Only a Dream Away

Sunflowers and albizzia

Sketchy details from last night's dream:

I am in a place that is supposed to be my parents' house. The inside is smaller but the surrounding land is bigger. I am trying to sleep in a room I don't recognize, inside a tent. The evening starts out warm, but becomes cold, and I unzip out of my tent to close the blinds and windows of the room.

The action shifts and my dad is showing me a plant. Actually he is just showing me a branch with small green leaves, serrated. He's talking about herbalism and for some reason it's annoying me -- there is a sense of 'this is MY thing' and 'you know it's my 'thing' but you won't let me get a word in edgeways' -- pretty consistent with my dad's characteristics in real life. The branch and leaves resemble young elm leaves but I rub the leaves and smell them -- they feel resinous and produce a lemon balm-like odor.

He tells me it's albizzia (mimosa) and again, I'm annoyed, because I know what albizzia leaves look like, and they don't look like this!

Then he's showing me the heads of sunflowers which he's cut off and placed in water. I don't quite understand why he's done this but it seems to be to feed the birds or squirrels, but I don't see how the seeds will develop on these heads after they've been literally decapitated.

The action shifts again and my little brother and I (in real life he is 24, but in my dreams he is always about 9, and he is about that age here) 'run away' from our house. We are laughing and giggling, giddy to be 'free.' But we also know we are on a mission -- to find an albizzia tree. We know where one is but we can only use it if it's blooming. (I assume we will be making medicine from it.) We stop at the train tracks to wait while a train goes by. From where we are standing it is only a few steps before we can see the lot where the tree grows, and after the train goes by, we walk forward, and our line of vision clears, and we see the tree. AND, it's blooming, with a few of its pink feather flowers all over. "It's blooming! It's blooming!" we cry. We are very happy. The dream ends before we make it to the tree.

Note: just before bed I pulled the nine of cups, "Happiness," from my new Thoth Tarot deck. This is the first card I've pulled from this deck and it makes me laugh because when I was in Glastonbury alone some years back I had recurring dreams about Aleister Crowley which weren't entirely unpleasant, but neither were they very pleasant. It was nice to pull such a positive card in my first experience with this deck.

Various snippets of dreams from Thanksgiving week:

1. My friends (whom we did host for Thanksgiving) come over for the holiday to discover that we've adopted something like four small dogs, all of whom have their own floor cushion in the living room.

2. I am sitting on the couch in my living room when I hear a rustling sound to my left. I look down to see a mouse burrowing into a potted bamboo plant. I suspect he has some access through the bottom of the pot into the wall and down through the building.

3. I am in Michael's clinic (which does not look like his clinic... more like a large hotel hallway; but it is softly lit, sparsely decorated and the walls are a soothing gold/pink color), waiting for him to be finished with his day. I do not have an appointment with him, I am just waiting for him. I have no sense of any plans or intention, it is simply waiting. While waiting I see a display of giant incense boxes (like the HEM ones which are hexagonal, only these are several feet tall) in a recessed window/altar area. I sense that I should take some incense and try to decide based on the smell. I choose the one I like and turn the box around to see what scent it is. It is called "Aphrodite."

The action shifts and I am in a similarly lit room with my Mystery School classmates. I'm sitting next to Jeff. Althea has instructed us to pick three tarot cards and reflect on what they have meant for us this year. I am working on my three: Wheel of Fortune, Death and (I think) the Star. While doing so she bends down to talk to Jeff about the Hierophant, which is one of his cards.

At the Tierras', missing my flight to Glastonbury

I am staying with a couple of other students at my teachers' house in California. I have never seen the inside of their home in real life, but it is light-filled, spacious, and cozy at the same time with an interesting breakfast nook in the kitchen with cushions covered with beautiful Indian fabrics.

It is morning. I am hanging out in the nook with a couple of other students (I do not recognize them) when I hear the front door open. I go into another room to see who is coming in. It is Lesley, and she has just come back from the salon. She's had a blow-out and her hair looks shiny, sleek, and beautiful, in relaxed waves around her face. She looks at least 10 years younger. She greets me and is smiling.

When I walk with her back to the kitchen Michael is there chatting with the other students. He says he and Lesley are going on a trip somewhere -- I can't remember if he said where or not. He is wearing his brown jacket and burgundy shirt. All of a sudden I feel I am intruding on something, or else I am uncomfortable, so I leave the kitchen and go out into the living room by myself. The carpet is light-colored.

Shortly after that Michael and Lesley take their luggage through the living room and down the steps to the front door (it is separated from the room by a wall and short flight of steps leading to the street). I say goodbye to them and follow them to the top of the stairs. Lesley goes out first and as Michael turns to close the door behind him, he smiles at me and blows me a kiss.

I go back into the living room, feeling suddenly awkward that I am in their home alone (the other students seem to have disappeared). Then I realize that I am due on a flight to Glastonbury. Part of my mind is there, part of it is with my body in California. I realize I haven't packed yet and begin to remove unnecessary books from my backpack. I wonder why I am so casual about this trip, when usually I am one of those people who plans the preparation and travel part of any voyage down to the minute. I want to call my teachers to ask them if I can leave my books in their house while I'm gone, but part of me realizes I'm supposed to be looking after things/living there, so it should be all right.

But why am I leaving when they themselves have just gone?

I remove my books one by one and stack them up against a wall in the living room. They create an irregular but tall tower, too many to have come from one backpack. I look at their spines and they are mostly about magic. Again I have second thoughts about leaving these in my teachers' house. What will they think? Why aren't any of these about herbs? Why do they all have to be the 'weird' books? I leave them there anyway.

I am off to the airport when, en route, I finally look at my ticket and see that I've missed my flight entirely. I wonder if I should call my dad to come pick me up from the airport or else just wait there for the next available flight... I start to calculate in my mind what time I will arrive if I leave in the evening, and I see myself walking in Glastonbury under a hanging garden (which I have not seen there in real life).

Autumn Equinox Dream Recap, plus the vagabond magician

Toward the end of last week and over the weekend I dreamed several times of my friend Ben -- these concerned cooking, train stations, and lots of laughing. And making fun of TV shows with his friend Nick. I was delighted to find out that Ben's beautiful son was born Friday afternoon.

Saturday night I slept in the forest and dreamed that a woman was singing in my ear -- no words, just a melody. In the dream she was outside my tent, so I do not know what she looked like, or if she had a body at all.

That night I also dreamed that I woke up several times to open up my tent to find that it was raining outside; and that I was not in the forest but in Glastonbury or at least somewhere in the English countryside, as if the whole campground had been transported there. There were fewer trees, however, which strikes me as strange -- we seemed to be on some kind of slate or limestone plain with trees in the distance -- and the people with whom I was camping were different from the people around me in real life. That is, the same tents were there, but different people emerged from them. In the dream it was early morning, the sky was grey and the rain misty and soft. The ground ran with a fine ashy white silt.

The clearest memory of last night's dream is of a vagabond, dressed in tatters, a little crazy, roaming a picturesque little neighborhood square at night, enthusiastically thrusting a tarot card at random people he met, saying, "This is my card! This is your card!" They looked at him like he was crazy and pulled in tight to their loved ones and hurried away. I don't have a clear impression that he came up to me and offered me the card, but that he would, eventually, and I was ready, anxious to see the card. The card, obscured, had the sign of the planet Mercury at the top. (The Magician, Key 1, is ruled by Mercury.) I remember looking at this strange man and thinking, "The Magician is you?"