the swooping flying falling dream

Everyone has a form of this dream, I think.  The swooping/flying/falling nightmare.
I had it last night.
At the beginning of the dream, I was at my mom's house looking outside at her garden. The garden was full of frogs, all kinds of frogs, sitting on leaves and on decorations and on the ground.  I went outside because one of the frogs was very appealing to me, and this frog came over to me and clearly wanted to be my pet.  I took it inside.  I also had some kind of pet lizard inside.
It was time for me to go to the Astrological Society of Connecticut's New Age Fair, where IRL I am a vendor every quarter, selling my books on the Mayan-Aztec calendar and artwork along with my artist Mike.  For whatever reason, I brought the new frog and the lizard and some other small creatures.  They were in a shallow round container covered with a black cloth.
The fair was held in a dream building.  Some lady kept putting her things onto my vendor table, worse yet, putting them on top of my pets, and I was very upset that the frog and lizard and other critters would be injured or killed.
The day before the fair, Leonard Cohen, the singer, had died.  (As I am writing this, he is very much alive, although Lou Reed just died, who is not in any way the same person.)  Apparently the way to commemorate this singer's death is to have line dancing at a New Age fair.  I am not into line dancing.  I was in the line, though, ready to do my duty, when people started to notice that there were cavities in the walls and everyone went into those cavities, because apparently acting like a rat is also a good way to commemorate the death of an awesome singer.
Inside the walls were a series of curved tunnels, stairs, spirals, and ladders. It was like a giant fun house.  Everything was around a blind corner.  You'd be spiraling up and next thing you'd turn a corner and be sliding down.  I was following two young girls.  We went up and then around a corner was a short ladder going down.  We climbed down the ladder and at the bottom was the mouth of a closed slide, like a water slide. They fit into it easily and were on their way but I was too fat.  I had no choice but to climb back up the ladder. But as I climbed it, it got longer and longer, and went further and further away from the wall.  Finally I was at the top of an immensely tall ladder, like an Indian monk doing a rope trick, and I was outside the building.  The ladder was free-standing, but wobbling.  I had a bit of lucid dreaming then--oh shit here it comes--and then the ladder started to lean toward the building.  I could see that I had to aim myself at a very small window.  I was swooping, I was flying, it was awful.
And I woke up.
I've also had varieties of this dream where I'm on a trampoline, or the high dive at a pool, and every jump I go higher and higher and get more and more scared but I have such momentum I can't stop. The going up is bad, the short hover at the top is terrible, and the falling, falling, falling in a great arc is the worse.
My husband was watching one of the Jackass movies once.  They were doing this stunt where they bounced people off a huge air pillow into a lake.  They put a camera on one person so the viewer could experience it. 
And although I have never swooped or flown (except in a jet) or fallen from a great height, the view from that camera was EXACTLY like my dreams.  To the point where I could not watch the movie until that segment was over.
According to the online Dream Dictionary, a falling dream means you feel like your life is out of control.  Something horrible happened to me last night, something beyond my control, something that I see as a betrayal, so that doesn't surprise me.  Their information on frogs and ladders was less than helpful, nothing on lizards, new age fairs, swooping, or deep-voiced singers.
(image source)

January 17, 2018

What is the significance of this date: January 17, 2018?
I don't know.
I was half asleep this morning, being harassed by one of my cats, and this sentence appeared from no where in my head: "On January 17, 2018, the cancer reoccurs."
Whose cancer? Literal cancer or figurative? I don't know. But it wasn't my thought, or my thought-voice, that put the sentence into my head. It's not a writing prompt. I have no idea.
It is also possible that the date was 2118. While this blog might still be up in 10 years (some of my old AOL stuff is hanging out online from 1997 and earlier!), I doubt it will be up in 110 years.
Still, I thought I'd record it and see if it rings a bell in anyone else's head.
The Mayan for that date is 13.0.5.2.13 11 Muan 11 Ben.
A Google search brings up nothing but empty calendars for that date.

birthday

So, today is my 40th birthday. Not that anyone around me believes I am 40. It's kind of weird, because I don't believe I'm 40 either. And my rainbow lorikeet, Sir Lancelot the Loud Lorikeet, just turned 20, and in September I'll have had him for 20 years. Which is now half my lifetime. I didn't think about the relationship between my life and Lancelot's life until I woke up from having a dream this morning.
I was at a Wal-Mart, only it was huge, bigger than any one I've been to. I went into the pet section and I was looking at the fish. They were in aquariums the size of pools, more like going to Mystic Aquarium than shopping. I was admiring a really cool black moor goldfish who had huge fluttery eyelids, still thinking that every black moor I've ever bought died very quickly, when I noticed something in a nearby tank that didn't belong.
It was a parrot, trying to swim.
I ran and got someone with a ladder and convinced him to climb up and rescue the parrot before it drowned. He was really annoyed but he did it and gave me the bird. It was a rainbow lorikeet and it was half-drowned, wet and shivering. I tucked it into the front of my shirt and started walking around trying to find its cage and whoever was in charge of the pets section. The bird section was disgusting. Filthy, tiny cages, with clearly unhealthy birds in them. I did find an empty cage that might have belonged to the lory, but it wasn't labeled and like the others was too small and too dirty. I couldn't bear to put a shivering, half-dead bird into that cage.
So I decided to steal it.
I walked around the pet section and figured out where the security cameras were. I left the parrot in my shirt but didn't hold it so my hands were free, but the bird was visible if you were looking. When I found a dead spot (blocked by something) I tucked the bird out of sight and left the store.
When I got to the car my mom started yelling at me, what was I going to do with another bird, etc. I said that I had rescued it, it wasn't going to be near my birds because it might be sick, and I would rehabilitate it and find it a home. I tried to feed it some nacho cheese doritos (why I had them with me I don't know) and the bird was clearly starving. I was trying to think of how I could sell the bird without explaining that I had stolen it (which my mom didn't know). I decided to name it Braveheart, thinking it was a boy. Then I examined the bird (it was very tame, clearly hand-fed) and found that someone had given the bird a PIERCING through its left wing, a hoop that went between the wing bones somehow. Hanging among the feathers from this hoop were 2 or 3 "charms". I only remember one of them, a Venus symbol. From this I figured that the bird was really a girl, but I already named her Braveheart and clearly she liked it.
I got her home and started looking for a spare cage that I could keep in the kitchen. She was dry by then and sitting on me. Somehow I got it in my head that she was one of my babies from when I used to breed Lancelot and once that was there, there was no way I'd sell her or give her up, even though I've always said I don't want any more birds nor to start over again with a baby.
I don't remember much more than that.

