelling for me to jump. The truck ends up going over a fence and about to crash to the ground and I let go and just hope that I am able to clear the truck and accident safely. I feel kinda like a kid in the dream.
Dream 3: (Amy comes in)
Beefy and I are in bed sleeping and we hear the door open and Amy comes in. She comes up into the bedroom and asks for me to help her do something, which I do on the floor, then she leaves.
October 31, 2005
Dream 1: (Snake while Blueberry picking)
I am walking around on the road above moms house picking blueberries. I am trying to hide from someone at the same time. The blueberries are weild and taste delicious. I think to myself that it reminds me of being a kid. I am then in the woods right next to the road, sort near where the old basketball hoop used to be. I am standing there and have the thought that I should watch for snakes. As I think that, I realize there is a snake under my feet under some leaves. I grab hold of a tree and pull myself up off of it, and to the side. The snake jumps up to the road. It is a beautiful copperhead type, but there are oragne markings mixed in between its other patterns. It is stunning. I end up at moms asking if it would have been a copperhead and describing the markings.
Dream 2: (Mucous plug)
Beefy and I are visiting someones house. It is large and fancy and it seems the McGoverns may live there. We are trying to tidy up the room we are in. It has wooden floors. I am trying to fold my clothes. I come into the room at one point and Beefy has all his clothes folded in piles everywhere, and I am a bit annoyed because he leaves stuff everywhere. One of the people we are staying with comes in, maybe Seamus McGovern, and I say I am trying to clean because the room is hectic. I am then outside and arranging two sculpture-like things, Art, like long tall abstract women figures. They havng from a wire rack, and I am moving them to a corner in the hall so they look good. Everyone keeps asking me about the baby and when I am due , I tell them I have been having contractions but dont feel them. Then I am in the bathroom on the toilet peeing and I notice int my underwear my mucous plug, it is huge and shaped funny. The more I look at it , the more it looks like a fetus…tiny….and I think maybe I had twins but one never grew, or something. I know then that labor will start soon and I start to get excited.
November 9, 2005
Dream 1: ( Dancing snake goddess)
There is a nude woman, goddess-like, with a huge snake. She is erotically dancing with it and it is slithering all around her. It is three times bigger than she is. She is having an orgasm as it slithers all over her.
Dream 2: (Food Prep and Driving up steep hill)
I am with Mayra Williams in Luray. We are trying to sell food, so we are looking for a place to set up. We are near 7-11 but it is different. We each eat a ham sandwich and bowl of tomato soup. I ask people in 7-11 for two bowls and they give us them. I fill both mine and Mayras bowls with the soup. A bunch of other stuff is going on, and then I am inside 7-11 working with food, all sorts of cool little treats and snacks that look like petrified wood. Before I leave ‘work’ the girl lets me take a bunch. I leave, with my bookbag filled with stuff. I keep finding orange feathers of different shapes, that seem to come from a cat??? I keep them each time I find them, and put them in the bookbag. I am walking to my car in the parking lot, with someone, a boy….unclear who it is. Some guy asks me if Joel Miller is picking me up, and I say no, I am driving. Then a boy in a wheelchair is there too. He has been bit in the head somehow. We all go to the car. I am talking about how hot it is and that we should go swimming. The car is a dark convertible. I drive it out and it is a bit weird to drive at first. I finally pull out and turn to go up the hill near Family Convenience and the hill is so steep the car putts up it slowly. Then it is as if we are being pulled by cables, like a ski lift. It is a very cheerful mood in dream.
Dream 3: (Jumping Joyfully on mattresses)
I am in Safeway parking lot in Luray with Beefy and others. There is a big group of people, including Rita and Becky. I am in some sort of conflict with Rita and Becky, over a comment? There are loads of Mattresses laid out in the parking lot. I get everyone to lay them in a circle, and we are bouncing on them and having loads of fun, doing flips etc. I feel quite joyful.
November 10, 2005
Dream 1: (Full moon Volleyball)
I am playing volleyball on top of a hill with some people. To our right there is a massive full moon, absolutely gorgeous. I go and point and say ‘ isnt she beautiful!’, talking about the moon. I say something about it being in pisces and that the energy is intense. Something happens at the volleyball game and some of us are knocked out or something…it is related to the moon in some way.
Dream 2: (Birthing Snake)
I am in a bedroom somewhere and I can feel my belly wriggling around very actively. IT is different and I think ‘this is it, baby is coming’. Then a small snake is born and crawls from my vagina and out the bottom of my shorts to the floor! I am in awe, and find it strange at first but then I try to catch it and it crawls under the bed. When I look under the bed to see it, I has changed into a cloth snake, made of white fabric, and it seems to have a bit of patchwork and is sewn with thread and the eyes are sewn on etc. But it is moving around like normal. Then I grab it and look at it closely trying to figure out what it means. Next thing I know, it is a robot, with metal wires, and what seems to be microchips on it, all pieced together but a bit crudely. I think to myself that ‘Mother” has been experimenting again?!
