Nimue Brown's Blog, page 340

Not always seeking inner peace

There are times for inner peace – we all need safe spaces,calm and time off. I use meditation and walking to find calm, but I do not seek calm as my default state, and I am increasingly clear about this as a choice that relates to my Druidry.

I am not seeking to escape from this world, to transcend it, or to be anything other than my animal self, living as honourably as I can. I honour nature. Death, loss, grief, pain and frustration are all part of the natural experience of being alive. I try to approach them with equanimity, but I do not avoid feeling them, because they are part of being here. I grieve the losses, I feel the wounds, I allow the things that are wrong and unjust to impact on me.

Of all the emotions, fear and anger do the most to disrupt our inner peace. A life free from fear and anger would be one of great joy and ease, certainly, but at what cost? Injustice, cruelty and eco-cide make me angry. The extinction of species, the starvation of children, the destruction of habitats, makes me angry. I am afraid of what we are doing to our precious home. I am afraid of what rabid capitalism will do to us all. I try and bring some measure of calm to how I manifest my rage and my fear, but I do manifest them. I hold some calmness because I need to cope and stay viable, but I do not ignore these darker, more destructive emotions. They have important lessons for me.

I do not want to insulate myself from the horrors of the world so that I can feel smug and safe in a little cocoon of privilege.

Death and decay are part of the dying time of the year. Winter has always been a killing time. The longer we live, the more loss we are bound to experience. The more I experience, the clearer I become that to live a present and feeling life is to be open to all of it. I’m only interested in cultivating peace to the degree that it enables me to function more effectively. Rage expressed calmly, pain expressed calmly, these can be more useful than the flailing of emotions keenly felt but unmanageable. I want just enough inner peace and self control not to be ruled by my emotional responses, but I am not interested in a life free from suffering. I am interested in a real life, and I’ll take the consequences, all of them.

The looming season of gloom

Gaudy autumn leaves, sharp, frosty mornings, jewel-like spider webs – these things I can appreciate. At the moment the leaves haven’t all turned where I live, many are still green, and the colour, and loss of colour looks like it will be a slow affair. Somewhere beyond waits the prospect of grey. We will turn from colour towards the season of mist and mud, washed out hues and overcast gloom. The days get shorter and colder; rising in the darkness, struggling to dry laundry and trying to avoid chilblains will soon be on the agenda. I don’t find winter easy.

Many people are affected by the lack of sun over the winter months, and are more vulnerable to depression as a consequence. As I walk for transport, I get more light than average, and spend my working day sat at a window, getting what natural light there is. No doubt, this all helps. It took me years to figure out that what I suffer most over, is the loss of colour.

The winter we were renting the flat, and obliged to live with relentlessly white walls and a beige carpet, really brought home to me how much I need colour. Since we bought the flat, increasing the colour has been a major priority for me. Yellow living room walls, a purple kitchen, the hall is blue, there are rugs, and art has gone up on the walls. Lampshades, textiles… I protect myself from the dark months ahead with amounts of colour that my mediaeval ancestors would no doubt approve of.

This is in interesting contrast to how I dress myself. I prefer dark colours, lots of black, simple patterns if any, simple shapes. I like to dress quietly, but live in environments rich with colour and detail. I am more interested in what I can look at, than in being looked at.

Sun in winter makes a huge difference to me, because it changes the world outside so dramatically. Last winter, we walked over the hills to my mother’s house, on a day of incredible light. The fields, hills, and the River Severn had extraordinary colours, and the sharp winter light brought an almost uncanny kind of clarity to otherwise familiar scenes. I find the cold easier to bear if there is light, and the short days easier to tolerate when there are standout moments full of colour.

In the last hundred years or so, western humans have done a lot to insulate themselves from the winter. We have far more light, heat, insulation and comfort than our ancestors. We import foods from around the world, so that winter doesn’t have to be a bland food time full of dried things soaked and boiled alongside a narrow selection of root vegetables. But we do this at a cost to the wellbeing of the planet as a whole.

Living more lightly than is normal, I feel the winter keenly. I feel it when I’m walking for transport, and when the drying of laundry has to be a daily consideration. I don’t buy much in the way of fresh exotica, and the root stews will dominate my winter months, and I will miss the fresh greens and the soft ripe fruits, but I believe in walking my talk, so I can’t ward off winter in these ways. Colour on the walls though, and cheerful textiles I can have, and the latter mostly comes from cunning acts of upcycling otherwise unusable things. Working with fabrics through the winter also creates a feeling that I am working to protect myself from the cold, and means the colourful things are in my hands and getting my direct attention.

