Nimue Brown's Blog, page 331

Liminal encounters

Edges are places of magic. The point where one thing stops and another begins, or the place of uncertainty that is neither quite one thing nor the other. Shores and wetlands are physical exemplars of the idea. The clear edge of where one body meets another, and the liminal emotionality of that meeting.

To be able to find the edges and liminal places, we have to be able to clearly recognise that one thing is distinct and separate from another, even if they blur when they meet. We must know the land and the sea to be able to see the luminal quality of the shore.

The need to divide and label seems to be a key part of how humans make sense of the world. We break things down into subcategories and ever finer delineations. It’s not enough to be a Druid. Reconstruction or romantic? Urban or feral? Contemplative or ritualistic? As though these are all firm boundaries and a Druid is a specific thing, a member of a discreet subcategory. In practice I find that the kind of Druid I am depends a lot on factors like where I am, who I’m with, what’s expected of me, the weather and my mood at the time.

If someone asks me to write a polytheistic poem for them, I will find the means within myself to do that. In the same week someone else could just as easily take some of my essays to put in a humanist/atheist collection (this has happened). I find it hard to wear any belief orientated labels. There are days when the language of deity makes sense to me, and days when it doesn’t. There are days when wearing a warm waterproof coat makes sense to me and days when it doesn’t, and I don’t think that comparison is unfair.

The sea is always itself, but the sea on a gentle summer’s day is not the same as the sea beset by a winter storm. The land is always the land, but in a mild growing season it looks and feels very different to how it is when gripped by slippery ice. Nothing exists in isolation. Nothing is entirely separate from the whole, yet all things are most easily understood when considered in terms of what makes them separate.

The same and not the same. Connected and separate. One great unity, distinct entities. There’s a paradox here that is essential and intrinsic to everything. I am not water, and yet without water, I would be nothing. A dry dust on the wind and no more. To know something is to go beyond what seems fixed and certain. To know the land in all seasons and all weathers, to know it wet, and frozen solid, to know it putting forth life, and decaying away. In the reconciliation of apparent opposites, there is often a new kind of truth.

“Know thyself”.  What is fixed and what is transient, what is of the season and of this week’s weather. Sometimes we need to define a thing to see where its edges are, and sometimes it is the experience of edges rubbing together that tells us about the limits. Skin again skin. Sea against shore.

Silent walking, and walking the talk

The most obvious way to take a meditative approach to walking, is by doing so silently – either alone or in company. Silence has a distinct power of its own, and as noise tends to be the social norm, it is well worth exploring what happens when we are silent, and silent in the company of others. I find sitting in silence to be really powerful, especially when shared, but will freely admit that silent walking does not work for me in the same way. Your millage may vary.

When we sit together silently, there’s very little external stimulus. A controlled, inside space means no unexpected things will occur. Any thoughts arising can be kept and shared later. Being outside, whether moving or stationary, we are more likely to encounter something unexpected. In interior spaces, working internally, there are only certain kinds of connection we can make.

On the first silent walk I undertook, quite a while ago, I found almost at once that it didn’t work for me. I wanted to share the things I was seeing, and in a group it’s only possible to alert people with sound unless they can all see you. I’m not sure that replacing sound with mime and arm waving is at all true to the idea of silence, it’s just swapping action for noise, while slowing down and reducing what I can express. If a buzzard flies over or I glimpse a deer in the undergrowth, there may be very little time to alert those around me. I’m good at spotting wildlife, and I love getting to share those moments of connection and joy with fellow walkers. To stay silent and let someone else miss out on beauty just feels wrong to me.

If you want to see wildlife when walking, then a quiet and attentive approach is vital. Most creatures have better hearing than we do, and a profound desire to be where we are not. I’ve walked with people who are talkers; interested in filling a walk with political debate and great thinking. Sometimes you have to stop them to get them to even see the big vistas of landscape. The person who is too caught up in their own head is not engaging with the world. The skills that make for good, indoors silent sitting – the deep inward looking of that can also be a disengagement when you take it outside. What point is there in moving in a landscape if you are not participating in the landscape and being open to other presences?

I’m also very interested in stories in the landscape. To handle this to best effect, it’s necessary to talk about them as they come up. Evidence of human history, of the ancient past in the forms of geology and geography, local folklore, and the like are all present in many locations. To comment on them and share knowledge and insight in situ is a powerful thing. It stops the landscape of a story from being just backdrop and makes it intrinsic. It is through stories that we tend to form our inner maps and make emotional connections with places, so sharing the stories of a landscape helps people bond with the place they are in.