12 19.15.8.13 16 Tzec 2 Ben Manifestation portal
(Venus image source; rainbow lorikeet source)

dream about my parrots

This morning I had a dream about my parrots.
I was outside for some reason with Lance. He was free. (I would never do that, for many reasons. One, he is old [20] and not in the greatest of health, two, he could not survive if he escaped. He loves kitty-cats and is totally unafraid of them, plus he has no idea how to forage for food.)
We were in a place that doesn't exist, at least a place I've never been. There was a road, and beyond it a river, and lots of rocks. Lance flew away from me and got hit by a car. I couldn't find his body and I knew he was in the grill of the car. I had no idea if he was dead or alive, but I hoped the collision had killed him, because thinking of him broken and alive, stuck to a car broke my heart.
I tried to convince myself that it was instant, he never knew what hit him, and it was better for him to die that way than suffer through a bad liver or set of kidneys like most of my other (dead) lories.
I crossed the road and started searching along the banks of the river, in case his little body had been thrown in the water, but I still didn't find him.
So I went back to where I had my other lories. In the dream, Goober was still alive, although she's been dead in real life almost 2 years. I found an egg and for some reason I thought it was Lance's egg, although he is male and (in life and in the dream) has no mate. I worried what would happen to the egg so I decided to give it to Goober and Zeebo to care for. I don't know if it happened when I was picking it up or putting it down, but the egg broke. Instead of yolk or dead baby, two amazingly tiny baby birds--twins!--came out. Instead of being round and fluffy with white down as newly hatched lory chicks are, these looked gangly and had the black dots of new pinfeathers, like a baby bird who is several weeks old, but they were amazingly tiny (a lory egg is maybe the size of my first thumb joint, so a new chick is also that size--these were half that size). As far as I know, birds can't hatch two to an egg either.
I started freaking out over these newborn twin baby Lance-birds, thinking I needed to go out and buy some hand-feeding formula, and worrying that Zeebo (who is a lunatic) would hurt them, when Lance landed on my shoulder, alive and unharmed.
12 19.15.1.8 16 Pax 13 Lamat

dad dream

I just had a dream this morning about my dad. He had mild Alzheimer's and we were traveling together. At one point we somehow started going through this exhibit of pirate stuff, and it was jumping out at us, and he was frightened. At the end, this guy was trying to sell us stuff based on the exhibit. My father was looking at everything and showing it to me and I knew if I showed the slightest interest in anything, he'd buy it. I knew he wanted to buy something and I even thought of feigning interesting in something cheap just to get us out of there. I found this really cute little stone elephant family. The biggest elephant was on a keychain and the smallest ones were loose. I thought of Aunt Bert, who collected elephants, and that she would have liked this set.
I got my dad out of there without buying anything and we got back into the car. We had to stop for gas and strangely enough there was a circus there also getting gas, and a woman in a pick-up truck. The woman had lost all the boxes in the back of her truck and another woman was trying to help her load the boxes. A pair of white trucks arrived as soon as the circus left and started cleaning up all the poop the animals had left behind. I got out of the car and told my dad I was going to walk around. I helped the lady with her boxes for a few minutes and then I went to talk to the circus cleaner-upper guys. When I turned around my worse fear was realized: my dad was driving away without me. My phone, purse, everything was in the car with him. Whether he had forgotten I was with him or forgotten to check I was in the car or thought I was in the backseat sleeping, I don't know. I ran for the pay phone but had no money and no calling card. I knew my father wouldn't know how to answer the cell phone but I was hoping calling it repeatedly would get his attention and he'd look for me to answer it and realize I was gone and start retracing his steps and find me. I remember swearing, saying something like "Damn Alzheimer's" as I went into the convenience store part of the gas station for help. One of the circus cleaner guys was with me. But before I could even call, my dad came back on his own. I went running out with the circus guy and my dad said "Your music was on in the car for an hour and I couldn't shut it off." (He was only gone 5-10 minutes at the most.) I told him I would take care of it. The circus guy, who was Spanish and rather cute, gave me his number and said the circus would be around for a while. I made some kind of quip about elephants that I can't remember, and I guess got back in the car with dad, although I don't remember anymore of that part.
Then I was at my mother's and my mom got some kind of mail for my dad. In this part of the dream, he was dead. And something for me, about some tests I'd taken to be in a study group for families of Alzheimer's patients, and it seemed to say that I was rejected because I already had symptoms (I'm not even 40!), and the worse thing was that I had no memory of taking the tests or trying to join the study.
12 19.15.0.11 19 Muan 9 Chuen