(Disembodied Terror/ Magical Happenings and Self As Antidote- Consuming the Snake)
Dreamtime Feb 28, 2009
I am asleep and can hear B outside in conflict with a big mob of young people who are drinking and making noise and being destructive. I get up and look out the window, and eventually go downstairs. They have been fighting and hassling. I open the back door and say 'Thats it' really angry, and I throw and stone into their crowd in the street and it hits someone, but they see me close the door and then know who it is that has thrown it. I run upstairs, suddenly afraid of what they will do. B has gone somewhere and I am alone in the house with Oisin and I feel insecure and unsafe. I see someone climbing on the wall to get into the house. I look out the window and then someone throws something in ….they are targeting the house and me now. The next thing I know I am in the bed sleeping next to Oisin, and I feel a presence….unseen….and I am terrified. It is sucking me down the bed toward an invisible hole or something. I can feel the energy and palpable terror as I try to fight the pull. I am afraid for Oisin too. It seems to suck me to the door/wall and I know I am powerless in relation to this immense energy, whatever/whoever it is. At some point I am telling B about the dream of the kids and the terror, as if I have woken up. Then I am in a car with a man who I have met and feel in sync with …he is older and somewhat familiar. He seems to belong to some group that I have befriended. B and I are at odds and he has pretty much dissed everything I tell him matters to me. I feel so angry and I want to get away, so I go with the man. There is something about a girl, familiar either in Waking Life or in Dream, and we both somehow come to realize with are on the same 'Mission'. The man and I are supposed to eat dinner with her and her parents but something happens and we are really late. When we turn up, with Oisin, Oisin is really wired and running around and I feel self-conscious and that I am offending her parents because they seem quite ‘proper’. He walks right off a table at one point while I half-catch him before he hits the floor in such a ways that it makes it look like no big deal. The girl and I are in in her room then, but we leave to meet the man at a pub or somewhere. We sit down at a table with some people There is a blonde girl who arouses my rage and I punch her and get into a spat. We are waiting for the owners of the place to leave with us. Then I am with the girl again, in her room, and there is an assortment of objects on a table. We are trying to do something shamanistic, and I turn into a Bat and she is something else. It has to do with the objects on the table. I fly out, in a bat-like manner, conscious of the quick flapping motion of my wings. It is hard to remain in flight however. We feel compelled to figure out or do something that has spiritual/ magical undertones and involves the girls parents too. There is a scene where I am hanging from a ledge in water or some other substance and asking for help up…saying “please help me!”. There is one scene where I am with Oisin and we are walking and I see a timber rattlesnake…a small fat one …and I run over to protect him. I end up grabbing it and have it in my hands. I feel I must consume it for some reason. As I am holding it I bite down on its belly and it lets out a loud squeal, then I crush its head in my fingers and take a bite out of it. It has a magical feel to it. There is another rattlesnake that seems to jump and bite Oisin in the face but we dont pay any attention … It is as if I consumed the snake in order to use it as an Antidote to any potential harm it could bring to Oisin. I end up describing the experiences to the girls parents. They are amazed.
The aesthetic finish calls up an image of genteel elders passing serenely away. This is not at all what I mean by “aesthetics.” The word roots itself in a gasp (aisthou), a sudden short intake of breath in the face of wonder, or horror. Aesthetics begins in the startle of surprise, the breath caught, held in astonishment. Aesthetics arises from an epiphanic image, the full force of character revealed as in a work of art.
Can a person become an epiphany?
Can we entertain the idea that all along our earthly life has been phenomenal, a showing, a presentation? Can we imagine that at the essence of human being is an insistence upon being witnessed–by others, by gods, by the cosmos itself….and that the inner force of character cannot be concealed from this display. The image will out, and the last years put the final finish to the image.
It is then only natural that we become more like apparitions, already sepulchral effigies, stand-ins for ancestors. Visits to us become ceremonies; gifts, offerings; conversations, liturgical repetitions. We are left as traces, lasting in our very thinness like the scarcely visible lines on a Chinese silkscreen, microlayers of pigment and carbon, which can yet portray the substantial pro- fundities of a face. Lasting no longer than a little melody, a unique composition of disharmonious notes, yet echoing long after we are gone. This is the thinness of our aesthetic reality, this old, very dear image that is left and lasts.
James Hillman, the Force of Character and the lasting life
Besides the muscles needed functionally to chew, kiss, sniff, blow, squint, blink, and twitch away A fly, most of the forty-five facial muscles serve only emotional expression. You don't need them to bring in food, to beat down an enemy, nurse an offspring, or perform sexual intercourse. The ventriloquist proves they are not needed for speaking. Nor are they essential to breathing, hearing, or sleeping. The extravagance of facial musculature is all for expression of major emotions, yes; but even more for such peculiar subtleties of civilization as supercilious contempt, wry irony, wide-eyed fawning, cool unconcern, smiling, and sneering. By means of these muscles, our faces make pictures. The psyche displays aesthetically its states of soul. Character traits become intelligible images; yet each expression is characteristically different, and the more complex the character, the more individual the expression. "There is nothing average about ex- pression. It is essentially individual. In so far as an average dominates, expression fades."