My son and I moved area when he was 8, from the place he’d grown up to the place I’d grown up. At first he was disorientated. He and I had walked together a lot and got to know the place we’d left, but this new place made no sense to him. In the first few weeks, we walked a lot, and I storied him into that landscape until places became identifiable, and the history of the place, and the family history of the place became ingrained in him, and he settled. Conversely, when I’d moved away from this area for the Midlands, my lack of stories to go with the landscape left me feeling adrift for many years, and collecting stories of place took a long time.

For me, the critical thing when walking is to avoid banality and small talk. Words for the sake of making a noise cut us off from what’s around us. If I’m alone I would never wear headphones to cut me off from my surroundings, either. If the time spent walking is used as time for a brain workout, a debate, an argument, a showing off of knowledge then this too cuts us off from the landscape. The default should always be silence, but with spaciousness so that when something important comes up, there’s room for sharing. That might be observations of what’s around us, it might be questions the landscape inspires, or stories we associate with a place. Given time and space, walking can cause deeper personal revelations to float to the surface sometimes, too, and those are also worth airing and sharing. If we’re too absolute about silence, we can lose the richness of experience. Human communication is part of being real, present and alive, when we get it right.

How to love

It took me a long time to make any sense at all of what happens when something is inspired in me. It may be that this is blindingly obvious to everyone else, but having never seen anyone else talking about it, I suspect not.

For me, there’s not much difference between falling in love and being inspired – each tends to cause the other anyway. When I’m not knotted up with fear, I love fairly easily and with an open heart. I’ve learned not to show this, having discovered, and tested the discovery repeatedly, that this is not something most people want to have to deal with. Just occasionally I find someone for whom my open hearted inspired response does not seem threatening or troublesome. I’m exceeding blessed in a husband who delights in how I am – and does not require that to be entirely focused on him.

The experience of love/inspiration for me is one of intense emotion and richness. I feel at my most whole, my most present and alive when really caught up in this. As a creative person, I depend on that rush of inspiration, and am lost without it. For a long time, I saw all of that emotional response as belonging to the person who caused it. They were the muse, and quite often the unobtainable beloved so popular with angsty poets… I experienced it as being because of the other person, which meant that without their blessing, permission, response… that vital flow of inspiration could be lost.

Half a dozen years ago or so, it finally dawned on me that what I feel is fundamentally mine. It usually is inspired by something or someone external to me, but the flow, the capacity, the intensity and everything I can do with all of that, is mine. It’s not conditional on what the object of my love, the source of my inspiration does in response to me. Obviously it’s nice to find my intensity is acceptable, but in some ways it doesn’t matter at all if it isn’t.

From this recognition I was able to make some big changes in my relationship with reality. In the past three or so years, I’ve become more able to love landscape, and skies. It took me a while to learn how to do it and how to be comfortable with it, resulting in an epic and sustained love affair with the landscape around Stroud. I can love other people’s creativity, and not find that problematic any more. In seeing this as something intrinsic to me, not coming to me from outside, I think I’ve also become better at hiding it, which probably makes me easier to be around. There will be an ongoing process of finding out who doesn’t need me to hide.

Love and inspiration are intense, consuming experiences. When it seems that both are due to something external, it’s easy to feel powerless in face of them. I’ve found this holds true for all aspects of passion and desire. Hate functions in the same way – it seems to be about what’s on the outside, but the force of the feeling comes from within, the shape of it fundamentally belongs to the person experiencing it, not to the outside presence sparking it. This is why it’s not a valid excuse to say ‘he made me angry’ or ‘he made me want him’ when explaining violent behaviour – and all too often this is exactly what happens.

If we want, if we hate, if we feel fear or love or anything else, that’s on the inside. In owning that, all kinds of other things become possible. It’s certainly changed my relationship with my own emotions. It gives me more space to own how I’m feeling and to recognise it as my own, but also to separate it off from external reality. Just because I love does not mean the other person is doing something that entitles me to expect anything. Just because I am enraged does not mean the other person has done something to truly justify that. This is not a mindfulness approach to emotion, I’m not trying to see the emotion as some transient thing to hold lightly and let go of – the effect is the opposite  – of bringing my emotional responses more deeply into my sense of self. What it gives me is full ownership, and full responsibility.