I will never love this time of year, I will never welcome it. I recognise it, and respect it, and intend to work with it as best I can. With a bit of luck, I can find ways to ward off the worst of it, without having to get involved in unsustainable things.

Good Pagan, bad author?

Uncertainty has always been a big part of my path. I don’t have fixed beliefs. Gods do not issue me with clear instructions. I have mixed feelings about many things and unsubstantiated personal confusion, rather than gnosis. It feels like the more time I spend as a consciously spiritual person, the less idea I have of what I’m doing, the less willing I am to invest in my own authority, the less sure I am of myself in some ways.

I become ever less willing to set myself up as some kind of expert, and ever more wary of any ideas about my own authority. But at the same time I have this compulsion to write, and the two do not go together very well at all from certain perspectives. There are reasons author and authority are related words.

Often what we want from authors – if sales of spiritual books, and books of personal growth are indicative – is confidence. Many of us like the people who can give us clear instructions about how to do all the things and get the results. ‘You can have all the things by doing it my way’ sells books. Why read a book by someone who doesn’t really know the answers? Why pick up an author who is not an authority?

There are subjects in which a person can become an expert and have a lot, if not all of the answers. It holds true in any theoretical subject. A few years ago, I tried to become a theoretical expert in the subject of prayer, and it was a very humbling sort of experience. Prayer is not something that makes sense looked at purely from the outside, attempting anthropology with self as non-participant (not that I’ve ever done any proper anthropology). Prayer is a living thing, that people do. Specific people, in specific contexts, and each is different. I could stand outside and make generalisations, but I couldn’t understand prayer in any way I found meaningful, by doing that.

I stopped approaching it as a theoretical subject and started doing it. That changed me. It also changed what I could say, but the specific cannot be safely generalised. I know what happened to me, but from that I also know that I cannot know what would happen to anyone else. The more I know, the less I can work out how to write about it. The more my experiences transcend what language can do, the more pressure I feel to try and find words for those things in the hopes of inspiring someone else.

Authority can get terribly competitive. In some fields, to be intent on being the best, the leading edge, the top of the pile, probably doesn’t get in the way of the subject itself, but in things spiritual, it really does. The more I obsess over sales figures, competing with my fellow authors and who is the most important Druid in the camp, the less able I become to function as a spiritual person. Work I do towards shaping or maintaining my own importance is a lot like tying my shoelaces together, because it stops me from running in other ways.

My spiritual practice calls for reflection, quiet, and not getting bogged down in what other people think of me. I suspect I’d be a more successful author (in terms of sales, not quality of writing) if I put more effort into crafting a public persona that set me apart as something special and worthy of attention. But I am no more or less than the next Druid, just a person doing things. I don’t want to write from a place of self celebration, I want to write usefully, in service, and I want to avoid creating and then buying into my own PR. I want to be able to do that alongside other people who are doing similar things and sharing, without authority, without hierarchy.

Happily, I know a lot of authors who are working in much the same way as me. There are many inspired folk in the blogsphere sharing experience but not setting up as a Very Important Druid. I am deeply inspired by the honesty of Cat Treadwell and Mark Townsend, who have shown me how being real, in all the flawed human messiness that entails, is a better spiritual path for me than trying to be shiny. I’d rather buy books from authors who don’t have all the answers, but whose questing might shed some light on my own journey. I’ve yet to find a book of everything solved neatly forever that came close to working for me, but in other people’s uncertainty I find hope, and inspiration.

Creative accountancy

For some time, a normal job has meant monthly payments of a predictable sum. Or perhaps weekly payments. When you know what’s coming in, you can make reasonable decisions about your expenditure, so that there is some balance. This is key for a viable household economy. Increasing numbers of people have been pushed into self employment in recent years, while zero hours contracts take away all pay predictability. Ever more people will be dealing with unpredictable incomes.

Of course in practice, expenses are unpredictable. If you manage your core, predictable expenses well (food, shelter, heat, light, communications, transport) you can have something to spare for clothing, repairs, broken things and sudden unexpected bills. You can hope it’s enough, but for a lot of people, a car bill and a really cold snap means either suffering or getting into debt, and there’s only so much safety net you can create when there’s not much coming in.

