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jacktellsliesRecently, while sitting by the river where my cousin drowned, Meredith wished for a boat she could row. I wished her one powered by doom like that of the Lady of Shallot. Not immediate doom, of course. It would take her wherever she needed to go without rowing, with the understanding that, as everyone eventually dies, everything you do is carrying you to your unavoidable death. She had only wanted exercise, and was displeased. But I realized the extent to which I need to read good books and have interesting jobs and spend time with friends and learn. A good life is the only thing that will carry me to my death, to my proper death, to the things that even the best, most adventurous and giving life necessarily excludes.
After my father died, my mother believed that he was trying to tell her something in her dreams. She'd dream of doing the dishes, of seeing his reflection looking at her in the window above the sink. But she'd know that he was dead and wake up afraid and concerned. She had the dreams often, and felt them to be urgent, but could not piece together any message, until my sister told her that she was pregnant, and the dreams stopped coming.
I've been having recurring dreams. Always my family is there. Once we all followed my grandfather, a former naval captain, all of us part of a fleet of something like small fishing vessels or rusted boats for tourists. Sometimes it is my father, back from the dead. I tell him I've missed him, or I fight with him, or try to speak with him of things that have happened since he died. Usually he is mute, or passive, but smiling, as if embarrassed that I don't understand the rules of visitation. And in the dreams there is a theft, or I am afraid of being made to pay for something, or someone, usually my three year old niece, turns to piracy. We move through converging places, land and sea. We wade through flooded tunnels under the boardwalk and the ocean. We cross bridges, crumbling wooden ones, land bridges flat and thin made of ancient orange brick in buildings built over and containing bits of the sea. And there is always a guardian of a passage or of some sort of riddle I never hear but seem to answer correctly. And the guardian is always two things at once. It was a weasel that was also a duck, three dimensional at one angle and two dimensional at another, flat so that it could slip between bricks. It told us that we had been flat and we had been silent, so we could pass and we could live. There was a man who was both my friend Bernie and my amazing geology professor, taking me into his office at a dig site and teaching me to dissect a human heart, smaller than it should have been and wrapped in an inch of gauze like a silver spider web. And in the dreams themselves I know that the dream is important, that I must remember it when I wake, that I must make sense of all of it. But I do not understand.
They are underworld myths. I've gotten that far. I'm crossing the water, I'm afraid of paying the ferryman, or we're stealing the boat. I am following my family into a place I always wake before finding. But why?
It occurs to me that my mother's dream contained some of the same elements. There was the presence of the dead, of course, and the dishes provided the water. The mirror that was not a mirror was a convergence, an otherworld of sorts. The realization in the dream of my father's being present despite his death was a riddle in its own right at the same time that it precipitated her knowledge of the dream while dreaming it.
I do three card tarot spreads. They are as simple as I want them to be, a single metaphor in three pictures. And I sometimes test my cards and my reading. I cast asking to be told about the coming day, so I can interpret and then return, correcting my own assumptions, seeing where prediction and interpretation line up with fact. Asking the cards to explain the Day of the Dead, I was given the Wheel of Fortune reversed; the Six of Swords, the ferryman rescuer, reversed; and the Three of Cups, family and friendship and celebration, reversed. Besides all of the other things that they can mean, reversed cards for me often simply mean an alternate realm of consciousness: it means that you are dreaming, it means that they are dead. So, yes. All of that is exactly what the Day of the Dead means. It couldn't have been explained better in words.
And, later, Meredith read for me. I asked to be told about me as I am now, and was given the Knight of Pentacles reversed, the Seven of Rods, and the Three of Swords reversed. Reading for me (with clarity and insight I never would have found reading for myself) she told me that I was meant to go on a quest, a physical one or a spiritual one or one through the other. The three of swords is what confused us. It is, of course, the heartbreak card, a red and bleeding heart pierced by three swords. She asked if there was any reason that the dead might be upset with me. This was interesting: I'd written almost all of this before that time, but I'd not yet posted it.
I realize now, though, a second option. The card was in the dream. I was taught to dissect a human heart. Bernie/my teacher cut twice. I cut once. But was the card showing the dream, or was the dream showing the card?
Weeks ago, Meredith suggested asking for a key to my dreams before going to bed. I tried. I even asked a fountain, which promised success, but lied. (Of course, I didn't pay the fountain.) I'm thinking of taking the key in with me: an old key under my pillow, and two coins for the toll, and the cards of the day and the dreams, and the cards of the quest.
After my father died, my mother believed that he was trying to tell her something in her dreams. She'd dream of doing the dishes, of seeing his reflection looking at her in the window above the sink. But she'd know that he was dead and wake up afraid and concerned. She had the dreams often, and felt them to be urgent, but could not piece together any message, until my sister told her that she was pregnant, and the dreams stopped coming.