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~Faces need to be used~
A face is something that is incomplete; a work in progress….faces need to be used because they are not finished images, says the Chicago art historian James Elkins. Aging as a progress of the face. If you consider your face as one more part of the body, then it withers, crinkles, blotches, and falls away like other parts of the body. If youimagine your face as a phenomenon with a different significance, with its own destiny, then all that goes on there, after sixty especially, is a work in progress, building the image, preparing a face that has little to do with the faces that you meet. What's going on, rather, is the progress of a portrait, toward a memory.
"Faces need to be used." How? Out there, weathering and leathering, actively engaged with world? Should we engage in full-face confrontations, get in each other's faces? Another way to use the face is aging. Aging uses the face every day, and it is these traces of use that cosmetic surgery sets out to repair. Without any effort on our part, quite passively, even in the solitude of a monk's cell, even in an immune-protective bubble, the face is being used. "The aging process,” says Levinas, “probably the most perfect model of passive synthesis. " A face is being made, often against your will, as witness to your character.
~James Hillman, The force of character and the lasting life
Last time I saw Chaplin, all he said was, "Stay warm. Stay warm.”
(Groucho Marx in conversation with Woody Allen)
Last chance, last minute, last round, last inning, last exit, last ditch. Last rites, Last Supper, last days, Last Judgment. Last words, last breath. Last word, last laugh, last dance, last rose of summer, last good-bye. What an enormously weighty word! Why does it give such importance to the words it qualifies? And how does "last" bear on character? We shall have to find out.
Already I can tell you this: Our inquiry will aim deeper than the evident meaning of "the last time" " as the end and therefore death. If that were all, the inquiry could stop here, satisfied with this banal result. Remember, we are eluding death all through this book, trying to prevent death from swallowing into its im- penetrable darkness the light of intelligent inquiry. Death is a single stupefying generality that puts an end to our thinking about life. The idea of death robs inquiry of its passionate vi lality and empties our efforts of their purpose by coming to the predestined conclusion, death. Why inquire if you already know the answer?
If a pair of socks helped us in the previous chapter, the fic- ton of a couple may help in this one.
“She just got into her car and drove off. That was the last time I saw her." How casually the moment slips by, blurring into the everyday. But when the simple action is marked by "last." the event becomes an indelible image. "Last" makes an event eventful, elevates it beyond the everyday, leaves a lasting impression. Last words become "famous," " last moments enig- matic emblems to ponder for years to come.
Why? Because what happens at the end of a sequence stamps its closure, gives it finality. Reverberations of fate. The events that composed the marriage, the love affair, the life together be- come essentialized into the last scene. She gets into her car and drives off. To her death in an accident? To another city and a new start? To another lover? Home to Mother? Back to her husband and children? Where she drives to belongs more to the next story than to the last scene of this fiction of a jointly at- tempted life.
Had she returned later as on any other day, the image of her getting into her car would have no significance and therefore would not last. But now it tells of character: the abiding char- acter of the relationship- -its commitment to casualness; its apparent openness, which conceals truth. Or it reveals her re- bellious independence; or her adventurous courage; or her fail- ure of nerve; or her diffident coldness. .. . It says something about his character, too. the unspoken feelings; the dulled sensitivity that cannot perceive and does not foresee. Their character together, his, hers- last, as she drives off.
So the last time is more than information for a detective's re- port. "Just the facts." She does, in fact, just get into her car and drive away. But the last time transforms the facts into an image. The impression of her at the curb as the ignition catches lasts because it is compressed into a significant image, a poetic mo- ment. Other times are held captive by the last time and ever- lastingly signified.
Poetry depends on compression for its impact. The word for poet in German is Dichter, one who makes things dicht (thick, dense, compact). A poetic image compresses into a snapshot a particular moment characteristic of a larger whole, capturing its depth, complexity, and importance. By putting closure to a se- ries of events that otherwise could run on and on, the last time is outside serial time, transcendent.
This kind of moment is hard to bear and hard to relinquish. It feeds nostalgia, coming back to mind, a refrain that will not let go. Older age makes room for what T. S. Eliot refers to as "the evening with the photograph album," snapshots that bring back a world. ' Gerontology names these evenings "life review" and claims that they are the main calling of later years. Since anyone at any age can slip into nostalgic reverie, "later years" can be taken less literally, to mean a poetic state of soul favored by the old but not exclusive to them.
The last time turns love, pain, despair, and habit into poetry. It puts a stop to, arrests forward motion, and lifts life out of it- self. This is transcendence. We feel shaken to the bones, as if the gods had stepped into the middle of our lives.