Stroud Short Stories, revisited

Stroud Short Stories runs twice a year, picking ten stories to be read at an evening event. Participation is usually limited to Gloucestershire. In the winter of 2014, I was picked to read. In the spring of 2015 I edited an anthology of all previously selected stories. Last autumn I was invited to help with the judging, and I’ve been asked to do that again this spring.

Judging literature is a very subjective process. A small percentage of the submissions don’t work – they don’t make sense in some way, are too unoriginal, or express prejudices that aren’t acceptable. Those are the easy ones to weed out, although I have to admit it’s possible that amongst them are high art, super clever serious literature that I’m not smart enough to get. The flip side of this is that I know the audience who come to hear the stories, and they tend to be more like me, and are not cutting edge literary academics either.

The quest for the best ten is not an easy one. It helps that there’s the ‘reading out’ aspect, because this rules out a percentage of the stories. We judge without knowing the author, so I’m less likely to pick a story that depends on fantastic, theatrical delivery. Most authors are shy, wary of the microphone and many come to the events not having read much (or ever) in public before. The story has to work regardless of delivery. I’ve learned to be wary of vast stretches of dialogue, because not every author can produce two or more clear voices on a stage.

As a reader, first and foremost I want to be surprised. This is true of anything I get my nose into. I want not to know where it was going. I want to encounter thoughts that would never have crossed my mind. I am susceptible to beautiful language, but it has to be in service to the story, and I do not like things that sound clever and poetic but lack for meaning.

In the autumn we were picking to a theme, and having the Eerie Evening (see poster!) to work with, was a useful focus for selection. There’s no theme this spring, and I have no idea how that’s going to go. The competition is now open for submissions, and in the weeks ahead, I’ll be reading, and pondering perhaps something in the region of a hundred short stories, looking for the ten. I hope I can do the process justice.

It helps greatly that I’m not doing this alone. John Holland also judges, and he’s done far more of this than I have. While there’s a fair overlap in our tastes, we think in different ways, and in finding stories that we both think work, we’ve got a good shot (I think) at getting the best ten, at least on paper. How they’ll translate on the night is an unknown quantity. Some stories come alive in whole new ways when read aloud, others don’t have the punch you expected. Nothing is certain, and that’s part of the allure.

If you’re in Gloucestershire and want to give it a go (but don’t tell me!) the details are here – http://www.stroudshortstories.blogspo...

Who will be my leader?

As a student, I have always needed teachers. As a Druid, I want to stand independently in my own power, and take responsibility for myself. I also need the guidance and inspiration of others. I’ve run events, and I’ve taught, and I don’t want to only have access to things I am running, so I need there to be other people leading things I can be part of. Being in charge all the time is generally not good for a person. As a writer who doesn’t want to be a one person band all the time, I need editors and publishers, and to be able to accept their authority in all practical literary matters.

Being a self employed person, I have the amazing privilege of being able to pick who I work for. Being a Druid, I have the right to my own spiritual authority and am not obliged to go along with someone else’s hierarchy. Consequently I’ve given a lot of thought to the reasons for following or not following someone else. Who will I work for? Who will I not? I’ve come horribly unstuck with this several times in the past, and that’s taught me a lot.

Do you value me? Do you respect me, and acknowledge what I’m doing? Do you make it easy for me to work for you, or do you set me up to fail? Do you reward me, and make sure I have what I need, or do you take me for granted? Do you recognise my individual skills and strengths, and also my personal vulnerabilities? Will you let me be a real person when I’m working for you, or will you demand the constant strain of me faking things? Will you be treating me like you’re doing me a big favour by letting me work for you? Are you paying me enough to live on? If you’re taking my time for no financial payment, are you recompensing in some other honourable way? Do I get a say in this?

There are some people who lead because they get off on having followers obeying them. There are others who lead because they want to get something done and can’t do it on their own. The ego trip leader burns out followers and discards them as soon as they can’t bear it any more. The person who wants to get things done takes care of their supporters as essential to what’s happening.

Having been burned more than once, I look for the leaders who are looking to do something, not to build a fan base. I look for leaders who don’t have a high turnover of people, and who treat their people as people, not as a resource for their personal use. I look for fair play, for respect, for realism. I can’t deal with people who want to control and micromanage me. I like clarity about who has responsibility for what, as well.

