Dream: Rhyton Priest

I had this dream October 16 of 2012.  I thought I posted it to the blog at the time, but apparently, I hadn't.  The dream was part of a FaceBook Discussion.  I'm posting it now because it's a particularly meaningful dream for me.

Just before I went to bed, I read a post about a Christian straight man from Tacoma who pretended to be gay for a year so he could write a book about his experiences.  At first I had several conflicting emotional responses ranging from, curiosity as to what he had did, cynicism about writing a book about his experiences, and a sense of betrayal and cultural appropriation.  But... I haven't read his book and I wanted to wait before responding to the [FaceBook] post [by David Raines, I think, asking for reactions].

As I expected I might, I had a dream which I think addresses this... (and no, I still haven't read the book).

The dream started out about rentals and insurance, and then transitioned.

I was in a dry land, with lots of large stony blocks.   I have an image of a river emerging from the fallen stones.  Somehow we were either performing "Jesus Christ, Superstar," and/else we were living in the historical time of Christ as an adult.  I have a recollection of togas or white robes.

A group of about six of us formed a procession into the shallow cave from which the river issued.  There was some sort of ritualistic taking of water or wine from a rhyton.  I'm trying to recall if the rhyton used was carved or not.  My sense was that it was plain, and gently curved like a horn.  I think it was stone or ceramic.  It was large and heavy with the liquid inside.  

(Here's some examples of non-plain rhytons)

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/30005340

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/130017295

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/130007897

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/130011051

We passed it around, squirting the water into each other's mouths.  Having taken the waters together, we processed outside into the bright morning sunlight.  I had the full, heavy rhyton (I have a sense of it resting on my shoulder), and was taking its contents back with me to distribute (I'm not sure where or to who).

A woman (a religious Christian person I know from real life) with a kind of crown of nails (points outward from her head -- in waking life she reminds me of Mary Hansen's painting of The Queen of Swords) was at the gathering outside on the stone blocks.  

She was of a different faith, but my sense was that we were all priests and priestesses together, so I offered and she accepted the spurt of liquid that shot from the rhyton when I removed my finger from its opening.  I have a sense that there was another woman there in brilliant white robes (there was a short conversation, or the brilliantly garbed woman explained something to the other woman).  The water shooting into her (the Christian woman's) mouth was a thin stream, as if from a garden hose spigot only slightly opened or an atomizer.  In waking, this seems wildly Freudian (it could only be more so if milk came out of the rhyton instead of water), but in the dream the emotional emphasis was the satisfaction of sharing water in order to quench another's thirst.   

To interpret this dream... If you want to understand the message of the waters, you can drink from the source, or you can (less immediately) drink through an intermediary.  Also, this dream is a metaphor for my understanding of the male expression of deity...  

So, yay for Tacoma guy for trying to experience what it's like to be discriminated against for being perceived as gay, and yay for this guy questioning his religiously-motivated intolerance, but his message of the grace of queers would have been stronger had he actually been queer.  

The First Dream

 The other day, at the end of the Big Freeze that we had, I went outside and discovered that the sun had warmed the roof sufficiently to make some melted water run through our drains.  There's a short stretch where the runoff flows out of a gutter and into a drain that (presumably) runs to the sewer.  By this time, the temperatures had been in the teens for about five days, and the most of the water froze along the ground.  The gutter was encased in ice.

When I looked down, the water flowing over the ice and down the drain reminded me of the first dream I ever recalled.  I think I was about four, or maybe three at the time; but a potent sense of dream deja-vu hit me all the same.

In the dream, I'm floating over an icy river that is flowing between snowy banks.  The sound of flowing water is the only sound.  Sometimes I recall that one bank was green and summery.  But the water flows into an icy cave.  Everything by then is in Wintery black-and-white, and the water becomes rapids funneling into an ice-rhimed whirlpool.  I am not sure if I was floating in the water, or hovering above it -- the dream has a disembodied feel to it.  In any case, my four-year-old self did not want to go further into the swirly, icy, darkness, and that's pretty much where the dream ends.

At least it wasn't the reoccuring, never-ending countdown nightmare (no images, just one voice counting down from a random start with random intervals until a second voice yelled "ZERO!" and there'd be a sound like a piano smashing from a great height, accompanied by the knowledge that Something Horrible had happened, -- and then the countdown would start again, and again, and again...)  I used to have until I was about eight (whew).

Anxiety Elevator of the North

Last night I had a strange mashup of dreams.

What had started out as a kind of house inspection turned into a party and then a ritual. This involved me standing in a knee-deep circular pool of water and spinning like dervish.

Then.. At one point I was waiting for an elevator. Elevators in my dreams are usually bad things--they pulse up and down between floors after their doors open, which makes them difficult to enter or exit. Or they have difficulties getting to the top floor or the bottom floor; it's as if they have two floors they want to go to, two-and-a-half and nine-and-three-quarters. And there's always the possibility that they'll plunge to the bottom of the shaft at any moment.

This elevator was slightly different. It was more a personal lift. As the doors opened, a recorded female voice chimed, "Mind the gap." I should have been suspicious when the elevator floor, which was a square metal grate, was still inching up a little below the level of the corridor. I hopped in without thinking that this was a dream elevator. The elevator shaft was shiny metal and the metal grate sped up little. There were no buttons I could see on the inside, and square shaft was only about three feet wide.

Then it reached the end of the shaft. This was a kind of iron trap door. I had a second where I thought I might be smooshed between the door and grate, but I got it open. The trap door opened in the middle of a field. And the the platform grate kept going. The shiny metal shaft telescoped out of the ground with me looking out of the top.

I slid down the inside of the shaft before it fell over. I'm going to sidestep the obvious Freudian interpretation and say that this reminds me of the tarot card, "The Tower." Also, this was at the end of the ritual and it felt like some kind of earthy counterpoint to the watery dervish part earlier.