Transcendence of the daily does not occur until the epiphany of the last time. She got into her car every day. The last time be- comes utterly different. In no succession of events do we imag- in any one moment to be the last. We can always come back another time, do this again. "The last time" says there is no "again." The last time is unique, singular, fateful. Pop lyrics play on this poetic moment: "The days dwindle down to a pre- cious few, September. .. " (Maxwell Anderson); "The last time we saw you . " (Leonard Cohen); "The last time I saw Paris" (Oscar Hammerstein), "Last time I saw him" (Pamela Sawyer); "This could be the last time ..." (Jagger and Richards), "The last time I saw George alive • (Rod Stewart). "Again, this couldn't happen again. "; etc. Each scene of life may be a last time, like the morning she drove off in her car.
To call the last time unique, singular, and fateful makes it sound inevitable and necessary, as if she drove off because it was determined by her character. If character is fate, as Heraclitus sald, then this was her day to die. Or she had to cut out, because *that's just the kind of freewheeling person she was; we should have expected it " Yet it might have been a spontancous impulse to which her character gave in: "Enough is enough; I'm out of here.” A whim, seemingly out of character. We can't know. For us the story stops as the car pulls away.
Right here, we have to be careful. Character could become an iron law, permitting only those acts that are "in character."In that case, the idea of character engenders little waves of repres- sion. "It's not my nature to do this, think that, want those, be- have like this." Is there no room for the spontaneous, for moments of speaking, thinking, and feeling quite "out of char. acter"? The answer depends on how we think about character.
I would claim that nothing is out of character. Character is inescapable; if anything were truly out of character, what would its source be? What stands behind a whim? Who pushes the urge and ignites an impulse? Whence do stray thoughts arise? Whims emerge from the same soul as choices and are as much part of your character as any habit. That last time belonged to her just as all the other times did. Belonged to her? Which "her"?
Her character must consist in several characters- "partial personalities," as psychology calls these figures who stir your impulses and enter your dreams, figures who would dare what you would not, who push and pull you off the beaten track, whose truth breaks through after a carafe of wine in a strange town. Character is characters; our nature is a plural complexity, a multiphasic polysemous weave, a bundle, a tangle, a sleeve. That's why we need a long old age: to ravel out the snarls and set things straight.
I like to imagine a person's psyche to be like a boardinghouse full of characters. The ones who show up regularly and who habitually follow the house rules may not have met other long- term residents who stay behind closed doors, or who only ap- pear at night. An adequate theory of character must make room for character actors, for the stuntmen and animal handlers, for all the figures who play bit parts and produce unexpected acts. They often make the show fateful, or tragic, or farcically ab- surd.
Fitting them in is called by Jungian psychologists integration of the shadow personalities. Fitting them in, however, means first of all finding them fitting, suitable to your idea of your character. The Jungian ideal calls for a more integrated charac- ter, for the full boardinghouse with no exclusions. This may re- quire conversion of the more disreputable and obstreperous to the morals of the majorin, an integration leading to the in tegrity of the matured character.
These noble ideals are better in the recipe than on the table. for old people, as Yeats wrote and Pound demonstrated, are often disheveled, intemperate, whimsical, and closer to chaos than to the sober well-honed wisdom that the idea of integra- ton suggests. The integrity of character is probably not so unitary , rather, the full company is onstage as at the end of the opera, when the chorus, the dancers, the leads, and the con ductor take their uncoordinated bows. Life wants the whole ensemble. in fagrante delicto. Even the cover-ups belong to the character.
The study of how each of these characters belongs is a main activity of later years, when "life review' consumes more and more of our hours. Whether going through piles of papers and closets of things, or regaling grandchildren with stories, or at- tempting to write autobiography, obituary, and history, we try to compress life's meanders and accidents into a "character study. That's why we need so many later years and why, as the days shorten, more and more evenings are absorbed in the photo- graph album. Regardless of whether contrition, nostalgia, or vindictiveness marks our feeling as we turn the pages, we are as engrossed in study as if for a final exam.
We study our character and others' for revelation of essence, and we read actions such as her driving away as compressed ex- pressions of this essence. She, at the curb, opening the car door, getting in and going off for the last time has become an in- delible image, an objective shot corresponding to her character. We study this poetic particular for descriptive predicates that might lead to predictions about her behavior. Other images come to mind--other times when her eyes shone with a wild light while she sat behind the wheel; casual words of envy at a friend's freedom; her collection of lightweight, thin-soled shoes; a girlhood story of a dangerous hike. This cluster of im- ages shows qualities that constitute her character: freedom, danger, movement, surprise. As these belong to her character so they can be predicted. Her driving off should be no surprise- providing we compact her character into only these compatible images, arrange them into a coherent story, and omit all that does not fit in.
What does not fit in demands all the more scrutiny and a widening notion of character. All we need to do is stick with the image, allow its complications to puzzle us, and abandon such superficial ideas of character as habits, virtues, vices, ideals. Ac- cess to character comes through the study of images, not the examination of morals.
