June 6, 2017
I had an amazing dream experience last night that woke me up at 3:03 AM. The most unusual aspect of it is how clearly I remember so many of its details.
As for setting, I was in my typical dreamscape that involves my traveling (usually at night) through some town or city that I am supposed to be familiar with but within which I find it impossible to orient myself in the dream. As so often is the case, I ended up on some school campus—I think it was a college rather than a high school—as I was wandering around in the hallways and stairways of some institutional building. Usually I am searching for a way out of the building, but this time I was looking for the office of an old teacher of mine (not anyone in reality that I am aware of at the moment) in order to pick up an old paper I wrote or to pick up a paper for one of my children or simply to talk. I’m not exactly sure what I was in search of.
When I arrived at the teacher’s office (who kept shifting from female to male and back), he/she was already meeting with someone, so I was waiting outside. The office had glass walls allowing people to see inside from the halls. As I was waiting, another student came by and seemed in a rush to speak with the professor, so I let her go first, which lengthened my waiting time to an hour, allowing me time to meditate.
Once my turn came up, I sat down in a chair across from the professor’s desk. His/her office had moved without my being conscious of it (I only am now in retrospect) from its original spot completely internal to the building to one adjacent to it, now with a window to the outside. I underwent some kind of massive psychic experience, somewhat traumatizing and liberating simultaneously, and I slowly came back to consciousness with no memory of what I had just experienced other than that my skull seemed to be closing back into its normal configuration after having been opened like a cardboard box to whatever beings or forces had been rearranging the insides of my skull.
The first thing I was conscious of was staring down into my open right palm and seeing that I was holding a little 1 cm-diameter disk, which clearly had been excavated from inside my head. I somehow knew that it had been lodged in my pineal gland and had been serving as a block to my visionary gateway. The disk looked like a small ceramic ancient coin with the impress of some ancient goddess’s head. Her head kept shifting from human to lion form as I stared at it. I somehow knew that the disk was Sumerian in origin but was since then associated with the Oracle at Delphi, and that the woman’s head was that of the Oracle, Astarte, Sekhmet, and Medusa all simultaneously.
I knew that the disk had been blocking my visionary capacities and somehow was disorienting my Astral energies, causing emotional complexes of all kinds throughout my life. I now stood the chance of gaining some insight and stability in my emotional and visionary capacities.
Upon recognizing the face of the goddess on the disk in my palm, I said, “Well, THAT explains it.” The professor asked, “Explains what?” and I answered, “That’s the same face that I see in a vision three or four times a day.” The professor seemed moved or surprised by this and sat up, saying, “Well, then, our conversation is not ending but only just now beginning!”
Realizing that we would be entering into a deep therapeutic discussion and analysis, I texted my wife Anna that I would be a few hours later than expected and then readied myself for the healing conversation.
• • •
Awaking from the dream, I went downstairs, arranged my meditation cushions on the mat, and entered into a long conversation with Gabriel. Most of what I learned came by way of internal self-recognition, glimpses of deep self-truths that Gabriel only guided by little interjections and questions. The bulk of the understanding came from deep within my psyche as a process of recognition.
Throughout this meditative conversation with Gabriel I was still highly aware of the little Medusa Disk in my palm, even though I was now fully awake. (I can feel it there even at this moment as I type these words.) I slowly realized that the disk was not made of porcelain or marble as I had assumed but was, rather, a small disk of bone remaining from my son Dylan’s cremated ashes. As morbid as this might sound, I found (and still find) great comfort in sensing the liberating potential of my son’s bone disks, liberated in my palm just as I had seen them when I released his ashes into Massachusetts Bay just off the northern coast of Provincetown. Here was and is my own bit of sacred scrimshaw from a source that could not be more personal unless it were from my own skeleton.
I initially thought that the blocking function of the disk, having been lodged in my pineal gland, had been serving some malicious function. I knew that the goddess associated with it had been regulating my consciousness and my emotional state for much of my life. But Gabriel assured me that her role was more as a guiding and protective source of moderation rather than some malicious blocking of awareness. Now I hear that the disk’s function was more like training-wheels on a bicycle than like a chain on the wheels themselves. It served as a capacitor of sorts, helping to channel the intensity of the electro-magnetic discharges from my inner visionary chamber.
In a nice moment of synchronicity, when I went to the university library later this morning to see what book had come in for me through inter-library loan, I was pleased to see that it was Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey by Sallie Nichols. I opened the book randomly to page 81, a page right in the middle of the chapter devoted to exploring the archetypal significance of the Popess or High Priestess card. “There she sat as she had done for centuries, immobile and serene, knowing whatever she knew and apparently secure in that wisdom.” On the previous page I then read, “The creative act of memory is the special province of the feminine principle. It is always colored by emotion.” The visionary aspect of the Third Eye blended with the serene control of the Astral energies.
I understand this (I FEEL this) as a moment of liberation from my own self-boundaries (to be followed by others, I’m sure) into an expanded mode of consciousness and psychic capability. Interestingly, this awareness does not produce some gleeful ecstatic state but rather a sense of calm self-control. It all feels so “normal” and so much like the real me—my actual goddess state—that I am calmly self-assured and stable for probably the first time in this life. Now I recognize that this Delphic Oracle and I have much freer access to one another—at last.