Unpredictable pay makes life really interesting. I earn something every month from various small jobs I do, but how much varies in ways I don’t have much control over. Tom earns money in sudden and sporadic lumps from art sales, advances and commissions. Royalties are paid every six months. That means it’s not unusual to find that we have money, but absolutely no idea how far that money will need to stretch until the next money comes in. A month? Six months? A year? Working out what we can afford from day to day is really hard when there’s no guessing the relationship between days and income. Keeping our outgoings down, and keeping a reserve, are the only ways for this to be feasible, and that takes discipline, and sometimes it feels horrible and stingy, but when your money comes in erratic bursts, feeling rich enough to be massively generous or indulgent can be a huge mistake.

A little bit of predictability makes a lot of odds. This is why Patreon is becoming popular with creative people. If you like what someone does, supporting them with a small monthly donation can really help. It gives them a fighting chance of figuring out the month to money ratios in a way that is sustainable and survivable. It’s also worth noting that when people kickstart projects in part with an eye to being able to eat and pay the rent while they work, this is often met with outrage. “Why should I pay for your lifestyle?” It’s not about keeping a creator in luxury, it’s about not exhausting their energies on trying to make ends meet because that really does get in the way of doing the work. If a creator needs to pay their rent to be able to do a project, then supporting them is no more a rip off than is paying more than an item ‘really’ cost in a shop so that the retailer can pay their rent.

I am a fan of self employment, but not of zero hour contracts. I’m a fan of having some self control and some scope for self determination. However, the truth of self employment for most of us is that workflows and pay are wildly unpredictable, while certain outgoings are consistent, and big, sudden expenses happen. It’s also worth noting that there are plenty of people with regular but low incomes who get caught out by big bills and thrown into difficulty because there is no slack in the budget. And there are people not as poor who just don’t have the ability to manage what money they get as effectively as would be perfect – because this is really hard to do, especially in the face of constant advertising pressure.

As a culture we can be quick to judge each other around issues of apparent economic success and failure. Often what we’re judging is material possessions. It doesn’t help. If we could care more about the necessities and care less about the surfaces, we might be able to help each other survive a little better.

Mighty dolls

Nimue Brown:

I’ve been decidedly unwell this week, and maintaining a daily blog is beyond me. But, landing on facebook this morning I was introduced to this wonderful artist and her work – she’s not the first person to take Bratz dolls and rework them, but she’s added a new dimension by representing awesome women as dolls. The difference between growing up with these images of women as your signposts towards aspirations, and the usual, as represented by Bratz, massively sexualised but does very little vision of femininity, would be huge. Do click through and enjoy these lovely, uplifting creations.

Originally posted on Wendy Tsao:

ROBERTA BONDAR

Roberta Bondar, 1945- , first female Canadian astronaut

“To fly in space is to see the reality of Earth, alone. The experience changed my life and my attitude toward life itself. I am one of the lucky ones.”  ~ Roberta Bondar

JANE GOODALL

Jane Goodall, 1934- , British primatologist, UN Messenger of Peace

“I thought my life was mapped out. Research, living in the forest, teaching and writing. But in ’86 I went to a conference and realised the chimpanzees were disappearing. I had worldwide recognition and a gift of communication. I had to use them. ” ~Jane Goodall

WARIS DIRIE

Waris Dirie, 1965-, model, author, social activist

” If you can survive in the desert, you survive anywhere. I know more than anything life in desert. You can tell by looking at the dirt how long ago it rained, how hard it rained, how much water came…

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Creating inner landscapes

The Druid meditation of The Sacred Grove is, in part, about creating an inner landscape. Other visualisations exist within OBOD and the wider Druid community that also have that inner landscape aspect, and any pathworking will deliver it too. Inner landscapes can be important tools for reflection, exploration and spiritual experience. There are some who feel they connect us to other worlds, and they can be a useful barometer for how we’re feeling, as well. The limitation is that we construct them fairly consciously, and so they are as likely to reflect our desires as anything else.

Bears, I have noticed, tend not to shit in people’s inner woods so much.

In my late teens and early twenties, I had an incredibly strange and vivid inner landscape when dreaming. There were places I was able to visit repeatedly as well. During my twenties, I lost this, pared down to a tiny inner landscape that was a twisted version of the place I’d grown up. I did not dream widely, or wildly for a long time. If I’d allowed myself to take it seriously, I would have realised what a mess my life was in a good deal sooner.

Over the last few years, the less conscious bits of my mind have started constructing landscapes again. Big, wild landscapes full of detail and possibility. Some of which I am revisiting regularly. It feels like my mind starting to work properly again.