I’m going to name some names. I’ve worked for Trevor Greenfield over at Moon Books for more than a year now, and he’s everything I could possibly want in a boss. As a consequence he has my absolute loyalty, and the very best that I can give. I’m working for Mark Graham a bit, for Druid Camp, because his is a leadership that is entirely about getting things done in a fair way. I’m looking at working for Stevi Ross and her Conscious Connection Camp on much the same basis. There are, alongside them a number of people I’m working with in various capacities – James Nichol and Elaine Knight with Contemplative Druidry, John Holland with Stroud Short Stories, and those closer creative partnerships with Paul Alborough, and with my husband Tom Brown, where the balances are somewhat different, but much of the same applies.

There are people I would never work for again under any circumstances. That’s fairly visible from my actions, for anyone who is watching. I don’t accept being patronised, taken for granted, pressured into burning out for other people, I don’t work with emotional blackmail and control freakery.

The mechanics of breaking a mind

In a greenstick fracture, the bone is damaged, but not broken. Before it can heal, it has to be broken. In terms of body damage and body healing this is unusual as the default is just to have to patch back together whatever is damaged. In emotional healing often the reverse is true, with the original damage looking more like a greenstick fracture, and the need to break something before healing is an option.

The reason for this is that a lot of our troubled mind issues are a response to experience. We develop coping mechanisms to get us through emotionally dangerous times, and eventually it is the coping mechanisms that cause us the trouble. It’s not a clean psychological break, but a bending of self.

To offer a case study on this… body shaming has always been part of my life experience, and my coping mechanism started long before I had any awareness that I was coping with something that maybe wasn’t ok. I protected myself emotionally by participating in the shaming. I agreed with it, I concurred that my body was disgusting and unacceptable. As a consequence of that, I’ve lived out the idea of mind body dualism, my sense of ‘me’ being all about the little voice on the inside and carefully disconnected from the physical presence. I tend to talk about my body as though it’s a separate thing, and not me. When my body isn’t good enough for someone, it’s my body I hate, not the person mocking or rejecting me.

There is no clean and tidy way of patching this up. Obvious ‘mend’ approaches just hide the problem. I’ve learned to not make any fuss about it when faced by people who find my body ok and who are disturbed by my self-loathing. This too is a coping mechanism, and of limited use.

To feel ok about my body, I have to break down everything I’ve thought and believed. I have to separate out belief and coping mechanism from truth, and I have to start placing the body shaming in the hands of the people who did it, and deal with the consequences. To claim this body as my own, and not as an awkward lump of flesh I am obliged to heft about, I will have to break parts of my own thinking. I’d have to break my story far enough to be able to consider that the lump is worth claiming.

To heal someone’s heart and mind is not a quick process. It is likely to be a messy one. It requires space, and for it to have space, that healing has to be more important than anything else. With the realities of work, domestic responsibilities, bills to pay, most of us do not get the time or space to deal with the green stick fractures in our heads. We may end up making more of them to cope with dragging our battered selves through the things we are already obliged to do. It’s only when a person breaks down to the point of being unable to work that we take their mental distress at all seriously. And then, the emphasis is on finding some kind of band aid – usually medication – to get said person back to work as soon as possible. We treat the symptoms, and leave the underlying damage undealt with. The greenstick fracture remains green and painful, and no one takes the time to break the emotional bones and reset them properly.

Mental health problems are on the rise, depression and anxiety are widespread. Unless we allow people the time and space to deal with their issues, they cannot heal. Unless we stop damaging people in the first place, we will continue to get ever more damaged people. We need to step back and look at why so many people are getting ill, and start recognising that there are sick attitudes in our culture that are causing much of the problem.

Not one of my better plans…

One of the weirdest questions I get asked as an author is ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ It comes up a lot, and not just for me. As an interviewer (something I do for Penton magazine at the moment) it’s not something I’d ever ask. What inspires you? Is an interesting question, because that’s not always about a straight translation into creativity. I am for example, inspired by great open vistas of sky and landscape. I like hilltops a lot. Occasionally I write poems about these things, but most often the inspiration of being on a hilltop translates into something entirely different.

Where do you get your ideas from? What is meant by ideas at this point can vary – plot, setting, characters, or on the non-fiction side, philosophy, spiritual insight, ways of practicing. For non-fiction it’s not a bad question – taking us into the realms of how ideas grow and develop, relationships with books, teachers, working groups and so forth. In fiction, the raw material is, simply, life. ‘I’m alive and paying attention’ is the only real answer to this question, which makes the oft repeating of it a bit odd, at least to my mind.

Where does anyone get ideas from? We steal them from other people. We see things and we think ‘I could have done it better than that!’ and so we figure out how, and we do it our way, which may or may not turn out to be better. And then there are the ‘ping’ moments, when you go from nothing to insight in the blink of an eye, with no rational explanation for how that enormous jump was made.