The daily world is notoriously poor in this kind of study. The little schoolboy killer was such a quiet nice kid; the serial murderer was hardly noticeable and seemed like anybody else; the baby-sitter who abused her charges was so prompt and tidy and polite. Our restricted notion of character restricts what we are able to see in people. If people are prompt and polite, nice and quiet; if they lack noticeable quirks, we expect them to be tidy in character. Unless we have a trained eye for the signifi- cant discrepancy, our predictions will invariably be wrong. The crime comes as a shocking surprise, an act altogether out of character. A culture blind to the complexities of character al- lows the psychopath his heyday of mayhem. No one noticed any oddity because no one had an eye for it. So after the horror he is sent to be "seen" by the psychologists who now, post facto, know what to look for and will, of course, find it.
We are as we appear, yes, but only when appearances are read imaginatively, only when the perceiving eye studies what it sees as a lasting image. This eye looks at the facts for the significant gesture, the characteristic style, the verbal phrasings and rhythms. This eye is trained by the visibilities of human nature. It learns from "people-watching, " from movie close-ups, dance postures and dinner parties, body language, and the street. It sees an image, which Ezra Pound defined as "that which pre- sents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."2 Especially, I would add, in that instant we see as "the last time." The older we get the longer we look, and want to look.
A woman of one hundred and three, living in Nevada, de- scribed her desire:
I want to start a wedding chapel. ……. I would just sit in a nice chair and let ... whoever I hire do the strenuous work. The reason I'd like a wedding chapel is that I could study the peo- ple. I could see what kind of man she's going to marry, and what kind of woman or girl she is. I can tell, I can tell.
Al Hirschfeld, artist and caricaturist, at ninety-five declares:
What's a man to do? Sit around some sun-soaked beach all day? Watching the waves? Or playing golf? Human beings fascinate me. People. I used to love just sitting in the window of the Howard Johnson's at Forty-sixth and Broadway, draw- ing the constant parade of people passing by. . .. Ill draw a bow tie, or a cane, or jot down one word or make a sketch that brings back an entire scene.
The eye for the image cuts to the essential.
In our overpsychologized culture, psychological testing sub- stitutes for this seasoned eye and prevents its development. In- stead of looking, we test; instead of imaginative insight, we read write-ups; instead of interviews, inventories; instead of stories, scores. Psychology assumes it can get at character by probing motivations, reaction responses, choices, and projections. It uses concepts and numbers to assess the soul, rather than rely- ing on the anomalous eye of a practiced observer.
The anomalous eye is the old eye. The older soul, aged into its own peculiarity, cannot, in fact, see straight at all; it favors the odd. Love of the odd may appear early in life, with the af fectionate nicknames children give one another and that single Out a particular feature or trait of character. But usually youth prefers conformity, trying to adjust or smother what does not fit in. In late life, having now become studies in uniqueness, we look for companions as odd in their ways as we are in ours. Similarities in daily routines, similar past experiences, parallel symptoms, common backgrounds are not comforting enough The fun, the love comes with companions in uniqueness. The odd couple: a couple of oddball characters.
The term "gerontology" should more rightly refer to the kind of study we do with our old eye than to the study of old age by young psychologists. Our studying does not aim to un- cover why she got in the car and drove off. The cause is already given: It was necessary because it was in her character. No use laying out the reason--she felt trapped; she had a secret; it was her time; she went schizoid and fled from love, or was a para- noid and fled from demons, or a sociopath and took the money and ran. We have little interest in exculpatory causes, such as her mother, her childhood, her horoscope, her awakened femi- nism. Conventional generalities explain nothing to the old ob- server. The anomalous eye just likes to watch, to sink deeper into the puzzle of human character which increases tolerance for human oddity.
Instead of coming up with reasons and diagnoses, we study the image. Our curiosity focuses upon the image of the last time, on her behavior as a phenomenon, on the image as an epiphany, for it is the image that lasts and can be reflected again and again in a variety of stories, exhibiting character in action. She was performing a drama, in which, as Aristotle said, char- acter is revealed through action.
Her last scene is also dreamlike, a tableau: the curb, the car, the key in the switch. In a dream we never know the motive for anyone's action or the diagnosis of anyone's problem. Psychol- ogy begins in the morning. We do not know the reasons for what dream people do, how they were treated in childhood, or even why they are there at all. The more the dream strikes us as an image- and each dream is a one-and-only, last-time dream- the less we can formulate it, yet the more we can re- turn to it and draw from it. Everything we look upon seems odd, as if seen for the first time, or the last. Something re- demptive happens. "We are blest by everything, / Everything we look upon is blest," writes Yeats- the last, and lasting, lines of one of his reflective poems on aging published when he was sixty-eight.
Blessing is the one gift we want from the old, and the one great gift only they can bestow. Anyone can applaud above- average achievements and award the outstanding. The old, however, are able to recognize the beauty that is hidden from usual sight, not because they have seen so much through the vears, but because the years have forced them to see so oddly. What one needs blessed are the oddities of character specific to our solitary uniqueness and therefore so hard to bear. I can bless my own virtues, but I need a well-trained, long-suffering eye to bless the virtues concealed in my vices.