Father dream

This morning I had a dream that I went a high school reunion. I had to travel to get there (I have the impression it was in France, a place I have no interest in visiting and whose language I don't speak.) For some reason my father was with me. He was maybe at the stage he was a year ago--you could bring him places without worrying about a violent outburst. I brought him into this big room, where the meeting was. There were many long tables, like in a cafeteria, and not many people there. I found a place for my dad to sit and told him to stay put. He sat there meekly and looked around. I went off to do something. Find food? Sign in? I don't know. But someone came over to me and said my father wasn't welcome and I had to take him out. At first I thought it was because most of the people there for the reunion were women and my dad's not. But it was something else, but they wouldn't tell me. "You know why," they said, avoiding my eyes. "He can't be here," another stressed.
I was really upset by this. Not because I had to babysit my dad, but because I couldn't have him with me, and I couldn't really leave him somewhere else unattended. So I was out in the lobby area, where there were a lot of plants like how the Meriden Square used to be when I was little, and a friend of mine from high school, who I haven't talked to in probably 10 years or more, came up to me and started telling me I was hanging out with the wrong people. In the dream, I thought she meant some friends I've retained (or regained) since HS, but now that I'm awake I wonder if she meant my father? I was very angry at her. I said, "You haven't been my friend in 20 years, and now you dare to tell me who I can hang out with?"
I decided to just go home. Turns out this lounge area was also part of the airport (that's handy). But then I couldn't find my return tickets. My mind was completely blank. I couldn't remember if I'd taken the return tickets with me when I left home. The flight was boarding and I was checking every pocket of every back, searching for the paperwork and begging them to let me on the flight. I'm not sure my dad was with me anymore; I think he wasn't.
And then my husband woke me up because it was past 7 a.m.

---

This is one of those dreams where I can pull out elements of real life. My high school reunion (20 years) was the Friday before my dad died. I thought about crashing it (I wasn't paying $60 a person to go for the whole thing) but I wasn't in the mood. The one-time friend who was lecturing me in the dream was there, because someone else sent me pictures. I am going on vacation in 18 days (Chichen Itza, here I come) so anxiety about plane tickets is obvious as well.
And of course, my father is dead. And there he was in my dream, following me around happily, glad to see me and have my attention. But he wasn't welcome where I went. That's the part that puzzles me. At no point during the dream did my dad talk to me (in the last year or so he was alive, his aphasia was so bad he couldn't have a conversation anymore) or try to communicate in any way except to be agreeable about what I asked him to do.
If this was someone else's dream, I would say that the person's newly dead father's spirit had attached itself to the dreamer, but that it shouldn't be, and that person had to let the father go. Or that the dreamer was holding onto the father. But I let my father go--I even did ceremonies to break the ties because I worried that subconsciously I was holding him back from dying.
After my husband's maternal grandmother died (they had to pull the plug), he and his sister both dreamed that she kept calling them on the phone saying "why won't you talk to me?" and they both said, "you're dead, stop calling," and eventually the dreams stopped. If this had been that sort of dream, I'd understand it and probably wouldn't have posted it here. But what could this one be about? I'm watching over my dad, but he's not welcome where I go? That's what I pull out of this.
12.19.14.16.11 8 Chuen 19 Mac intention portal

2 dreams

I had an "I'm not in this" dream where some ancient Babylonian or Sumerian god came to life after someone did some kind of ritual and it was rampaging around killing people. I couldn't find a picture of the exact god I saw in the dream. (image source) This picture is of Marduk's dragon. The god in the dream had the same kind of awkwardness, especially about the legs and feet, but he had a thicker body and a bigger head and was orange. Not the orange of a cat, but crayon orange. It was kind of cat like-like, or maybe like the a child's drawing of a lion. He looked like a drawing come to life and stomping around but in 3d. And it was a vicious nasty monster, killing everyone in its path.

---

I was in the other dream. For some reason Willy and I went to Boston. We had to park the car way up high in some weird garage. And it wasn't a nice spiral ramp so you hardly know how high you're going. It was a very steep (like South St hill) ramp and at the top was a glass bridge, two lanes wide, leading to the garage. I said, "I don't want to go up there" and Willy said "I don't want to either" but we went. And of course once we got onto the horrible glass bridge we were forced to park the car there. Willy took off and left me there alone (I guess he thought I was following). I was terrified and unable to move. He was in a building at the same height but across about a 20 foot divide. He told me to throw him my purse so I would have both hands to grab things as I walked. I did, but of course it fell short, and in slow motion it hit outcroppings and awnings, slowing down every time, but at the bottom on the sidewalk it still broke open spewing my things everywhere. Although I knew my PDA was in there (the same PDA that once broke after a fall from the sink to the floor) and my camera and my wallet, etc., all I cared about for some reason was my phone. I had to cross the glass bridge and go down the steep ramp and get to where my broken things were. Someone was trying to sweep them up and throw them away but somehow I convinced that person that the items were mine, and gathered them up. I don't remember if I found everything or if anything (everything) was ruined.
That's a pretty symbolic dream, huh?
12.19.14.13.7 15 Yax 9 Manik

dream

One of the original purposes of this blog was to be a dream record, but it's been a while since I had one worth recording. But this morning I had a doozy.
The initials are real people I know. I don't know who Brian DePalma is or if he's a real person. Snoop Dogg, of course, is a rapper.

