2012/08/20
It didn't feel like falling asleep. It really felt more like rolling over and falling off the edge of the world. This was not my usual transition into dreaming. I remember that my mind followed the feeling of motion, into a dream-body of mine as the waking world was suddenly and completely shut out. That was a little disconcerting: I had been ready for bed, but had been fully awake only a moment ago. What if this happens again while I'm walking in the middle of the road, or cooking something with real fire, or something?
Anyway, I was in some room lit up everywhere by this steady red glow from the walls. I'd seen this red glow before, once, years ago, during one of the first nightmare sleep paralysis experiences where I also sort of went out of body. I never figured out exactly what it signaled, but take it as something unpleasant and out of the ordinary.
Although I no longer stay there, this new vision of the similar experience looked very much like it was the same place as when the red glow happened last time... with new nightmare-forms. Specifically, a silhouette in some distant corner of a humanoid figure with two horns curved upwards, and a lot of giant black beetles between us. The beetles were swarming.
I mentioned before that I have a couple of dream weapons, the larger of which I use for larger-scale battles. (You don't have to click the link, I'll just tell you it's the white-handled katana that I named Mercy). So, I used it now, slashing across things, building up the energy in the sword to blast out clouds of white ball-lightning... those cool stunts that usually end in a satisfactory victory and my not dreaming of those enemies again, at least, not for a long while.
For this battle, though, they wore me down. There were so many of them, the beetles, and they just kept coming, and while I could keep them at bay I noticed that my efforts were keeping them less and less bay-bound. I was losing ground, and... I didn't want them scuttling on my skin. I mean, eeurgh.
So, I decided to fly out the window instead. The scene outside was of a peaceful night, over my childhood neighborhood. So, by then I must have been dreaming. The red-light critters didn't follow me, it was like they were really confined to my room in the dream of my old neighborhood.
2012/08/23
The memory: A year ago today, I confessed to Mahadevi something quite personal and painful, and he turned what I confessed into his intellectual playground, invalidated my pain and revealed himself to be a strongly unshakeable advocate of principles and situations that would continue to cause me suffering. And, he wouldn't hear a word more about what it actually was like for me (which I judged intellectually dishonest, considering that he didn't seem to have ever been anywhere in his life that would ever resemble my circumstances at all, and, again, kept talking over me.)
The dream: I was walking the same path in that same mall, alone, when I saw a sword stuck in the ground. The location, to me, is significant: it wasn't stuck at the spot where Mahadevi made me cry tears in public, it was stuck there where I snapped at him. (In waking hindsight, I suppose, this was a change that came about so deep within myself that I didn't notice: Mahadevi is not my mentor. He's not my friend.)
I pulled the sword out of the ground and examined it. The blade was about an inch across, and it was very very long. Double-edged, straight-- not at all what I'm used to fantasizing about battling with, I'm a katana and kris kind of combatant, if I really can't get a ranged weapon or run away. The most interesting thing was the handle. It was made of the blackest substance I've ever seen, and had a luster to it like polished stone or glass. From the bottom-most, spreading out like tentacles or flames, was a gold inlaid pattern. The wriggly kris-like flames seemed to cradle an oval ring of gold, inside which an oval stone rested. The stone had an emblem or image on it... but that was the only thing about this sword that kept changing, in this dreamscape.
2012/08/29
I just spontaneously dreamed of barging back into that red room with all of the beetles, and holding ready with my brand new (unnamed) sword.
This time, all the beetles (which were still there) just stopped moving. They weren't dead, they just sort of all turned to see, but didn't attack. And if they aren't attacking... I don't want to. So none of us moved for several awkward moments. I don't know if this had anything to do with anything, but the horned figure was nowhere to be seen. Eventually, I relaxed a bit, and sort of got the impression that the beetles were waiting for my order, because they saw my new sword, or something.
But we remained at an impasse until I woke up.
2012/08/30
I dreamed of that room again, this time with the horned thing present, and I called across the room to it-- just out of curiosity, it wasn't a challenge-- asking if it liked my new sword. It responded by shooting giant grubs and maggots at me from its midsection. They were slow, but definitely aggressive, so, even though I felt bad about killing what I essentially understood to be babies, I hacked them to pieces until the pieces stopped moving. And the horned thing kept shooting more at me, which I just cut in half in mid-air while I ran towards him. The closer I got, the more frequently it shot, until I stabbed at the shadowy part where I hoped would be under the rib (since it was humanoid-shaped) and into the heart. Then I swung upwards, because the ribcage, if it had any bones, was that frail. I essentially sliced the upper half in vertical half.
