Quiet days with snow on the ground are perfect for one of my favorite pastimes: going back through old journals to see what I was dreaming and doing around this date in past years, what recurring themes pop up and what cold case files might be worth opening up again. I found three reports from one year ago that immediately seized my attention.
January 9, 2023
dream
People Trees
Through the window of the train, I look out at the landscape as a wild pink wind picks up, sculpting the trees into different forms. There is a wood wizard in a hood, of course, and a female figure wagging a finger. I decide to call her The Schoolteacher. As I watch it seems that I am not merely indulging my fancy. These are People Trees, capable of communicating and showing themselves in more ways than I knew.
I would normally call them tree people. There is something different going on here that made me call them People Trees. I feel that a scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses has come alive and is playing in reverse: as if people who were turned into trees, like Philemon and Baucis, are showing themselves as people again.
Shall
I get off the train and speak with them? Not right now; the train is moving
fast and there are other adventures ahead. Perhaps I'll be able to meet them or
their kind in a future journey.
Comment 1/9/24
Trains often feature in my dreams, though I rarely take
them in ordinary life these days. I frequently make an association with training.
Now, a year later, I am about to launch two new dream teacher trainings. We
almost always start such programs by helping people connect or reconnect with a
personal tree of vision that can become their ladder between worlds. I have
learned a great deal from trees and have often found them to be wiser than
humans. I have encountered and lived close to trees that also harbored human
spirits, including that of a great Native American shaman. I do want to draw those trees, and that pink wind.
I am at the mouth of a tunnel. There are rails on the ground. I decide to go through. The walls of the tunnel are dirty and spattered with graffiti. When I come out it is at a train station somewhere deep in eastern Europe. There are crowds of men in fatigues or work clothes by a gunmetal train. Soldiers or convicts. Two big, brutal men look at me. I have given no thought to the form I am in. I am surprised they can see me.
I feel
this won’t end well if I remain visible, and ponder how to get out. I don’t
think it’s safe to simply leave the scene. Some part of me is in that scene. Now observer as well as actor, I am amused by the idea of needing to arrange an extraction for one of my
doubles or projections, while recognizing that this is actually a serious
matter. I could try to go back through the tunnel but they might follow.
Instead, I focus on lifting myself up so fast and so high I won’t be visible le
any more and the men at the station will soon disbelieve what they saw. I’m out
of there.
Comment 1/9/24
Here the
train is a literal one, apparently a troop train for conscripts - many of them convicts
- being sent by the Russians to the meat grinder at the front. Maybe in a
parallel life, I am still engaged as a journalist in trying to monitor and report on such things. Or maybe I am simply being reminded of the state of the
world we are in. I am also reminded that when we get around in our dreams, we
are generally not just disembodied thought forms. We travel in a subtle body that
can get into trouble.
January 10, 2023
Dream
The Golden Robe
When the bagpipe starts playing I know
it's time for the team to get out fast. I encourage them to climb through a
back window. I am in no great hurry. It's as if I have stepped into a movie -
in this case an exciting spy thriller with scenes in Cyprus and Turkey - and
can leave or switch roles as I please. I stay in the room when the other team
come in and pull it apart, searching for something. They make a great heap of
clothing and bedding in the middle of the space. I want to be sure to retrieve
my beautiful gold brocade robe.
Waking, the simple image of the robe is what I want to keep from my streaming dream movies. I will picture myself putting it on and see what swathing myself in golden silky energy does for my creative output. Simple is good.
Comment 1/9/24
I am in all kinds of adventures
in my spontaneous sleep dreams, and the lucid dreams I simply allow to unfold
from scenes and images that arise in liminal states between sleep and awake. Come
morning, I can be quite travel worn! My dreams often give me wonderful research
assignments involving scholarship or detective work, and glorious material for
performance and storymaking and creative art. Sometimes, however, as I noted in
my original journal report it is enough to bring back just one thing, and wrap
myself in its energy.
I am grateful for all of these, including the golden robe.
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