What are these inner landscapes? Some of it, for me, is about relationship with the land I live on. If that relationship is not good, if I am not rooted, then I won’t dream the place. When things are good, strange but familiar versions of the places I spend time will show up in my dreaming. Some of it is to do with my emotional inner landscapes. This is not unrelated to my relationship with the land. I can’t be at ease in a place where I feel no connection and no sense of belonging. How much inspiration I have and how well my imagination is being fed and is able to flourish also contributes to my making of inner landscapes.

Work that focuses on interpretation can encourage us to pull out a few key features and try to decide what they mean. What was that creature in the sacred grove, and what was it doing, and what does that kind of creature signify? As we have, on some level constructed our inner landscapes, be they dreamed or visualised, treating them as a code to crack may be reductive to say the least. If we take a more holistic view of them, they may make more sense. To go into an actual wood and ask ‘what is the meaning of my seeing a deer here?’ is to miss out the deer’s relationship with the wood, the seasons, the food supplies. To take the deer out of context in search of personal meaning can, in real life, allow you to miss what was actually happening. Deer have their own reasons.

To take a deer out of a dream landscape as a symbol, may be interesting, but there are no more guarantees that the symbolic potential was the important bit. Maybe it’s more important to note that your inner wood now has creatures in it. Inner landscapes offer us the potential for a bigger picture, and it pays not to pick them apart and lose our sense of the wood by staring too hard at the trees.

More thoughts on interpretation and dreams here.

Speaking to beauty

Before I even met her, I was told what a grumpy face she had. Photos bore the observations out, although the bad haircut really didn’t help. A haircut that undermined all scope for dignity, combined with a grumpy face – so easy to make a joke or two at her expense. Meeting her confirmed the impression, although she was also clearly shy and wary of people. I didn’t know her name, but I called her ‘grumpy cat’ and said it warmly, and she came to me, and we made friends.

The next time I saw her, I simply said ‘hey, grumpy cat!’ and she ran to me, purring. I think she’d remembered. She’d been climbing about under vehicles, not grooming herself, I asked for a brush, but apparently her brush had been taken, along with her litter tray, dry bed (a waterlogged cat bed remained) and scratching post. She was not in a good way, and with the nights getting colder, I could not bear to leave her living outside. We made a snap decision and asked if we could take her home. The chap she had been left with had said he couldn’t really take her in because he’s hugely allergic to her. A situation desperately unfair on both of them.

I brought her home, and started calling her ‘beautiful cat’ and asserting that in there somewhere, she was almost certainly a princess. I don’t go in for monarchy amongst humans, but it’s a whole other thing with cats. We groomed her – a vast amount in those first days, but only a little bit each day since as she’s become keen on washing herself. As her eyes became less sore, it became obvious that some of her facial expressions had been due to sore eyes all along. As a half Persian, half Rag Doll, she needs her face washing pretty regularly. You can learn a lot with a search engine about how to take care of a cat.

The change in her face was rapid. She can be a really smiley cat now. She beams at us, with big, open eyes, and a cheerful expression on her cute little face. We tell her she is adorable, and charming, and all things of that ilk, and she basks in the praise.

How much language any given creature understands, is difficult to judge. They certainly learn key words at great speed – Vet, food, out, and the like. Tones of voice are very important in animal communications – they hear warmth and ridicule, certainly. Given the speed with which grumpy cat stopped being grumpy cat and started being beautiful princess cat, I have to wonder how much difference our words have been making to her. It probably also helps that we don’t shout at her, we reward good behaviour and generally make life easy. She’s pretty chilled out, and that too has an impact on the grumpy face.

Of course in humans, the effect of language tends to be much more immediate and pronounced even than this. Especially in children. It’s so easy to tell a child who they are, what they look like and what, if anything, they are good for. The child who is a beautiful princess for whom everything must be perfect has a very different life from the child who is an ugly waste of space. Not just because of the power of the words over the child, but because of the power of the words over the person speaking them. We talk ourselves into a certain relationship with reality.

Perhaps in part I see her as a beautiful cat because I have chosen to recognise what is lovely in her. My words have consequences for me. And so I am blessed by having this lovely, gentle, generous, well behaved little creature in my life, and cannot recognise in her the grumpy, messy, angry creature I’d heard about. Changing the language won’t always change reality to this degree, but it makes it a good deal easier to alter relationships and behaviour and that can have enormous consequences.

