Early in the morning, a man in his late twenties or early thirties knocked on our door. He was an amalgam of various people I know, clean-shaven, short curly hair, earnest. He wore a sheet or a toga. "Oh good," he said when we answered the door. "I wanted to check in on you to see that you hadn't disappeared and let you know that last night Todd [editor's note, Todd is a random name] and I were walking around last night Todd saw you naked in the window, and I turned and I saw you, too. You want to be careful." The implication was that the conference center was in a rural area and we risked harassment at the least.
There was a break in the narrative. I was sitting at a long formica-top table in a darkish conference center cafeteria. A group of us might have been sitting in a booth. There were clumps of people walking by, and my sense is that it was morning... but it might have been evening. Three generic "townie" guys were at one end of the table (in waking life they remind me of the 19 year old "townie-hood-wanna-bes" who used to hang out in downtown Northfield, Minnesota, only in the dream they were super-generic, bland, middle-Americans), and six or so folks of diverse gender and orientation were at the other. The two groups were at the same table, but sort of pretended the other wasn't there... or more accurately, the guys were pretending to be part of the gay/pagan conference, and everyone else was pretending to be taken in.
The leader guy pulled out some hand written notes out of envelopes and started reading the letters. I wondered how he'd gotten a hold of them. The letters were things like coming-out stories and poems. It wasn't exactly a doxxing, because he didn't know exactly who the authors were, but he was reading them to his friends and saying things like, "Can you believe this?" and other judgmental statements. I worried that he might have something I'd written. A discussion started between the lead guy and one of the diverse women, and it seemed like one of the generic guys was not as convinced of his moral superiority as he had been.
There was a break in the narrative.
I was in a brightly lit conference room, like a conference center ballroom divided down the middle by a movable partition. I was waiting by a raised floor or stage, about fifteen feet on a side. It was a square grid of white squares about two feet wide, either a dance floor or else some kind of Dungeons and Dragons game. Stairs on the grid led up to a second raised dais with a blocky throne. I was wearing large black boots, more than motorcycle boots, but less than Glam Rock boots a group like Kiss might wear, and I held a large hammer (it wasn't Thor's Mjölnir, the shaft was like a sledgehammer's, but the head was a large rectangular hunk of metal). A woman in a white dress, along with everyone else, was waiting for "Steve" (I've forgotten what his name was in the dream) to show up, so the presentation/conference could begin.
Finally, I said, "Well, I've got the boots and I've got the hammer, so I'll just start things until he get here." I hopped onto the stage, went up the stair, and sat on the throne. The presentation hadn't been going on long when some townies came in and glared at people. I shrank back a bit on the throne hoping to remain inconspicuous.
There's another break in the narrative.
It was dusk. I was moving along a mostly straight path set along grassy and lightly wooded hills. In waking life, the motion was similar to RollerBlading, but in the dream I was walking quickly. The path was made of a dark red marble, with quartz veins and inclusions. I supposed that either a heavy dew was falling or it had rained because the surface was shiny. I held a long-handled rake, or squee-gee, or hockey stick in front of me, which I used to clear the surface of the path as I raced along. I cleared off fallen miniature maple leaves that had fallen from some of the trees that the path sometimes passed through.
There were townies in the hill, but they had changed into fantasy raider armor of a vaguely Nordic type with thick helmets, with down-pointing bull horns on either side. Sort of like the Knights of Ni, but I am only making that association many hours after waking. They never got onto the path, but there was a sense that they might pull me off of it as I went speeding by. I swooshed through miniature maples overgrowing the path, managed to avoid them, and raced before them.
Ahead in a canyon, there was a large group of mostly men having a dance contest. It was night, but there was enough light from overhanging lights, and possibly a fire, to see bright red costumes of two men spinning around each other in a kind of tango or lindy. In waking life I'm pretty sure this was inspired by a dance routine I'd seen earlier in the day. More people came walking in procession along the path.
I was there to announce the end of the dance contest so that the contestants could be chosen and the next festivity could begin. I rapped the butt of my rake in a four-four rhythm against the marble path, which made a loop around the dancing ground, and began to chant (iambic octameter?) in a language unknown to me:
Oh-be Bárðarbunga nachtan
Oh-de Bárðarbunga nacht !
[editor's note, the chant is an approximation; the words Bárðarbunga and nachtan were not actually used, but something like that - there was certainly a ð in the mix.] The crowd joined in and it became a call-and-response. The energy of the chant grew until a hairy, burly man wearing nothing but a large, brown leather kilt rumbled a sustained and deep tone which ended it.
I woke around here; there was another scene where someone needed a special balloon inflation rig before the dance awards ceremony could start, but mostly I lay in bed and tried to fix the syllables of the chant in my mind.
I'm trying to figure where this dream is coming from. I was fatigued from a COVID booster and Cedar Creek Fire smoke, so the Full Moon ritual this time around was harping before moonrise in the backyard circle, scratching Cicero while an orange moon rose over the hills, and smooching Mark (once I got him outside). This was followed up with various electronic word games with Mark, a small libation of tequila in honor of the moon, and the season one finale of Lucifer.
The first part of the dream feels like typical privacy anxiety. In the back of my mind I'm always wondering how well drawn bedroom blinds are and just how sound-proof everything is. Mark at a convention, let alone a gay paganish one, would have been a sure sign I was dreaming if I had stopped think about it. I think the convention is a lite version of "back at Reed" motif.
The second part of the dream I suppose is a continuation of being out anxiety. Mark dropped out of the dream. I'm making some plans for traveling to a big city pride, and maybe this is connected somehow. Though I am not sure where the generic straight rural townies are coming from. They weren't "townies" per se, more just super-generic middle America dudes.
The third part of the dream is puzzling. I don't know what is going on with the boots and hammer. The dream became more "Norse" as it progressed from this point. The only thing I can think of is that earlier the previous day I had used a (smallish) hammer to drive some rebar into the ground in order to place gardening crooks for the sun and moon around the back yard ritual circle. Oh, right... and recently I'd come across a 1902 painting of a "Young Germanic Warrior Looking at a Roman Helmet," by Osmar Schindler
The forth part of the dream is a fairly textbook otherworld transition material -- I'm surprised there wasn't a horse or a river involved, but the motion along the path (which did have a watery sheen) would count as crossing a boundary into an other realm. Even if the waking world backyard circle of bricks transformed into the dream dancing ground, the hammer transforming into a rake/hockey stick still seems a little odd.
The dream started in bright moonlight, transitioned to day time interior spaces, and returned to night time light by fires. I don't know why by the end of the dream everything had become a kind of Heathen-fest. I would have expected Greco-Roman or Egyptian or something more Arthurian.