A culture is preserved by the old. This cliché usually means that they guard the old ways, the old knowledge, the old stories; they are wise and give prudent counsel. Rather, I think, culture is preserved by the old because they enjoy the odd, study oth- ers for it, and locate the essence of character in what is peculiar to each phenomenon. A culture that does not appreciate the character of anything eccentric to its model tends to homoge- nize and to standardize its definition of the good citizen. The old preserve culture by means of the stubborn sameness of their unsuitable peculiarities.
The increasing importance of oddity as we age shifts the idea of character from the constitutive center of a human being out to the edges. The character truest to itself becomes eccentric rather than immovably centered, as Emerson defined the noble character of the hero. At the edge, the certainty of borders gives way. We are more subject to invasion, less able to mobilize de- fenses, less sure of who we really are, even as we may be per- ceived by others as a person of character. This dislocation of self trom center to indefinite edge merges us more with the world, so that we can feel "blest by everything."
C. G. Jung spent his more than eighty years following the Delphic maxim Know thyself" Self-examination and inquiry into the self of others was his lifework and formed his theory. Yet, amazingly, this is what he writes on the very last page of his autobiographical memoir:
I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am dis- tressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about my- self and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. When Lao-tzu says: "All are clear, I alone am clouded," he is expressing what I now feel in advanced old age. ... Yet there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night. and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unex- pected unfamiliarity with myself.
Let us review for the last time her departure. That image offers one more allegory for imagining character. Her move exposed a dimension that he at the door had never been able to perceive, owing to the assumptions he made about her charac- ter. What he could not see before, he sees only too clearly now, in his imagination. Perhaps, until she turned the key, she, too, was ignorant of this depth of potential, this eccentricity. Nor had either of them a foreboding of sudden death--if that is where she went.
We come to realize that character dissolves into stories about character. We become characters in these fictions; this implies that the very idea of character also becomes a fiction--and therefore vastly important, for it generates imagination much as her image in this chapter provoked our imagination to invent fictions about her character and about the idea of character.
This is why the idea of character is so needed in a culture: It nourishes imagination. Without the idea we have no perplex= ing, comprehensive, and long-lasting framework to ponder; In= stead we have mere collections of people whose quirks have no depth, whose images have no resonance, and who are distin- guishable only in terms of collective categories: occupation, age, gender, religion, nationality, income, IQ, diagnosis. The sum of these adds up to a faceless Nobody, not a qualified Each. Without the idea of character, no single person has a lasting value. If each is replaceable, each is also disposable. The social order becomes like a battalion under fire; we are all replace- ments, filler for empty slots.
Character itself dissolves into fiction, as she does in our imaginings about her character, but the idea of character makes the fiction lasting. The idea keeps us inquiring, makes us look more closely at the snapshots. Her image spurs our imagina- tions. We want to know her better, see who she really is. Yet "who she really is, " her literal character, is only literary, only a figure in the stories in which she is the main character, and that is what lasts even when she has gone.
We, too, last as fictional images, whether in the reminis- cences of family, the gossip of detractors, or the reports of obituarists. Our character becomes the fertile source of fictions that add another dimension of life to our lives even as we fade as actualities. Jung realized this truth in his very late years, find- ing that he had become unfamiliar with the character he had as- sumed himself to be. His self-same reality became porous, indefinite, susceptible. As he wholly loosens into the world of "plants, animals, clouds" and is assimilated by the natural World, his character in the imagination of the human world continues to last, and goes on generating stories of who he really was.
As I sat down to write this post, I put on some music. I felt suddenly compelled to put on ‘Travis’, a band I used to listen to profusely 20 years ago. I clicked on the song ‘Sing’, sorta randomly, but had to chuckle as it started to play and I was whisked back to another lifetime. In some ways. In other ways its the same old story, the same old ways of trying to stay sane.