Matters of exclusion

For the purposes of this blog, I’m going to identify two kinds of exclusion. One is a genuine issue, where people are not able to participate because their needs are not met – usually by something inherent in the location that assumes everyone can leap off buses, bound up flights of stairs, squeeze into small toilets and so forth. Or because there’s prejudice against them in some way – gender, race, sexuality etc. Exclusion based on not considering what some potential participants might need, is a bit shit, through to a lot shit, depending on how big and professional an outfit you are supposed to be. Exclusion based on prejudice is abhorrent.

Type two exclusion, is when a space is offered as particularly for one set of people – that tends to be about gender and lgbt spaces, ethnicity, and disability, sometimes it can be about religion. The logic behind this kind of space is that it allows people to talk about their specific experiences. Bringing together fellow travellers to talk about issues is an opening move to getting things done, often. I think these are good spaces to have. The trouble is, that this kind of group pretty much always excludes young, straight, cis-gendered, moderately affluent, able bodied white boys, and this really, really winds some of them up.

These are the chaps who, if you talk about domestic abuse will say ‘men are victims too’ – not because they have been, but to derail the conversation. These are the men’s rights activists, who think hashtags like #nohymennodiamond are a good thing. Because female virginity is a male rights issue, obviously. If a group is about an ethnic minority, it’s racist for excluding them, women’s groups are sexist for excluding them, and so on and so forth. They’re very present on twitter and very easy to spot, and they are angry, and they feel left out, marginalised and unfairly treated.

Most sane people treat them as a bit of a joke. As they are the kind of joke that sends death and rape threats to women who dare to speak about sexism in the gaming industry, to take an obvious example, I think it is worth considering their issues. Why are they so angry? Why are they so bothered about not having a place in groups that manifestly have nothing to offer them anyway? It’s easy to make them choose to go away. Say you want to talk about the agonising details of childbirth or the mechanics of menstruation, and you won’t see them for dust. Say ‘no men’ and they take offence. You might instead get some friendly chaps at your talking about blood group who would like to be better informed, and you might decide you can make the time to inform them, and if you can’t, they may feel a bit sad, but are unlikely to tell you to go and kill yourself.

I’ve done a bit of an informal study, because twitter makes that easy. Who are these angry young men? Well, based on their tweets, they aren’t terribly articulate, nor do they have much to say when they aren’t hating on someone. Most have a handful of followers, so they aren’t popular and don’t have many friends or fans. Most show no signs of having much going for them – they don’t talk about personal achievement, they don’t have anything to show. If their profile pictures are indicative, none are especially well dressed, fit or good looking by conventional standards. These are guys you would pass in the street without a second glance.

I suspect they’ve grown up well enough off to feel entitled, but not so well off as to be safe forever, but they don’t have much going for them, so making their own way in the world will be hard. They have neither the money nor the looks, nor the personalities to attract women, and are painfully ignorant on the subject of relationships. With no emotional literacy worth mentioning, they have little hope of sustaining relationships, as their lack of online friends often indicates. Take away their young white male straight cis-gendered privileges, and all they have left is being barely able to string a sentence together, a spotty face, a bad wardrobe, and a dead end job. Of course they’re angry. Rather than deal with their own shortcomings, they project that anger outwards.

I think the problem is that, having nothing going for them and no prospects, they do feel marginalised. All the spaces for marginalised people have no room for them, because they look like young white straight male privilege. Desperate for attention, desperate to make a mark, they strike out because they do not think they are capable of doing anything better, and they resent anyone who in face of having nothing going for them, by their standards (being female, ethnic, gay etc) are trying to do something.

It must be a whole world of pain. So if you run into one acting out (usually on Twitter, but no doubt they lurk in other places, too), pity them. They belong to that most marginalised of groups – the privileged white guy who expects it all handed to him on a plate but isn’t seeing any action. They can’t admit to feeling marginalised because that would mean admitting to being failures by their own standards. So they envy those whose reasons for feeling marginalised aren’t shameful, and who are supporting each other. It hurts them every time someone else gets up. It hurts them every time no one is impressed by them being white boys. They belong in a different century. Pat them gently on the head and tell them that they can have a sandwich, the trick is to take their sorry ass out the kitchen and make it all by themselves.

When meditation is awkward

Meditation in all its various forms does not suit all people in all circumstances. This isn’t about being in situations that deny you the calm and time to meditate – which is an issue in itself – but about methods that really don’t deliver what’s needed.

