Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Dreaming Dream Interpretation Art

I dreamed I was helping some people sneak back into what ultimately was Arcosanti.  Previously, there had been something about watching a tech fixing my parent's WiFi or stereo...

The dream had been in progress for some time; a group of us were in a white van, and the driver had missed an intersection, and we were returning via a back-road route.

I want to say it was something like 2 AM in the dream.  I flew down a path and over a hedge, where a side door was on a long wing of a building (in waking, I am reminded of the school wing of my parent's church).  The door was only about four feet tall, and locked, but I had a key for some reason.  I crouched down, below the bushes, unlocked the door, and left it open behind me as a signal to the others that we could enter. (I don't remember why we were sneaking in, we weren't in any danger.)

I entered a long hallway.  Through the windows it was night.  The hall was beige carpeted and had creamy white walls.  I took a few steps down the hall and saw two people in it.  At first I thought they were sleeping in the hall and that we'd have to turn back.  At first I thought they were two middle-aged to old Native American women with two little mutt dogs; later, they turned into S. and G., the instructors at The Child's Kung-Fu place; still later they turned into R.T. and some unknown woman from Arcosanti.

Papers and parchments covered the walls and were rolled up on the floor.  Some of them were covered in either a heavy Gothic typeface or else hieroglyphs or Asian characters.   "Have you come for the dream workshop?" the little Native American ladies asked, "We'll create an interpretive scroll of your dream.  One unrolled a three by two foot piece of parchment or heavy yellowish which paper and began rubbing a stick of butter over it.

"Do you want a soft or a hard parchment?" she asked as she left a thin layer of butter (or something that I understood would be embossed or have characters scraped into it).

"Soft," I said.

"Good," she said, "because that's what you're going to get.  Do you have a dream that you'd like interpreted?"

I had five, but they were on my iPad, so I had to dig around in my backpack for the iPad so I could look up which one I wanted to use.  At this point the dream workers became S. and G.  I wanted to work on a Very Long Meaningful Dream -- at the time I could remember it clearly, but going through my dream journal it must have been some amalgam of dreams, or else a dream that I had more than ten years ago.  The Meaningful Dream had the form 1) Travelling over a Boundary, 2) Wandering in a Maze/Mansion, 3) A Dark Stillness/Deep Sleep/Death, 4) Magical Identification/Awakening with a Tree, 5) Bright Holistic Revel in the Otherworld, 6) Bittersweet Return to Regular, Grey Society.  At the time, I didn't formulate it that way, the dream had a shadow knot in the middle of it, with a dark awakening with a craggy redwood in it.  

Because the dream had happened at Arcosanti, they photocopied a map of Arizona centered on Arco, and presented it to me to put into the collage I would create.

I chose the Meaningful Dream and said I was ready.  The dark pre-dawn morning turned into a bright day.   Other people had wandered into the hallway and it was turning into more of a workshop.  At this point, G. had turned into R.T. and he had me sit down on a table while I held a reddish, hockey-puck shaped disk of camphor or cinnamon to my forehead.  Or else it was a burning disk of frankincense (in waking life I'm reminded of an open tin of Tiger Balm).  

After a while he asked, "Are you alright, because you're slumping."

"I'm a little dizzy," I said.

Someone escorted me to a side stairwell, sat me down with some words or symbols roughly punched out of white tissue-like paper, and I stared at a large white poster leaning diagonally against the stair.  The poster had a light, penciled grid on it.

I think I sat there in a haze for some time, trying to put together what I was supposed to do... remembering this Meaningful Dream and not sure how to make the collage or why it would be an interpretation.  The woman, who had been S, but was now an generic middle-aged Psychic Workshop woman with a soft voice, came up and helped me.

And then I woke up, the Meaningful Dream clear in my head, but fading fast...

No comments: