Only a Dream Away

Bid Ben Bid Bont

Finished Simon Buxton's "The Shamanic Way of the Bee" last night. I cried myself to sleep. Dreamed all night restlessly and intermittently about the Bee Master collecting honey from the blessed hives. Exhausted and weepy today.

Edited to add: One of the things that kept awakening me was a piercing, stabbing, fixed pain on the inner aspect of my right thigh. This pain is not new to me (been happening for a year maybe) but it is very occasional -- months between occurrences-- and always at night. When it woke me last night I wondered if it is what a bee sting feels like. The pain always comes and goes within an hour or so and never leaves soreness -- but it is pretty excruciating when it is happening.

Seeking out the Sting

Another night of non-stop dreams last night, but only a few remain:

ACT I

I am in an upstairs room, maybe a cozy finished attic with pitched ceilings, with my mentor Althea. I say to her, "It's so nice for us to have time like this. We never do anything, just the two of us." She agrees, and I take off my top and lie face down on a blanket. She begins to give me a therapeutic massage. After a little while someone comes in (another mystery schooler -- Linda perhaps) and Althea sends me away to a private room with something in my hands. I can't remember what I was holding, but I am to go into a smaller, curtained room while she deals with the other person.

ACT II

Althea, I, and a handful of herb students are at a book signing. There is something to do with horticulture and herbs at this event but the author is -- get this -- the Queen of England! None of us is dressed appropriately for her arrival, which is announced and we are all to move to the sides of the wide carpet she is to walk as she approaches a table at the front of the room. We are all dressed as though we are going to do bodywork or are on an outing doing herb harvesting in the woods.

Queen Elizabeth II processes down, wearing one of her famous matching suits and hats and handbags. She takes her seat at the table and looks frankly rather annoyed. The lining up and signing begins, lots of hullabaloo, and I stay off to the side and just watch her to see how she behaves. Two teenaged girls come up and make small talk with her; she leans forward with a sparkle in her eye and says something that makes them laugh. I respect her grace and cleverness, and the way she interacts.

At the end of the signing, my classmate Claudia has hauled a large bag of elderberry powder onto the table. It's about the size of a bag of potting soil. It is open and I can see the purple powder inside. Althea says something about wanting a drink, and I get her one, but her drink comes as a strange viscous periwinkle substance... it has the consistency of face cream. And the only way I can serve it to her is to  use the scoop from the elderberry powder bag. I ask her if it's OK if there's elderberry powder in her 'drink,' and she says it's fine.

ACT III

This is the dream that I remember the most vividly emotionally but I don't have many more details than that. Basically, throughout different scenarios, private, not private, indoor, outdoor, clothed, unclothed, I am waiting for a honeybee to come and sting me. In this segment of the dreamtime I am quite literally obsessed with the idea and am waiting for a bee that never comes. I understand it to be an initiation of sorts, and while I want it to happen, I'm also scared about how much it will hurt and what my reaction will be (I have never been stung in real life).

Losing my shoes at the Indian dance

The flood of dreams has returned, after a dearth brought about by too much study and stress. The past few nights I have dreamed almost all night long, different scenarios flowing seamlessly into the next, dozens of them in a night, so many I can't remember all but a few aspects the following morning.

The night before last, a few snippets remain: looking at Dulac-style children's book illustrations, woodcuts maybe, and reading some illuminated caption about bees, which had to do with the illustration. The more I tried to focus on what I was reading as the words appeared before me, the more I tried to be lucid so as to remember it, the more the words would slip away. It turns out Dulac did an illustration for Shakespeare's the Tempest called "Ariel and the Bee" and also did woodcuts for Yeats' "A Vision,"(see left) neither of which I knew about before (consciously anyway). Interestingly, just before bed that night I was meditating in a milk and honey bath about Yeats' gyres and the lemniscate of the Mellisae tradition.

All I remember from last night was going to an East Indian party. When I arrived, dozens and dozens of women were outside and had arranged themselves to a do a complicated dance. They were all wearing saris but not the sort that were glamorous or of very high quality; it seemed to be a village folk dance, and they were common women gathering for a festival. I looked down at myself and was dressed similarly. I took off my shoes and put them with the others off to the side. We were in a semi-enclosed stone courtyard. It was daylight and warm. Yes, probably in India. Some of the women looked at me like I didn't belong, and I felt like I didn't quite belong either, but they went on with their dancing. 

I went inside where there was food and some friends of mine (whom I do not recognize) were helping to set up and keep the food coming out. I was in a large 'kitchen' -- nothing indicated that it was a kitchen except for a large refrigerator which wouldn't always close properly. I remember volunteering to take some things out of the freezer to help it seal. The room was sunny, lots of big windows, warm, not air-conditioned, and was carpeted. The main party was going on in some other place but I never went there.

At the end of the evening I went back to retrieve my low-heeled shoes -- which were a curious yellow color, not something I'd ever wear, and I couldn't find them. There was one pair of shoes left that resembled mine but I was entirely sure they were mine. I put them on, and they did fit, so I took them.