I had wanted to spend this evening’s blog post talking about the end of the beginner’s class and my take on it. But, I was tired after the last chat lesson because last week was the first week of school in my neck of the woods and it is tradition for teachers like myself to spend the first weekend of the school year sleeping in a desperate attempt to catch up on rest before the semester gets into full swing. So as the sun started to set in the west, I took advantage of the soothing shift in the light and let it lull me to sleep for a quick nap.
My sleep is never dreamless, but often I do not hang onto the images upon waking. They dissipated like so much fog when I open my eyes and leave me with only a vague notion of what transpired. But every now and then, a dream sticks with me long after waking. It’s most common with night-time dreams, but has happened in day-time naps as well. It happened tonight. I woke up with clear memories of what I had seen and with a sense of utter confusion over why I would be dreaming of this again.
This one wasn’t nearly as dramatic but it still had a lot in common with the other dream. Just like before she was in cat form and sitting on top of me, and once again was responding to me being in need of protection—though this time it was more an issue about trusting her to protect me from something which might or might not happen than an actual thing I needed protecting from.
Another dream about Bast…what is going on here? One was strange enough, but to visit this topic again…and this time there wasn’t even anything to provoke it.
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The setting was as close to my waking life as dreams ever are and was fairly mundane, the lead up to the main events of the dream even including me buying a gallon of milk at Wal-mart (which is a thrice-weekly ritual for me in real life, as I drink a lot of milk). At one point, I found myself “on the net”. I got the sense that I was virtually “chatting” with other members of the House, but we could see each-other physically in the room. I wasn’t really participating, but rather just watching and listening to the others, feeling a bit like I was in over my head from a theological knowledge stand-point.
There was a debate, which was edging on an argument, about ritual safety and the need to discover vs. the need to protect the ones discovering. I remember someone saying that the *thing* in question, which they were all up in arms about, “should work” and someone else retorting that it wasn’t guaranteed to, and that it was extremely dangerous, and not entirely necessary, and therefore shouldn’t be done by anyone. This *thing* they were talking about involved a metal cylinder with a carved edge. I remember being curious about it but not wanting to ask any questions.
Suddenly, I found that I was away from the others and the cylinder they had been talking about surrounded me like a barrier. I was sitting (cross-legged) on something in the center of it. Though, whatever I was sitting on wasn’t connected to the metal, and the cylinder itself only came up part way—higher than my waist but lower than my chest—and I could still see the room beyond, which had transformed into some kind of garage/workshop. Bast was sitting in my lap (in cat form, as she was last time I dreamed of her) and she leaned against my chest. I was clutching her pretty tightly because I had the sense that the carved edge of the cylinder held fuel of some sort and was going to be lit on fire. I remember being concerned that I wasn’t small enough to keep myself far enough from all the edges at once and was worried that I wouldn’t be able to avoid being burned by the heat radiating off the flames. I also knew that once the flames were lit, it would be impossible to get out without getting seriously injured.
I remember saying “Bast, are you sure?”
She didn’t reply but just watched me calmly. Not purring or doing other cat like things—just watching me in a way that I’m sure was supposed to be reassuring, but wasn’t. Eventually it was obvious I needed a firmer answer than what she was giving. There is the foundation, she imparted without speaking.
Then the dream abruptly moved on to something else entirely with no ongoing mention of what had just happened and I woke up partly from the jarring shift back to the mundane atmosphere of the dream before she had appeared.
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Allow me to stress again: I have never had contact with Bast before all of this started. I have never sought her out, nor shown anything but a passing interest in her—not even early on in my Kemetic explorations when she was one of the only Netjer whose image I was familiar with. I don’t even own any cats. If I really stretch my mind, I can recall a stray cat that used to walk me to and from school when I was a child, but it’s most likely that it was just looking to be petted and/or fed. That’s it. So when I woke up from this latest dream, all I could think was that this was ridiculous. Why would I be dreaming of Bast? I had no connection to her.
I’ve been on enough pagan boards to know that seemingly everyone wants to be in the company of Bast, to the point that it’s somewhat cliché—kind of like she’s the default Netjer for every animal loving 101Wiccan who needs to justify their cat-hoarding. I had seen her name abused so many times in that context, that whenever I see someone on the general pagan boards mention her at all, my gut reaction is always *sigh* another one of them.
Back when Djehuty was showing me why the RPD is important and necessary, Bast was even on my list of Netjeru that I didn’t know how I’d deal with. Yet…here she is, saying this thing to me like I should know what it means: There is the foundation. I asked again, what foundation? What do you mean?
I opened up my notebook to jot down details of the dream before I forgot it and happened upon a single, unattributed phrase.
You can find the “phrases” throughout my recordings—small snippets of words that make no sense to what I am currently doing when they pop into my head and have a feeling around them that they are “voices not mine”. Most of them are attributed to specific Names already, but there is an odd one here or there where I did not recognize the accompanying energy and wasn’t able to guess at who had whispered it into my consciousness.
What astonished me was how, when I read it back to myself, the energy of the phrase seemed to feel remarkably like the energy around her voice:
“I have stood before you and uttered your name in that moment of darkness which almost claimed you forever.”
Did you? There is no answer.
I wrote that phrase long before my ER visit, but time doesn’t mean to them what it means to us. Just less than a week to the day from my ER visit, I am keenly aware that something inside of me broke that night, something that had broken before—and this time there was no attempt to fix it. Something was added to replace it. Something fundamental was changed. And yet that change is subtle. So subtle, that when I look around my internal landscape I can’t see the difference. Like someone has worked in the walls of my soul and done such a thorough job replacing the drywall and covering up the hole that all I can find for evidence that it even happened is a slight, impossible-to-pin-point whiff of fresh paint.
That line of thinking stops me cold. Impossible. What is wrong with me, considering something like that?
I am clearly going insane.
That is what’s wrong with me.
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