Baby, you’ve been going so crazy Lately, nothing seems to be going right So low, why’d you have to get so low? You’re so You’ve been waiting in the sun too long
But if you sing, sing, sing, sing, sing, sing For the love you bring won’t mean a thing Unless you sing, sing, sing, sing
Colder, crying over your shoulder Hold her, and tell her everything’s gonna be fine Surely, you’ve been going too early Hurry, ’cause no one’s gonna be stopped Now, now, now, now, now
But if you sing, sing, sing, sing, sing For the love you bring won’t mean a thing Unless you sing, sing, sing, sing, sing, sing, sing, sing
Baby, there’s something going on today But I say nothing, nothing, nothing Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing So, now, now, now, now, now
But if you sing, sing, sing, sing, sing For the love you bring won’t mean a thing Unless you sing, sing, sing, sing, sing Ah, baby, sing, sing, sing, sing, sing, sing For the love you bring won’t mean a thing Unless you sing, sing, sing, sing
Francis Healy from ‘Travis’ the Invisible Band
Ive been going back and forth about how to frame the narrative that is starting to chip its way out of the prism cell that is my mind, so effortless it wants to flow out, and I could use any number of filters to see it and speak it and sieve it through. I have been going through old journals and writings from way back to barely teen all the way up through recent times. The running theme, almost frighteningly so, is madness and moods and the mercurial mind. And in light of that, I have come to realize that the only authentic lens to write from is the pulsating pendulum of the opposing states of Mania and Depression that have characterized my existence. Ive spent my whole life with a subtle deeply ingrained terror that the white coats would be knocking on the door at any moment. Ive spent 23 years now in deep research into psychology, neurology, spirituality, astrology, healing, pathology, trauma etc……..simply to understand my own Self and the ‘madness’ that lay at the root of all I am and do. Most people who know me identify who I am, with the Manic side of my nature. There are others, particularly me ex-husband/sons father, who would have a very different story I am sure. To be fair, I met him at 19, not long after the life-changing Trip (story at the end of this post) that I describe elsewhere, which ripped what semblance of a cohesive self I had at the time, into a million pieces. Which catalyzed my entire life since, into a journey of self-discovery, healing, and understanding the precipice I feel I have always teetered upon. He was the only stable tether for almost 10 years as I dove consciously into the underworld in obsessive preoccupation with healing and wholeness. I was a shattered and fragmented madwoman, essentially; My maddening moods and breakdowns were the undercurrent of everything, I was clinging to my highly lucid and lightening fast mercurial mind which attempted to carry me on its wings out of the oozing swamp of unconscious emotional energies and frothing underworld demons from many lifetimes; what little boundaries I started with in this life, were completely shattered at age 19 and I have spent the past two decades putting all the puzzle pieces back together, to gather all the soul shards and gain some footing in this strange place called Consensus Reality. It is not a comfortable place for me, I live more fluidly in the Imaginal Realm, and I know that my Intention in this lifetime was to go down into what I call the ‘psychic gulags’ and rescue all the imprisoned selves that have been splintered and lost for lifetime after lifetime. If I were to try and write the story that is my Life hereNow, without acknowledging the impact that my own wiring and disposition and temperament has played in the narrative, it would feel delusional. And there are so many threads, ‘too many clues in this room’ as Gordon Lightfoot sang……….that untangling them finally will free me to explore another reality. If I had not discovered and immersed myself in the deep undertaking of Astrology and Psychology, I would , no doubt, be locked up somewhere unable to exist in this world. I know a few of those alternate selves, I have been inside their lives in the DreamPlane, I have seen some of the parallel tracks my potential has played out……and I believe I am in the best of all possible worlds.
BlissNinja ai generated Art
Lyrics
Dear diary What is wrong with me? ‘Cause I’m fine between the lines Be not afraid Help is on its way A sentence suspended in air Way over there
Dear diary What else could it be? As nightshade descends like a veil Under the sail of my heart Be still, don’t stop until the end
Dear diary What is wrong with me? ‘Cause I’m fine between the lines
Francis Healy, ‘Travis’ the invisible Band
Astrologically I am a Scorpio Ascendent/sun/uranus/mercury. Sun and Uranus are in exact conjunction………in the first house. If you understand what Uranus represents and expresses, it will make sense, the Mania aspect. The Million-watt electrical connection to the All, that cannot be separated out from my basic sense of self and vitality. Mercury sits almost exactly upon my ascendant. in the 12th house on the other side of Mercury, sits Pluto and Venus in exact conjunction in LIbra. There he is, Hermes, the trickster, the psychopomp…….straddling the very line between the unconscious/conscious self………mercury the winged messenger, the only god who could safely traverse the underworld the realm of pluto/hades. Neptune and MArs sit conjunct in the second house of sagittarius, adds some more intensity. But the kicker for the up and down pull of the madness of opposing highs of euphoric ecstatic delight and the morose leaden disconnection of despair……is perhaps the Moon(Moods/instincts/primal experience of self) in Aries(fiery/impulsive/intense) in close opposition to the 2′ conjunction of Saturn(contraction/depression)and Jupiter(expansion/joviality/cheer)….Those are just a couple short snippets of some of the things I will unpack over the course of writing. Ive gone so deeply into all of it for years, but never articulated it in written form. Its a daunting task, really, when the mind is super mercurial and sees the infinite patterns and connections of everything on many layers, one single sentence can have me fighting to stay focused on the point at hand instead of branching off into a hundred other fractal directions of experience and understanding.
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Understanding myself through the astrological framework, has been instrumental in giving me some objectivity from my own temperament and even the gifts and traumas inherent in the very blueprint of Me. I had been convinced I was utterly insane and there was no hope, no way Id ever be able to integrate all of what was destroying me; in retrospect, I can see how far I have come in stabilizing myself and finally learning exactly what I need in order to have a functioning nervous system that is not destroying myself or others around me, and which can take advantage of the vast creative capacities I carry and have found expression for in the world. The terrible fear that I will die without having developed my talents in this life is the cattle prod that keeps me delving ever deeper into my Body and Soul in order to bring the two together in the arms of Spirit, to truly Bring the Fullness of my Unique Individual expression of Self into this reality.