---

I was on 91 near exit 13 and I saw a limo with blacked out windows. I forget who I was with in my car, but that person (female) said, “oh, that’s probably J, out with his girlfriend.” I was amazed. J? Girlfriend? Limo? The person with me said that J had been doing a lot of work for Brian DePalma who owned a funeral home and was some kind of gangster and that he let J use the limos when there was no funeral. And J was pretending to be in the music business and picking up women. He had a baby with a black woman and tried to bring the baby home to his wife to raise. She said, predictably, “fuck that” but why she stayed married to him or put up with it I don’t know. But now he had a different girlfriend, another black woman.
Then I was somewhere talking to C (J’s wife) and she told me that she had a GPS tracker in his car. She seemed kind of wistful when she said that he knew all kinds of good places to “park” (like he had taken her to them at one point) and when she used the GPS locater she’d recognize the places, drive by and there he would be, porking some woman in the back seat of the car. (Not the limo.) Again, why did she allow this? I don’t know.
Then I was in some kind of store. I was looking at the New Haven Advocate. There was an article about J and S, of all people, with photos of both of them, and a colored map showing the places both went and how they didn’t intersect. The story (which was badly laid out, very confusing, and in my dream I was critical of it) said that S made a Facebook page soliciting men with the intent of getting J. I think it was supposed to be something C cooked up (do they even know each other?) but the article didn’t say that. That S got hundreds of responses before J answered. That she met him in a bar, he realized he knew her, and supposedly then the jig was up (how he didn’t recognize her Facebook picture wasn’t explained). It made S sound like a major slut. It also had, on the map, exactly where she lived, in some kind of vegetable growing hippy commune. I knew she wasn’t going to be happy about any of that so I was waiting at this store for her to arrive with her commune. And we had some things we had to give her—can’t remember now what, but it seemed like a big piles of stuff, maybe folding chairs? Something very weird.
She arrived but the commune leader, a big tall woman, wouldn’t let her talk to me. S saw me and came toward me. I waved the article and pointed at the (chairs) and she said the (chairs) weren’t hers and she didn’t want them. I tried to find out what to do with them but she wouldn’t/couldn’t tell me, and then the woman made her go back in line with the other hippies.
A fat white guy who I think was Brian DePalma came into the store with a really skinny black guy who had long braids or dreads down his back. I was looking at the black guy, thinking he looked familiar, when an alarm went off. The black guy completely freaked out and that was when I realized it was Snoop Dogg. I thought, wow, Snoop Dog, but had no desire to meet him or talk to him. He was yelling and waving a gun. The white guy was trying to calm him down.
The alarm was still going off.
A lady with some kind of hand-held device was checking things in the store. She came to a big cabinet on the wall near where I was and the device signaled that the thing causing the alarm was inside. She opened the cabinet and it was full of people’s stuff, like backpacks and bags and jackets. One of the backpacks set off the alarm. She reached into the pocket and there was a brand-new Speak n Spell in a clear slipcase. She held it up and said, “It’s just this, nothing to worry about,” and I went over to look at it closer. I said in a really quiet voice, “it was one of those that started 9/11” (I guess meaning explosives in one?) and she looked at it again and looked at Snoop Dogg, who had stopped yelling and put his gun away. “Let’s not tell him that,” she said, and put the Speak n Spell back into the backpack without even taking it out of its case to check if it was real or a bomb.
Then I noticed a bunch of checks, maybe 9 to12 of them, stapled to a bulletin board and used as a background for a message scrawled in magic marker. I went over to look at them. The checks had a background of whales and dolphins and had all been dated January 2 but I can’t remember what year. They had CC’s name and old address (in Wallingford) on them and the message was something about 2012 but now I forgot what.