The human mind is an amazing thing. We have a capacity to see patterns – even where no patterns exist. We can build up narratives of cause and effect, even when we’re inferring that, and wrong about what caused what. We can put things together that do not inherently suggest their togetherness. We can take things apart that do not suggest dismantling. And we have this ‘ping’ capacity where some unconscious process in our minds connects the dots between things and suddenly gets a shape we had no idea we were even looking for. One viable answer to ‘where do you get your ideas from’ is ‘my brain does stuff when I’m not paying attention’.

Ideas, and the potential for ideas, are everywhere. Every stranger on the street has a story to tell. Every friend has told a story that could be turned into something else. Every fear, each last hope – these are all ideas that can be turned into things. Getting ideas has (for me at least) never been the problem. It may be for some people that the first necessary step is to recognise the sheer wealth and wonder of what is around them. Life is rich, surprising, full of things to wonder about.

The more interesting question is of selection. How do we pick a good idea from a weaker one? I could be writing about a man on a bike – there’s one just gone past my window, after all. Sometimes people on bikes are a good blog topic, but I picked this one instead, today, for reasons. One of the reasons is the overall balance of the blog and that I’ve not written about creativity in recent days. One is that I had a ‘ping’ moment and the idea popped into my head. Several others popped up too, and I picked this one because it seemed the strongest, and the easiest to work into a blog shape. The others I may come back to when I’ve had more time to think about them. (The short answer to that question is ‘practice’ but it also helps not to be overly afraid of getting things wrong.)

In this age of information overload, ideas are seldom in short supply. Good ideas are rarer, and harder to spot amidst the noise. We all have ideas. It’s not having ideas that sets a creative person apart. It’s noticing the ideas and working out which ones to explore and take seriously. It’s allowing the space to go from one idea to other ideas, and selecting, constantly for what could work and the context in which it would work. With all due reference to Les Barker, Guide Cats for the Blind make an excellent verse, but a dreadful reality.

When the gods are mortal

I didn’t start today well, sleep deprived and hurting, falling onto twitter to start trying to do the jobs I am supposed to do of a morning. And there, the shock that is the passing of David Bowie. It doesn’t matter how old someone is, how expected it was, how really impressive it was that they lived so long when you consider how they lived… These things amount to nothing in the shock of a loss. The death of someone you care about punches a hole in you.

David Bowie was one of my first encounters with the idea that there could be more to this life than being straight and conforming to the gender you were apparently born with. An icon for fluidity and re-invention, he made this world a good deal bigger and more interesting by being here.

I never saw him play live.

There is, this morning nothing I much else I can usefully say. But other people, who have stories to share, are sharing them – and that’s the best thing we can do for the dead, and for ourselves, famous or otherwise. Speak of them, tell their stories, carry on.

Sauntering

In an essay about walking, Thoreau talks about the origin of the word ‘saunter’. He says “going à la sainte terre” means going to the Holy Land, and also offers ‘Sans terre’ – without land – as another interpretation. Both suggesting to him the idea of pilgrimage. The online etymological dictionary – http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=saunter – has it as a word from the 1660s to mean walking about in a leisurely way, and there’s no agreed history to the word aside from that.

However, poetic interpretation is just as interesting and valid as agreed history, and I like the idea that a saunter is in some way connected to the act of pilgrimage. From a Pagan perspective, it works very well indeed.

In a conventional pilgrimage, the journey is as important as the destination, but still the point of the journey is the place, or places you are going to. A person could not be a dedicated Christian pilgrim by sauntering slowly around a couple of fields unless a saint had left their relics there or some other dramatic event made said fields a religious focal point.

A Pagan pilgrim can saunter anywhere. Moving with less purpose, less intent and more presence changes how we experience a space. It makes it more possible to both see and dwell upon the details of our surroundings. Anywhere you might go, even in the most urban of spaces, there will be tiny signs of life. Or even big ones – it’s surprising how easy it is to miss large manifestations like urban trees if your head is down and you’re mostly thinking about what’s coming next.

A saunter gives us time to see a place afresh. Often the wonder is in the details, and if you want to immediately connect with what’s around you, noticing and rejoicing in the details is a big part of that process. It’s possible to become complacent about and oblivious to the wildest and most officially beautiful or picturesque of landscapes. Sauntering provides an antidote to jaded awareness.