It exploded into tarry splatters. None had landed on me, despite my being so close. I caught my breath. The moment I set the sword down, point jabbing in to the ground because it didn't have a sheath, to my surprise the sword formed a bubble around itself and included me in it... just as a few of the beetles flew at me, because they were all angry again. They hit the bubble instead, and fell as if they'd been swatted. I told them that whatever I just killed, it was its own fault, because I was just trying to have a conversation.
2012/10/31
While I continued meditating on most cards without anything as dramatic as what happened with poor, dear, Timmy... the meditation upon the Queen of Swords card brought a similar experience.
She was silent, not still or stalking, really more like ghostly. She had a restful presence, more like an angel of peace, most like a muse that was just musing. Since she was the Queen of Swords, I invited her back into my mind, into a visualization of the memory of the dream where I had been put through the sword test. (Poor, dear, Timmy!) She didn't accept the invitation so much as take the change in world-constructs in stride. When we were there, she floated around and seemed to be looking at what I got.
The Queen had some disdain for the wakizashi, Justice and Spite. "Like kitchen knives," she seemed to say. Ignorance was nothing special, it seemed too normal to be interesting. When she got to Mercy, however, I felt a subtle, positive burst of emotion from the Queen of Swords. "Oh, but this is fine, a fine sword," I could almost hear her say, and I saw her hold it up admiringly, examining the bared blade. I tried to explain to her that Mercy is Ignorance when not paired with Justice, but she didn't seem inclined to either listen or comment. Then I asked for her attention and pointed out my unnamed rapier. She reacted to that one as if it were outright ugly. She wanted nothing to do with it, this so-called Queen of Swords.
Since I had left Mercy out for display and hardly used it anymore, and since she liked it so much, I told Her Royal Highness that she could have it. She expressed her gratitude for the sword, and then stabbed me in the chest with it. I believe that she did that with the aim of stabbing my heart! I mean, she stabbed where my heart would be, if I hadn't already done a meditation to feed my heart to my wolf-spirit and send it away for safekeeping.
I don't believe that we'll get along. Still, I didn't retaliate or panic, because I still kept getting the sense that, however unexpected her action, she... wasn't real. She had an aim, but not an intention, if that makes sense.
Maybe I would have considered her more real, and spiritually significant, if I hadn't hidden my heart away and she'd managed to stab it. As it was, I couldn't even feel that she was something to caution myself against. She just wasn't giving off as much personality as even poor dear Timmy, so I didn't sense that she had the ability to mean to do that. I don't know what these tarot characters are. If they were me, you'd think she'd know to attack the wolf instead. If she were something/someone else, you'd think she'd become more animated and begin to speak oaths to the effect of accomplishing real harm to me and my little dog too. Instead she was just... there. Continuing to be there. Until she wasn't.
2012/11/11
Noting now that, still, when I came to after that daydream, the Queen of Swords was still there, and for a few days after this she haunted my space. As I mentioned, she was still super quiet, didn't seem to be swearing "real" revenge or anything, and I didn't even notice when exactly the Queen of Swords stopped hanging around.
The rapier remains unnamed, and I have in fact been feeling an aversion to using it lately. I haven't needed to, and it is definitely more effective than my Japanese-style swords, perhaps because I found it in the depths of my psyche instead of forging it at a conscious, lucid, precise-but-not-powerful level.
The bubble that it forms, when I stick the point into the ground, the first time seemed to be made out of something that looked gauzy. Like, sunshine but a much deeper bronze color. Like what one of my only dream guardians, named Isolde, was made out of. Except that the sword-bubble successfully works to protect me whereas Isolde failed.
I've been play-training with its bubbles since then, in waking life, visualizing myself sticking the sword point in the ground and seeing if I could make a blue bubble, a black bubble, a white bubble, make it spiky... It's fun, and I actually feel protection working on another level.
It continues to have neither name nor sheath, and, for all its efficiency... the sword also feels somehow like a curse.
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