---

12.19.14.12.9 17 Chen 4 Muluc

grandpa dream

12.19.14.3.7 4 Manik 0 Uayeb intention portal
Welcome to the dead days. I started mine off with a weird dream.
I was an adult in the dream, not sure how old, but with a friend of mine I'll call J. I haven't seen her in years; she moved out of state.
My great-grandpa (who died of emphysema when I was 11) was sick and I wanted to go see him. I had just been to see him with my grandma (his daughter-in-law; he was my mother's father's father) but I wanted to go see him by myself. And J drove me, but didn't come in with me.
When I saw him the day before, he'd been in a room right across from the nurse's station, right where you come in. But that room had someone else in it. I asked and they said he was in room 108, upstairs. The stairs were not at all hospital like. They were a great tier of riser-less slabs with many landings and 90 degree turns. I just looked at them. A doctor came up and said "she doesn't like backless chairs, she won't like those stairs, take the elevator." By backless chairs he meant the kind without back legs. (The pictured chair is from Ikea.)
I went up the elevator and found my Big Poppy (that's what I called him) in a room by himself. I thought he had had some kind of stroke or something. I sat with him and held his hand and he started telling me something (can't remember what) and in the middle of a sentence, with no fanfare whatsoever, he died. I sat there for a moment thinking he was just gathering his thoughts but he was gone. I saw his x-ray displayed nearby. Except that it wasn't a black and white regular x-ray, it was in full color and looked more like the scans you see on TV that they do of mummies. And it showed that my Big Poppy's sternum had been crushed into small pieces (how could he even breathe?) and many of his other bones--just about all the big ones--were also broken. I had no idea how the damage happened but he had been moving and not in any apparent pain. I went and told the "she doesn't like stairs" doctor that Big Poppy was dead and not knowing what else to do, went back to J's car. She had moved it from where I left her. I found her peeing in a public bathroom (a one-seater) but for some reason she had left the door open and anyone could see/hear her. And she was peeing really loudly. She laughed that I saw/heard her but wasn't really embarrassed.
We got in her car and went to some kind of meeting with a bunch of others, in a library or similar space, but one where we could talk. The "stairs" doctor came in and said he wanted to help us deal with our grief. But only I was sad; no one else knew my great-grandpa. Then he changed the subject and started talking about drugs. He put a bowl on the table between me and J (we were sitting across from each other). It had little packages in it, like origami, but tiny. He instructed us to take a packet, open it, and take the drug inside "to see what it felt like." So like idiots we all did. The drug was some kind of amphetimine (not meth) and right away we all got hyper. (Which doesn't happen when I take amphetimine based diet pills, but we'll let that slide.)
The doctor kept talking about the dangers of drugs but we were all high and ignoring him. J grabbed a bunch of the packets and took more amphetimine before anyone could stop her. She was acting really wild. The doctor tried to restrain her by grabbing her but she just kept going for the bowl. No one else knew what to do. He hauled her off and I left and went somewhere with my mom. Not sure if she knew her grandfather had just died.
We went to a used book/cheap book place. There was a really long table of books and we started looking. Some DVDs were mixed in. I found a 30 second "welcome to Stephen King's World" DVD and next to it was a weird medal. I couldn't really read it, it looked really old. Then I saw that along the top of the stacks were--toys? models? miniatures? don't know how to describe them--of the Inquisition. Like the Inspector General, a head Torturer, etc. Collect the whole set. The medal had come from one of them.
For whatever reason, my mom and I got on a bus. My mom started talking about J and how weird she had been acting when my mom saw her earlier. I didn't want to say that she was high. (No matter how old you are, some things you just can't say in front of your mom.) A guy I know from the ASC got on the bus and started talking to me. My mom knew him too, but not as an ASC person, and thought it was strange that we knew each other. In the distance I saw someone chasing J through a field. The ASC guy noticed and said something like "she's not feeling well today." And I thought that was an understatement.
I'm not sure what I got at the bookstore--I think it was a book, not a DVD. I remember a little of it. This dark-haired girl with a newborn baby was dressed in some kind of ancient middle-eastern costume (but I don't think she was middle-eastern). She was in a fight with someone. In full costume, with her baby also in costume and a little boy who was a friend of hers or maybe a brother, they were sitting on cushions on top of an advancing tank. A framework around them held billowing brightly colored silk like a curtain or backdrop, but those coming at the tank could see them clearly. The tank met the resistance on a bridge (a modern bridge, like the one over the Connecticut River on I-95, but not so high up) and the girl had to jump, along with the little boy, and throw her baby into the water. They all survived. The girl found a big blue piece of something floating and pulled herself on it. The baby and the boy just swam back to shore. It took her forever to drift that far. When she got to the shore she was dirty and muddy and there was a small fish in her shoe. She watched it flop around and thought she should put it back into the water, but she was too tired to move and it died.

worm in my foot dream

12.19.14.1.5 1 Chicchan 18 Pax
A few weeks ago I had a problem with my right foot. (The so-called "good" foot, meaning simply that it's attached to the non-edema leg.) A small dark purple lump appeared deep under the skin on my instep and the ball of my foot was swollen and purple. Basically it looked like the bottom of my foot had turned into a gigantic varicose vein. I was in terrible pain for about a week, had energy work done, did my own things to it, and then one morning I woke up and the pain was gone.
This morning I dreamed of it. I was outside in a desert with a bunch of hippy-like people and my foot started bothering me again. One of the people wanted to look at it and touch it. Touching hurts A LOT and I don't allow it. But this person knew how to touch it. She pressed on either side of the lump as if it was a giant zit and it popped. But instead of blood or pus, a worm came out. It was maybe 6-9 inches long and had a large flat triangular head about 1/2 an inch wide. (The body was maybe a 1/4" wide.) Well, the worm didn't really COME out. It became visible and she somehow pulled it out.
I know worms, snakes, & dragons (and feathered serpents for that matter) are all related in dream and shamanic imagery. Being eaten by any of these signifies going into the underworld or into the subconscious. It's a transformation thing, related to caves. (Like the underground bunker dream I had about my friend with cancer a few weeks ago.)
But I didn't get eaten by the worm. It was inside me. And I didn't eat it.
I've had worm/snake/dragon inside me visions and dreams before. Several years ago during a shamanic journey a white snake/dragon and a black snake/dragon were put into my body by a very powerful figure to clean me. But they were VERY small and are still in me. One of them put a diamond in my heart. (Which is strange because my Launchcast station is playing "Shine on you Crazy Diamond" as I write this. I can't make this stuff up.)
This worm didn't feel like it was in there to help me. And it didn't feel like an accident that it was in me. The woman put it in a jar (it was still alive) and started asking me what foreign countries I've been to. In 2003 I went to Belize, Honduras and Grand Cayman on a cruise. I didn't take my shoes off in Belize that I remember, nor do I remember eating anything. She was trying to convince me this worm had been in me all this time. Doing what? And why?
Sometimes I just need to put these things out here on the Wall.
(The Wall is the Internet. I wrote a book about a priestess from Atlantis coming to our time and she wanted to get people's attention. She asked where the wall was, the place to post information. It's the Net. The book didn't ever completely gel, but that priestess is still in my head. Tse Nen Ray is her name.)
PS- today is 1 Snake.

