Nightmare - A Portent?
Was it a portent of the year that on the first day of 2016 I woke from a nightmare?
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The earliest part I could recall was standing in a building that was cluttered with many boxes, some open and some closed. Paladin and a woman were sorting through the boxes. I wrote this about that aspect of the dream: "Paladin had become the owner of a store of some sort. The store was still under some construction but was also is being used for some events that brought in some income. I felt betrayed. He had not told me this until I was actually there in the dream."
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Was it coincidence that on Sunday (two days later) Hibiscus and I had an exchange that went as follows?:
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"Has Paladin actually made any efforts toward finding another woman?"
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"No," I said.
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"Do you believe it is actually very likely that we will?"
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"Oh, not very - he's more likely to get employment first!" I said, laughing. And it truly was funny. I'm so paranoid about having a metamour when neither of my men are actively seeking other women or very likely to just bump into the right situation.
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"I can take that two different ways," Hibiscus said. "You could mean that Paladin will have an easier time finding employment than a girlfriend, or you could mean he'll need employment before he finds a girlfriend."
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"I meant the former," I said slowly. And then, all of the sudden, I felt terribly sick to my stomach. "Oh gosh. He might spend money on another woman," I said, despair in my voice. The idea felt almost as bad as thinking about him having sex with another woman. Perhaps it did feel just as bad.
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Hibiscus had been the one to cause me to think of the idea - it hadn't occurred to me because of the dream. And yet, once the exchange and the dream were examined side-by-side, the connection was evident. Is the universe intentionally trying to get me to process this? I wondered.
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The dream continued, "A previous owner of the store, a thin and tall red-headed woman, was there helping Paladin sort through the boxes. Much of it looked like paperwork. I was standing and watching, eating some sheep's yogurt from the carton with a bamboo spoon. I decided that I wanted some milk.
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"At first I wanted to dismiss the thought as ridiculous because I would have to go back to the car to get some out of my cooler. Then I remembered that I'm supposed to follow my impulses."
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It was interesting to note that in the dream I was remembering my relatively new commitment to myself to follow my impulses. Often it took months before my waking life seeped into my dream life.
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Back to the dream: "I asked Nicole, which was the name of the red-headed woman, if I could use the car keys. Somehow I knew that Nicole had been the previous owner of the shop years back, and since then the building had changed hands a bunch of times.
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"Nicole handed me something that was supposed to go back to her car along with the keys. Paladin seemed surprised that I was going to go back to the car myself. I thought he might have been worried that I would get lost. Nicole seemed to think it was impossible that I could possibly get lost. I went outside of the building and I went around the corner and I ended up behind a house where there were people I knew in the backyard.
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"When I saw the familiar people, I thought to myself: Sure enough, I could not miss this house. They were not people I know in waking life specifically, nor were they people who made me feel particularly safe or welcome. They were all white people, of the persnickety variety. I somehow got to talking to one of them named Sarah. I started to practice consciousness alchemy with her.
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"Somehow Paladin was with me, as well as the intern from Redbud Community, Mouflon. They were trying to help me facilitate consciousness alchemy on Sarah. Sarah became defensive and told me that I was not appreciated and that she would prefer that I did not do my witchery to her or anyone she knew."
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On later reflection, I wondered what it meant that in the dream I encountered someone who thought that consciousness awareness processing was "witchery." In my waking life I had never encountered anyone like that, although I supposed it was possible that Marigold (Paladin's mother) might think it was the "work of the devil" if I described it to her in anything less than the most scientific terms.
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Yet clearly some subconscious part of me is picking up on resistance from others, I thought. Perhaps it was because of Otter's reaction, who thought I was talking about something "woo woo" when I was really just talking about how the subconscious mind works.
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The dream went on, "I left the inside of the house for the front of the house and a blonde girl agreed to help me to Nicole's car. When I saw the really steep driveway filled with cars I realized why Paladin was surprised that I would go back to the car myself.
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"There was a stepped garden alongside the driveway. We decided to walk through the garden, even though there was not a pathway. The girl led me part way down the garden beds and then stopped and screamed that she had a praying mantis on her chest."
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I can imagine interpreting that in many ways. The girl who was leading me was unable to handle the situation, and I had to lead myself. Or perhaps she represented the part of me that I associated with being blond - my most pleasure-seeking, devil-may-care aspect of myself - and that her being 'attacked' represented an assault to that aspect of myself.
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The dream continued, "Because I was on the terrace above her, my foot was at the level of the praying mantis. I aimed too kick the bug off but ended up kicking her in the shoulder-blade instead.
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"She turned to me and said, "Who do you think you are?" When she said that, I looked down at the soil of the garden. The soil was a crawling mass of giant bugs, including centipedes that were crawling in and out of the soil, with bodies an inch or two across not counting the legs."
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Was it with shame or guilt that I looked down? And was it my shame or guilt that caused the mass of bugs to be there?
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"I became frightened and jumped down to the next terrace, and then the next. When I landed my feet got a little bit embedded in the somewhat muddy soil. I could not jump again immediately, and I felt terribly afraid.
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"A huge centipede sprung from the earth, its many-feet-long body stretching from the ground up to me at lightning speed and its stinger striking me in the wrist. It felt sharp and glass-like -as it had in real life, when I'd been stung years ago - but it was also accompanied by a squealing noise and a body-wide shock that felt electric."
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Then I woke. I strained to fully wake up but my wrist still hurt and I felt afraid. I forced myself up anyway. Staggering, I made my way across my room, pulled open the door and stepped into the relatively cold hallway. I opened Paladin's door, went into his room and crawled into bed beside him, still trembling.
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Waking him, I told him about the dream, and tried to settle down, but I could not. His bed was uncomfortable to me, and while he was terrifically hot under the blankets, the air was very cool. I went back to my own room and dictated a string of text messages to Hibiscus with the details of the dream, including the following reflections:
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"The garden beds represented my intestines, and the centipedes represented parasites. The unwilling blonde girl, who I felt distaste for, and who felt distaste for me, may represent a part of me who is trying to help but it was only doing so out of obligation as part of the whole of me.
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"Paladin having his own business and me not knowing about it seems like a reflection of how I became very serious with you before he really knew about it. It is like the store represents a kind of revenge. Like I made big life changes without consulting him, and so now he will make life changes without consulting me. It seems like an expression of guilt perhaps, frustration and fear.
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"It also seems interesting to me that the drama with Sarah was initiated by wanting to go to the car and get milk. In other words, I had a food impulse and then things went bad. Clearly there is a fear that following my food impulses leads to disaster.
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"I miss you very much," I added at the end. And then I told him of an exchange that Paladin and I had had recently:
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Paladin misses you too, he says: "Of course I miss Hibiscus. If he were here, you would be a lot happier and you would be a lot easier to deal with."
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I found Paladin's sense of humor adorable.
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I didn't really believe that the dream was a portent for the entire year, but it did strike me as significant. But perhaps not as significant as the New Year resolutions I set forward for myself:
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"I will stop eating at my first impulse to stop eating, even if that is after one bite of a meal. I will eat what my first impulse tells me I want. And, I am doing the hundred-push-up challenge. I did it a few years ago and got up to thirty push-ups (and started by not even being able to do a single good-form push-up from my feet!), but now I'm back to not being able to even do one all over again. So it's time to do it again."