As I laid on the floor in my blindfold bandana, 5 hours into bodywork and somatic meditation, It came to me how the see-saw had ripped me apart my whole life. But since I had started to prioritize Embodiment and working with my physical body in a variety of intense ways, I had finally found the path to stability, at least, as much as I am capable with this particular wiring and nervous system and astrological blueprint. I had tasted this years before when I obsessively did several hours of my own style of yoga/pilates/movement every single day……it was the only thing that saved me from leaving this reality completely, something to balance the Mind that drove me to madness. AT the time, for years, I still fought the twin demons of Anorexia and Bulimia, but the bodywork allowed me to get some kind of grip on my emotional dysregulation. I only rarely missed a day. I have a tendency toward OCD and my life is very ritualized in many ways, even still, so the over-control at the time of every single thing in my life was vital to regaining some footing in physical reality. AT one point, I woke every morning at about 5:30am, did two hours of yoga, showered hot/cold/hot/cold etc while doing more breathing practices, walked the two miles to West Portal (SF) to get the same Golden Dragon Oolong from Peets Coffee…….I walked the entire way reading a book…(I read up to 10 books a week, used bookstores being my favorite haunt….buying piles, reading, and returning some for the cashback exchange for more)……silently stirred my honey into cup for several minutes, in a sorta trance I would assume it looked like to others, walked back with tea and reading. That was my morning ritual for 1.5 years while living in the Sunset at that dwelling. I still have ritualistic things that I do, but I change them up now and again. AStrologically my moon is in 6th house in whole house signs, and in the evolutionary astrology framework my Pluto Point is in that same house. The 12th house where one of my my stelliums of planets resides is the house of the diffuse boundary realms/subconscious/deeply buried/dreamtime etc…….the 6th is work/service/the daily ‘chop wood carry water’ and the health and purification of the body etc. So it makes sense that the form my healing would take is through the constant and dedicated discipline of Bodywork and daily routine rituals; my natural tendency is toward the Dreaming reality and altered states of consciousness/OBE etc, Its natural, the challenge for me is to stay grounded. To BE HERE NOW.
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How many times over the years have I come out of the low tide, the chosen isolation and reclusive despair state where I have zero tolerance for anyone or anything outside my own company and grasping mind, to think ‘im free now. Im healed. I did it, Im better, Ive sorted it out, im finally totally sane. The sweet shift into mania and high energy and lightening thought and desire for human company etc, the proof that Im superhuman and flying high and from now on I shall accomplish all the infinite desires in my soul, constantly without fail and I can be depended on and life will never lose its golden glow…….’
And hovering one fractal dimension away, my Daimon laughs maniacally and watches as once again the inevitable plummet with wax wings burnt, and the cycle starts itself over again.
The only salvation, is the Body. When I am able to stay true to my bodywork every single day and my grounding rituals, I feel balanced and great and high energy, with excitement and joy and creative fire, I have patience for the daily requirements of living, I care about people and things and have great warmth and appreciation for everything. It is not the euphoria of mania, but the ecstasy of truly being embodied, and loose and feeling and experiencing life through the flowing fascial network of the bodies wisdom. Its as far away from mania as it is from depression. Saturns cold leaden fingers cannot get to me when I devote myself to being in the body, through fascia work, yoga, intense dance, playful movement. Over the past few years I have made a point that when I start to feel Mania coming on, which is usually when Ive left the realm of body and gotten lodged into the mercurial uranian lightening mind suffocating in the infinite patterns and possibilities of all that I can and should do and be and write and say and want and dream and the adventures I can create……I step back and force myself to go deeply back into my body. I trade the extreme highs for the less intense but embodied joy of the simplicity of life. I still cycle through the pendulum but the lows are more like chosen retreat and renewal and refocusing and resting of the nervous system instead of nervous breakdown and collapse and despair and terror that the white coats will be here any moment, to take me away finally.
There are those who somehow find some simple way of living that carries them through, enjoying the typical distractions of what this society dances around. There are others who come into this game with a fire that threatens to consume them, driven by creative intentions that rip them apart and taunt and mock; Moods that make everything and everyone incidental to the crushing weight of manifesting that which is within the mind and soul, clamoring to get out. There has always been a fine line, they say, between genius and madness, and a huge proportion of those who have left the most vital and inspiring and insightul works of art and literature have danced with the very same demons (or Daimons) that keep me pirouetting on a tightrope between chasms……..uranian multidimensional awareness pulsating through a fleshbody with neural synaptic rapture as the Plutonian Dark Underworld of emotional terrors rises like molasses and the Jester Mercury juggling life and death and light and dark tries vehemently to rescue all these personalities from all the lives from all the playground capers in this Infinite Time Game……and integrate them into a Whole New Me.
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