indoor sundial dream

12.19.14.0.7 9 Manik 0 Pax
In this dream, I was at the Meriden Square with a friend (which friend I was with kept changing so I'll assume that friend wasn't important). They were unveiling a new exhibit--an indoor sundial. (Not that the Square has exhibits! It's a shopping mall--oh, sorry, a "Westfield Shopping Town".) It was the opening and a lot of press were there, but it's not clear to me if I was there as a reporter or I just happened to be there.
The person who created the sundial had died right after completing it, which is sad. He was Mexican. They had some female relative of his speak in his place. She barely spoke English and knew nothing about the sundial and basically they made her look like a buffoon. Somehow I got the original notes she was speaking from and she'd written across the top that she made custom cakes. I think she thought maybe the paper would get passed around and she'd get advertising benefits. I thought maybe someday I'd call her to make me a cake or something fancy so I put the paper in my pocket.
The sundial itself was still covered, but there were all these other exhibits that were part of it. They made no sense. It was like just snippets of the guy's life.
As my ever-changing friend and I were looking at these snippets, the main unveiling happened. We went over to see it.
Technically speaking, a sundial is a kind of clock which works by a shadow cast on the ground by some kind of upright (called a gnomon). I'm not sure how it adjusts for the changing positions of the sun in different seasons; however that's not important. What is important is that you can't have an indoor sundial and I don't know why anyone would have commissioned one. What would it measure, mall time?
This sculpture wasn't a sundial. It might have kept some kind of time and technically been a CLOCK, but it was NOT a sundial. It had a lot of fiber optics that came on and off seemingly randomly in different areas. It was round. And vertical (like a clock, not horizontal like a sundial). It included lots of pictures, some of which had been in the attached exhibition.
And it was a ride, like a carnival ride.
I didn't ride it. I went to sit down nearby. People kept getting sick and having to get off. I didn't even watch how the ride portion of the sundial worked, that's how absurd I knew it was even as I was asleep.
There was a lot more to the dream, but only this part feels important.

---

Writing this out, I see that the "sundial" was actually some kind of akaskic record for the man who created it. That's why all the side exhibits were so personal to him and made no sense to anyone else. It measured HIS time--it was all about him, and therefore appropriate that he died upon its completion. Since no one truly wants to live another person's life, riding the sundial made everyone ill and want to get off.
And since this is about me, and most likely about my calendar...hmm. When I finish my Jaguar Nights 2008 calendar am I going to drop dead? I don't think so--too literal. Even the calendar part might be too literal.

dream

12.19.14.0.6 8 Cimi 19 Muan
I have a friend who has cancer. She's already been in hospice once. It's disconcerting to think someone my age could die...not in a car accident, but of a disease, of a body giving out. My best friend went through this a few years ago when a friend of hers from high school died of bone cancer at age 34. We still think we're immortal in our hearts, that we're 18 or 22 with everything ahead of us.
I haven't talked to her for a few months, but she popped up in a dream last night.