I've been having recurring dreams. Always my family is there. Once we all followed my grandfather, a former naval captain, all of us part of a fleet of something like small fishing vessels or rusted boats for tourists. Sometimes it is my father, back from the dead. I tell him I've missed him, or I fight with him, or try to speak with him of things that have happened since he died. Usually he is mute, or passive, but smiling, as if embarrassed that I don't understand the rules of visitation. And in the dreams there is a theft, or I am afraid of being made to pay for something, or someone, usually my three year old niece, turns to piracy. We move through converging places, land and sea. We wade through flooded tunnels under the boardwalk and the ocean. We cross bridges, crumbling wooden ones, land bridges flat and thin made of ancient orange brick in buildings built over and containing bits of the sea. And there is always a guardian of a passage or of some sort of riddle I never hear but seem to answer correctly. And the guardian is always two things at once. It was a weasel that was also a duck, three dimensional at one angle and two dimensional at another, flat so that it could slip between bricks. It told us that we had been flat and we had been silent, so we could pass and we could live. There was a man who was both my friend Bernie and my amazing geology professor, taking me into his office at a dig site and teaching me to dissect a human heart, smaller than it should have been and wrapped in an inch of gauze like a silver spider web. And in the dreams themselves I know that the dream is important, that I must remember it when I wake, that I must make sense of all of it. But I do not understand.
They are underworld myths. I've gotten that far. I'm crossing the water, I'm afraid of paying the ferryman, or we're stealing the boat. I am following my family into a place I always wake before finding. But why?
It occurs to me that my mother's dream contained some of the same elements. There was the presence of the dead, of course, and the dishes provided the water. The mirror that was not a mirror was a convergence, an otherworld of sorts. The realization in the dream of my father's being present despite his death was a riddle in its own right at the same time that it precipitated her knowledge of the dream while dreaming it.
I do three card tarot spreads. They are as simple as I want them to be, a single metaphor in three pictures. And I sometimes test my cards and my reading. I cast asking to be told about the coming day, so I can interpret and then return, correcting my own assumptions, seeing where prediction and interpretation line up with fact. Asking the cards to explain the Day of the Dead, I was given the Wheel of Fortune reversed; the Six of Swords, the ferryman rescuer, reversed; and the Three of Cups, family and friendship and celebration, reversed. Besides all of the other things that they can mean, reversed cards for me often simply mean an alternate realm of consciousness: it means that you are dreaming, it means that they are dead. So, yes. All of that is exactly what the Day of the Dead means. It couldn't have been explained better in words.
And, later, Meredith read for me. I asked to be told about me as I am now, and was given the Knight of Pentacles reversed, the Seven of Rods, and the Three of Swords reversed. Reading for me (with clarity and insight I never would have found reading for myself) she told me that I was meant to go on a quest, a physical one or a spiritual one or one through the other. The three of swords is what confused us. It is, of course, the heartbreak card, a red and bleeding heart pierced by three swords. She asked if there was any reason that the dead might be upset with me. This was interesting: I'd written almost all of this before that time, but I'd not yet posted it.
I realize now, though, a second option. The card was in the dream. I was taught to dissect a human heart. Bernie/my teacher cut twice. I cut once. But was the card showing the dream, or was the dream showing the card?
Weeks ago, Meredith suggested asking for a key to my dreams before going to bed. I tried. I even asked a fountain, which promised success, but lied. (Of course, I didn't pay the fountain.) I'm thinking of taking the key in with me: an old key under my pillow, and two coins for the toll, and the cards of the day and the dreams, and the cards of the quest.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 05:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 05:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 05:33 am (UTC)♥
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 05:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 02:59 pm (UTC)I was taught to dissect a human heart.
i seem to have fogotten the knack, and am in terrible need of it. will you show me how?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 08:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 03:06 pm (UTC)I, too, have been having very vivid, almost disturbing dreams as of late. Two nights ago, I dreamt that I had a job as a teacher at my old high school, but wasn't notified of it until I was already late for the first day of work. I tried to argue with the front-entrance woman that I was just notified of where I should be an hour ago, and that there was no possible way for me to get there any earlier, and that I knew very, very little about film production. She was completely unforgiving and just pointed me in the right direction.
I climbed up an insane amount of stairs and never reached my classroom.
The entire day after I woke, I was out of sorts and late for everything. I had people yelling at me for things that weren't my fault, runs were in my stockings, my hair was a mess, and my bus was missed.
Dreams are so interesting.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 08:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-07 11:26 pm (UTC)Reading this made me think of going over your house in Catholic school and my deep yearning to always be outside in your backyard, which I considered to be a great place of mystery, and I guess magic. Thinking about it now evokes a feeling of mystical whimsy. And I remember being 12 or whatever age and delving into paganism and witchcraft rituals, worshipping the moon and directions and elements, which I have continue to put importance in.
I want to say we should hang out soon, but I'd rather it be that we run into each other and have nothing else better to do but sit and talk.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-08 09:35 am (UTC)I don't dream about him much anymore. I don't think it means I've made peace with it because I don't think such a thing is possible. I think my heart grew too tired of trying to find order in chaos.
I've always had a knack for the cards when it comes to other people. I cannot read them for myself at all. The only things I can cast for myself with any accuracy are runes and faery cards. I always know where I stand with the faeries and they've never done me wrong.
I have this image in my mind of a key that lives in my left hand. It comes out of my palm whenever I need to open a door. It's a skeleton key -- so it opens any door I wish.