Non-judgemental self reflection. Just sit with your thoughts and feelings, watch them arise, notice what they are and let them go. Sounds lovely. However, if what you are is in pain, this process strips away your mental defences and rapidly brings the pain to the fore. I know, because I’ve done it. Equally, if the thoughts that arise are anxious and you just sit with them in a non-judgemental way, what you can end up doing is giving those thoughts more space to develop. If you suffer from anxiety then it’s really important to challenge anxious thoughts as they arise. Letting them be is not a good move.

Some people don’t get on well with breathing exercises. For some, controlling the breath can add to panic, for others who are panicking, breath control can be a vital tool for keeping it under control. The only way to find out is to test it at a safe time and see what you get. If breath work doesn’t feel right, then it isn’t right for you.

I suspect for some people the problem with breath work is more to do with another person telling you what to do with your body. For anyone who has been physically abused, being told what to do can be triggering. For anyone with pain, or potential for pain, the allegedly ‘safe’ yoga moves can turn out to hurt. I’ve done this several times where I was told it would be safe and gentle, but it wasn’t, which in turn reduces my willingness to have someone else tell me what it’s ok for my body to do. If you’re taking physical instruction, you need to entirely trust the person you’re working with, and it needs to be ok to say no to them if something hurts.

Some meditations depend on sitting still. Some injuries and ailments of the body make sitting still for any length of time painful. Some positions favoured for meditating will hurt some people. If it hurts, it should be ok to stop, and the teacher or group that don’t support stopping when in pain are suspect. It usually means you’re dealing with inexperience, and some very narrow ideas about what is good and helpful. Anyone who thinks that what their body can tolerate is a reasonable measure of what anyone else can do, is simply not to be trusted.

Sometimes, meditation just opens the door to all the difficult stuff you’ve been trying to avoid or manage. If you don’t have the room to deal with things, meditations that take you into your own thoughts and feelings are to be avoided. Wait until you feel safe and ready.

Tiredness, illness and overload can make it really hard to concentrate. Visualisation and pathworking require concentration, but if you’re already mentally exhausted, this can just make you feel worse. The frustration of not being able to stick with the work just adds to the problem.

Any meditation method should leave you feeling better, not worse. It should be calming, not stressful, it should be inspiring, not despair inducing. If you’re getting results that aren’t good, it’s not a personal failure of any sort. What it means is that the methods you are using, and your current state, mental or physical, just don’t match up. A different method may yield better results. It’s worth having a range of meditative methods you can work with, so that if one doesn’t deliver, you can switch over to something that better suits your needs.

Forcing yourself to stick with something may sound like discipline and devotion, but that only makes sense of you think that it’s basically good to suffer. It’s very easy for people who are not suffering, and who have never suffered, to tell those who do that its good for them to keep doing the work. Whether it’s a good idea to keep pushing or to change tack, or to try again tomorrow, has to be the judgement of the individual, and should not be about trying to conform to someone else’s standards.

(You can find out about my book on meditation here.)

Pagan Dreaming – Nimue Brown (Trigger Warning: sleep paralysis)

Nimue Brown:

The review process is always a bit hair raising (because I always expect people are not going to like my work, and occasionally I do get really nasty reviews) but it can also be a bit of an adventure. My favourite reviews tell me something I didn’t know. Usually this means the book I’ve written gets placed in the wider context of someone else’s reading or personal experience. There’s always more to know, and the insights that come from finding out what other people do with my words, what’s useful, and where they go with what I’ve suggested, is always a fascinating process.

So, this is a reblog of a book review that introduced me to a topic I didn’t know much about. I’ve had a gut feeling for a long time that too much effort to get control over the contents of dreams, might be counter-productive, but this is the first time I’ve had some evidence for why that may indeed be very much the case…

Originally posted on adayinthelifeofawitch:

My dreams were in the process of returning from a long period of absence whilst I was reading this book, which was a strange but delightful coincidence.

For reference, I have a non-relationship with my dreams. I’ve suffered from sleep paralysis all of my life, but only in the last few years have I found out what exactly sleep paralysis is and that I’m not being violated by some hideous eldritch creature(s) invading my dreams.* Since every bout of my sleep paralysis is preceded by not one, but several horrible nightmares, so my instinct always is to open my eyes and be awake as soon as possible which is the worst thing to do in the situation.

For this reason I really appreciate the emphasis on healthy sleeping and dreaming over mere interpretation in Nimue’s book. I also appreciate the inclusion of scientific and medical findings on sleep and dreams.  The…

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