---

In the dream, I was going to go visit her. But she wasn't home, she was in a hospital room. Room 118 to be exact. Except this this room wasn't in a hospital. It was...
detached... somehow. I can show you on a map where in town it was, although the streets I took to get there don't really exist and neither does the place where it was. I finally found the place, and there were two rooms there, not just one. Room 117 was there too, right next door. Imagine a very small concrete shed or shack, barely wider than the door, and only a few feet deep. That's what these "rooms" looked like from the outside. They were separated by about 10 feet, on a plot of land that needed serious lawn care. I parked my car (gravel driveway) and went to 118. When I opened the (unlocked) door, there was no room inside, just a concrete stairway leading down, very much like an exterior basement entrance. The stairwell was about 1/3 full of crinkly fall leaves and crumpled paper 8 1/2 by 11, not newspaper). Neither of those things weigh very much and it was easy for me to push them aside and get to the lower door, which wasn't numbered. I knocked and went in.
The room inside was also made of concrete. The lighting was low and dim. It did not look like a hospital room. It looked like someone living in a basement, in a one-room apartment. The walls were lined with bookshelves stuffed with books. My friend was sitting on the couch with her back to me. She did not seem to want to see me, and seemed rather surprised I'd made the effort. I said something about the leaves in the stairwell and she waved her hand a little and said she'd have it taken care of. I felt very awkward--not because she was sick, but because I was clearly an unwanted guest. I finally asked if she was going to be able to go home and she snapped, clearly irritated, "I'm working on it."
With that, I left, and realized that when I said "home" I wasn't sure if I meant "Home" (meaning heaven or the other side of the veil or the afterlife, however you envision it) or "home" like back to where she lived. When I got upstairs, a bulldozer had just finished knocking down room 117. I marveled that we hadn't heard it from underground, and wondered it meant that the room was gone. Had the patient gone Home or gone home?
Then I went to do a bunch of other things that didn't really seem related. I was bringing my old Body Shop stuff to a party, but I was late because I couldn't merge into the correct lane and had to around in a big loop and waste a bunch of time. Then I realized I was supposed to be bringing my mom but going back for her would make me even later. I called her and she was angry at me, but understanding. When I got to the house where the party was, a bunch of old ladies wanted me to play cards. I pulled a regular deck (52 cards) out of my purse (why I had cards in my purse I couldn't tell you) but they said we had to play with their deck. It was a big fat deck and made up of regular cards, tarot cards and some other kinds of cards based on places, almost like the location cards in Mythos (the Call of Cthulhu trading card game). The smaller cards had been laminated and cut to be the same size. We were supposed to "sell" the cards in our hands to the other players. I had a blue-inked New York City card and I tried to sell it to the lady on my left for 500 (500 what? I don't know. Points? Pennies?) and she said that was too much so I changed it to 50 and she offered me 30 and I realized I had no clue how to play this stupid game.
Then my ex-boyfriend wanted to see me. I didn't want to see him but I went and picked him up anyway. I was driving my 1981 Chevy Chevette--it was light blue with a white stripe--and my body shop bags were in the back seat. He kept saying how much room there was in the back (not true!) and I had the awful feeling he wanted to have sex with me. So I told him I wasn't on any birth control which had the opposite effect. I got away from him and went home but I felt as dirty as if I HAD slept with him, so I took a shower.
The next day I decided to go see my friend again. The stairwell was completely full of leaves and papers this time. I scooped them out with my hands until I could get down to the door. She was playing World of Warcraft and one of my husband's friends (who doesn't play WoW) was there. They were talking about how there was a Dungeons and Dragons expansion for World of Warcraft. I said I had seen the ad for it in Dragon magazine.
They both looked at me like "what the hell are YOU doing here" but I didn't leave. I outstayed my welcome. My friend asked me if I could type her spell list for her. She gave me a bunch of very messy hand-written pages with all kinds of strange words and numbers separated by slashes and hyphens, a kind of shorthand which I don't speak. I didn't want to do it, but I said I would. She said she needed the original back in a few hours, or else the finished copy. I said I'd try to find a copy machine or fax machine at the hospital and they both looked at me strangely--hospital? What hospital? I left with the pages and I can't remember anything else.
Basically that's it.
Car picture source

---

Some of it seems pretty straightforward.

• Going under the ground, that's a classic shamanic image for visiting the "underworld" and clearly my friend represents some part of my unconscious which is hiding from me...or that is "dying" because of all the work I've been doing on my self (or both--hiding from me because I'm killing it).
• Fall leaves are a death symbol, but like all death symbols have that hint of rebirth about them. The crumpled papers all had writing on them--discarded thoughts? Thoughtforms?
• World of Warcraft--my husband plays it all the time and I'm basically a "WoW Widow" because that's ALL he does at night and on weekends. So it takes my husband away and now it's taking my friend away...except that she represents an aspect of my SELF so how does that work?
• My old car does go back to the time of that ex-boyfriend. He emailed me recently so that could be why he came up. I have NO desire to have sex with him. He is married and going bald and still a jerk, I presume.
• Lugging around the bags of Body Shop stuff--that's a failed endeavor which is still haunting me in real life, and I still have the bags of stuff around because I paid for it all and I'm going to use it up. I hate failing.
• The basement room was full of books--that's knowledge, but because it was in this basement, it's hidden knowledge. And my friend (aspect) didn't want me there, so I'm not supposed to see it/not allowed to see it? Don't know how to see it?
• The old ladies and the cards--no clue what that could mean. They wouldn't let me play with the familiar deck, that's getting me out of my comfort zone and challenging me in some way.
  
• Getting on the wrong highway because I couldn't merge--that's victim consciousness, it's not my fault, someone did it TO me.
  
• The hospital room being detached from the hospital--I can see that it's rich with symbolism but can't figure out WHAT it means.
• The other room being destroyed--a symbol of another part of my unconscious being destroyed? Re-absorbed? It felt more hopeful than sorrowful.
  
• The "spell list" is knowledge my aspect has that I don't. She was giving me a short time to make a legible copy but I couldn't seem to manage it, or didn't want to.
• The friend of my husband's being there--my friend and his friend probably know each other as we all went to the same high school, but why he'd be there I don't know. And I can't imagine what he symbolizes in my unconsciousness.