A slow walk encourages us to stop and look more closely. Turn around and see the locality from a different angle. Sit down in it, lie down perhaps – if there’s no hurry and nowhere to be, then these things can all be part of the mix. At a slower pace there’s more scope to chat as well and this is not necessarily a distraction from the spiritual experience of being in a place. Sharing our responses to what we experience can broaden and enrich our perceptions, and this is an idea I’ll be back to again at some other point.

Humans are busy things. We’ve got a hectic schedule to fill, we’ve got to be achieving something. We’ve got to be somewhere else, or we’re running through the landscape for fitness. Slowing down is a magical thing, regardless of where the word ‘saunter’ really comes from. Slowing down opens out what’s in front of us, revealing the gems of water droplets on the intricate spider web, or the brilliance of a toadstool, the fragile beauty of flowers in the grass, or the presence of birds. Occult means ‘hidden’. If you want what’s hidden, slow down, and what was once obscure and unavailable becomes perceptible.

Walk on the ground beneath you as though you are walking on holy land. Every walk can be a journey to the most sacred place, because both you and the earth are present. And at the same time be sans terre – without land. If only we could let go of this mad human urge to own and control the land, everything would change. Be on the land and with the land, move over the land, find ways to explore your intimacy with it. Approaching without a desire to own, to conquer and subdue also opens the land to us in entirely different ways. In not seeking to possess, we make room for respect, and reverence, and create opportunities to be moved and possessed ourselves, instead.

Nightmares

I have memories of nightmares from earliest childhood, and they’ve been a frequent, dramatic feature of my life ever since then. I’ve had times in my life where I feared going to sleep because I’d had runs of ferociously bad dreams. In my twenties, my entire dreaming experience gradually narrowed down to a handful of fairly banal bad dreams, and for years, that was all I had.

I’m prompted to write this today, having woken from an intense set of nightmares. It’s been a week of unusually vivid, complex and difficult dreams, but last night’s were the first to take a nightmarish aspect. Death, violence, grief and loss, pursuit and threat – all the things, with no kind of narrative coherence and fantastical landscapes the like of which I have never seen for myself.

Dreams always tempt us to ask why they happened and what they mean. I think nightmares especially incline us to seek the comfort of an easy explanation. From the consumption of cheese through to something downright Freudian, the impulse is to rationalise. One of the most frightening things about dreams is how much of our time we spend in these mad states doing irrational things for no obvious reason and often suffering terrible consequences. Surely it has to mean something?

We have similar attitudes to life, and in our waking existence, the experience of horrors sends us off in search of meaning. Why did it happen? What brought us to this point? What does it mean? Can there be a reason for this? Religion and novels both owe a great deal to the human desire to have incomprehensible things tidied up into viable narratives. If it makes some kind of sense, we might have control over it, and we might be able to save ourselves. In dreams, as in life, the reality we experience isn’t tidy or coherent, yet we, as humans have this peculiar desire to try and make it all make sense.

There’s no particular reason why I had nightmares last night. Some of the threads I can trace back to people I’m worried about, historical experiences and recent reading matter, but that only explains what I’m drawing on, not the nightmare itself. Put in its context though, in this run of dreams that have been intense and more incomprehensible than is usual for me and something else suggests itself. Something big, and as yet unnameable is shifting in my head. Something I have no words for, and maybe as yet no proper concepts. A big upheaval in how I see things and understand things. It may be some time before that transition shows up consciously and starts to make sense.

Dreams are at least in part, functions of the mind. In much the same way that physical sensations are functions of the body. Not all body sensations show up at time or point of cause – the low blood pressure headache, and the muscle ache from exertion are not things you can make sense of by looking at what was happening when the pain started. There are plenty of symptoms which, on their own don’t mean much, but when aligned with other symptoms, have very specific meanings. Dreams are often like this, in that taking one dream on its own, out of the context of your wider dreaming, is not a good basis for analysis.

So while the contents of last night’s nightmare were really disturbing, I am not feeling that disturbed this morning, and I’m not picking over the precise details. I’m seeing that nightmare in the context of the last week or so, seeing how the visual vividness and emotional intensity connect it to other dreams, and that some kind of unconscious process is happening. When that process is feasible for me to handle in a more conscious way, it will start making itself known. It could be that it already has, that elements of the nightmare will prove relevant in time, but I’m not going to try and force a meaning today because I know that would be counter-productive.

If this approach to dreaming appeals to you, do check out my book, Pagan Dreaming – http://www.moon-books.net/books/pagan...