Any outside thoughts welcome.

dream lesson

I had a dream this morning. The actual content of the dream wasn't important because I got the message right away.
It was about me being in unequal relationships, where I give and others take. Wait, that's fair, isn't it? I'd like to get once in a while.
In the dream, I was in a relationship, which started out looking like it would be a mutual give/give type thing, but very soon, it degenerated into the give/take, and I was helpless and hopeless to break out of that cycle. Just like I feel in real life.
I keep taking on "volunteer" jobs which suck up enormous amounts of my time and energy, hoping that I can turn them into paying jobs, or at least use them as experience toward paying jobs. But instead they just lead me to more "volunteer" opportunities. I feel like I have no time for myself, and I still have very little money. I'm very frustrated.
Right now, I am doing the following "volunteer" work: editing at E-press, editing at the Shamballa Foundation, editing for a friend, writing for the ASC, and now I'm apparently part of a start-up group on a new publishing house--but no one's said anything about money yet. Plus all my own stuff, all my blogs, my web page, my own writing...who helps ME with that? No one. I've always got my hand to help (and today is Manik, after all, the helping hand) but when does someone hold their hand out to me? Even when I ask for help, I don't get it.
I submitted one article, as a test, to Associated Content. They were supposed to respond within 5 days on my payment and then put it online. That was 8 days ago and I've heard nothing. It's not online either.
12.19.13.16.7 8 Manik 0 Kankin

Weird dream about Plymouth

You might think I dreamed about Plymouth because of the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving but actually it's a place I like to visit. I've been there many times.
In this dream, I was going by myself and it was August 1. The route I was taking doesn't exist in this world. At a certain point, the highway splits into two (like it does with 95 and 495 to go to Mohegan Sun, except this was in a city) and as I took the right-hand path I allowed myself to get excited. Seems that whatever was to the left-hand fork I went to more often.
As I drove, I started to think that maybe I should have called and confirmed my reservation. Although it's never happened to me in real life, in the dream it seemed like the last time I came to Plymouth by myself my reservation was lost and I was only allowed to stay one night, and the other hotel I was moved to wasn't adequate and I came home. And I realized as I drove that I made this reservation with the same phone call as the lost one.
I parked my car. An astrologer I know came to greet me. In real life she lives in Hartford and doesn't work for any kind of hotel. She was picking up a whole contingent of guests for the hotel. She looked surprised to see me and asked if I had a reservation. I told her I did but she frowned in such a way that I knew she hadn't seen my name on the guest list for that day.
We started walking. I realized that although I had my purse, I had left my luggage in the car, which meant I'd have to walk this long path again. (Not sure why I couldn't drive to the hotel--the Plymouth of my dreams had NOTHING in common with the real Plymouth except its name and the fact that it was on the shore.) We paused for a break by the water, and I walked down a steep path to get to the water, and then another woman and I went out on some rocks because we saw a horse swimming. (Yes, a horse.) On the way back I found this beautiful, perfect shell, a little smaller than my palm, like a mini conch. Janet said the guides (like her) weren't allowed to go into the water and take things. I said, "But can I have it?" I was turning it around, making sure it had no hermit crab or snail inhabitants, which it didn't seem to. She explained that it could have something living in it, and I said it didn't, and could I take it since I wasn't a guide? She never did answer me and I think I took it.
As we were walking, I started thinking about calling Will and telling him there might be a problem, but I decided to wait until I got to the hotel and found out if there really WAS a problem or not. I got to talking with another person heading for the hotel and when I started to pay attention to my surroundings again, they were strange. We were in an obviously very poor neighborhood, heading up a steep hill. The pavement was broken. It was some kind of slum. A dog ran up to me and tried to bite me. It was a yellow dog of some kind. Its owner came up to me and said he was supposed to put the dog to sleep because it had worms but he loved the dog and couldn't bear to have it killed. I said something to the effect that the dog didn't seem to be suffering, and just then the dog fell and had a terrible seizure. The guy explained that was the worms and then we were past him and his dog. I went up to my astrologer friend and said, "Are we taking a shortcut?" and she looked around and saw we were lost.
Now logically, even in the dream, I knew if we back-tracked we'd get to the shore or to a familiar road. But she said she couldn't, we had to go forward. We came to a dead end with a big building which was a police station. We went inside and explained our predicament. The police said they would have to take us into custody until someone from the hotel could come and get us. Basically they were putting us in jail. They wanted to confiscate, I mean, put aside and protect, all of our luggage, they wanted our credit cards and our driver's licenses. I got angry and upset (and secretly glad I'd forgotten my luggage). I tried to call Will at work, home and his cell and he didn't answer. The cop was asking me for my phone. (Now that I think about it, I should have just called the hotel!) He said I couldn't make non-local calls. I was just about to shut my phone when I saw the name "Amanda" on my list. I do know this Amanda (although she goes by initials, not her name) and she lives in Florida, not Massachusetts, but in the dream she lived one town away from Plymouth. I called her and evaded the cop. She was amazed that I called her and concerned when I asked for help. I tried to explain where I was. I went outside, followed by the angry cop, and looked around. Down the hill toward the shore I could see a brand-name hotel (Hilton? Not sure). I told her I would wait for her by that hotel and she said it would take a while for her to get there. I went back inside and found my astrologer friend and explained that I was getting a ride. They were "booking" the hotel guests into jail and taking their stuff. Everyone was very upset. (It also seemed like the group was all women, mostly elderly.) My friend said without a map I wouldn't find my way to the other hotel but I didn't care, I was going anyway.
Unfortunately that's all I got of the dream before waking up.
12.19.13.15.7 1 Manik 0 Mac