Discovering the Anatomy of My Soul

I walked into work to find that my coworker had been kind enough to get my mail for me from the main building. It’s a long hike from the small, stuffy rooms above the auto shop to the overly air-conditioned and cavernous main lobby of the school, and I hate making the trek. I put my things away in the locked drawer, so as not to tempt my students, and turned to my stack of mail to sort out the inevitable junk.

Yes, junk mail. We get a ridiculous number of catalogs as teachers—often for subjects we don’t even teach—along with the occasional flyer from a local business that hasn’t yet figured out that teachers don’t have the sort of money they’re looking for. Normally, I toss all of it out with barely a glance. But this morning there was only two pieces of junk and I couldn’t help but notice them: one was a medical catalog for anatomy models like the ones you see in doctor’s offices and the other was a local spa advertisement with a big picture of a lotus on it.

This is why omens can drive someone crazy—they are subtle, but just noticeable enough to impinge on your normal reality even in moments when you least expect them to appear. It would have meant nothing if not for an earlier hint, but in the context of my current situation, it was unmistakable. But to understand why, you need some background.

I have always associated the image of the lotus with “spiritual things” especially with matters concerning the soul. (I think that’s mainly UPG— and if it is sourced somewhere, I do not recall the source.) To find the image of a lotus next to images of human anatomy is telling, because I have been inadvertently poking at the cross-section of those two things, when pestering Bast— asking insistently what she did to me that night after I went to the ER and why she keeps going on about this mysterious “foundation” thing.

Knowing I am still obsessed with double confirmations, she didn’t give me long to contemplate the omen. She spoke softly to me in my mind, ignoring the students starting to file into the room.

If you want to understand what I have changed, you will first need to understand the anatomy of your soul, Bast said, watching from behind me with steady, unblinking eyes.

I realize now that She was the one who prodded me to pose the question about souls to the Nisut (AUS) during the final beginners chat. Though I didn’t recognize the prodding at the time—the question just popped into my head out of the blue—I did recognize that the answer I got was significant. I correctly identified it as a puzzle piece even though I had not been able to identify the puzzle it went to. Now I knew in no uncertain terms.

I played with the concept all day in idle moments, scribbling on a small notepad during my prep period and contemplating the nature of souls over my lunch. When I got home, I started the process of checking terms in the indexes of the various Egyptology books I own and gathering snippets here and there. I hopped online and looked through the UPG of countless Kemetics in their blogs and their forum posts.

I was frustrated by the apparent lack of consensus: academic sources didn’t match with people’s UPG and neither matched exactly with what Hemet (AUS) had told me during the chat. In fact, after a good while searching under different terms, I came across an earlier post in the Ask the Nisut (AUS) forum in which she seemed to directly contradict part of what she had just told me! However, I soon discovered that things are more cohesive underneath then they appear on the surface.

I keep forgetting that Kemetic thought is inherently polyvalent and that opposite truths can co-exist in reality at times. It was when I remembered the importance of duality, and the nature of things to be balanced through duality, that I realized the comprehensive picture I was looking for was hidden not in the pieces but in the connections between them. The answer was not in the dissecting, but in the process of reassembling. I got a sudden feeling that, if I could only draw all of what I knew—all the contradicting seemingly unrelated pieces of it— into a single image, I would be able to learn what I needed to from that image.

Eventually, I managed to create one which, once I had fitted it together properly, proved to be quite wide of scope indeed. I realized immediately that it would take several posts to describe and explain the thing (along with a few hours in Photoshop just to make it recognizable—my drawing skills leave something to be desired). Still, I’m willing to make the effort because putting it into words is a good exercise in making sure that I really understand what I have discovered and because if it might prove useful to even a few others than it ought to at least be available to the community at large.

Understand that this will be 98% my UPG and intuitions about things, and a lot of that remaining 2% is the UPG of others. I have few academic sources to back any of this up (read: almost none to back it up). But…yeah, that never stopped me ;)

 Next time I post it will be the first in a new series: An Etheric Anatomy of the Kemetic Soul.

So...Bast says I'm not crazy, just dense :P

It occurred to me to ask why it should matter even as I fished one of my tarot decks out of the bottom drawer of the altar. I tossed it on the table in my living room and asked again.  If candles are lit in a dark room and music is played and a draw cloth is laid down on the table—why should that matter? Why can it not be a bright room with only the noise of the fans and the AC and a clear workbench?

 I have come to believe that it likely doesn’t.

The gods are powerful enough to step in regardless of the circumstances, but the trappings of ritual provide a sense of security and containment of the unseen for we mortals—a way to reassure ourselves that we are still in control. It is also an invitation. Invitations can be given in other ways, but the preparation of a mystical space signals one’s intent most clearly. It leaves no doubt about one’s consent.

I finished reading Filan and Kaldera’s book on God Possession today. Now, I should mention, I was not reading it from an instructional standpoint: I have done aspecting and shadowing before, and I have some extremely hesitant and limited experience with channeling that I would be embarrassed to recount, but have never experienced a full on possession by anything, god or otherwise—and I am very grateful for that after having read the experiences of the authors. I read the book mostly out of curiosity and because I had seen a reference to it elsewhere, and it served to satiate my lingering curiosity about the phenomena. It is not a how-to manual anyway, though there was some practical advice, which I took from the text, for dealing with deity communication of all kinds regardless of how it is received:

In one chapter they advocated the combined use of omens, dreams, and divinations to confirm (or cast doubt on) messages one receives from the gods before acting on those messages. The general concept is to verify one form of communication with another—sort of like when one calls their phone company to confirm that they really were the ones who sent the e-mail asking for personal information. Double checking helps prevent the unseen equivalent of phishing scams. Which makes sense to me: these are gods we’re talking about here, it’s reasonable to expect them to be strong enough that they can at least confirm that the messages really are coming from them.

But in my case, doing that means giving them permission to answer a question I may or may not really want the answer to. So here I am, sitting in the living room with all the lights and fans on and staring at the tarot deck on the table, wondering if I’m brave enough to ask: Is it really you? Am I really hearing you? And if so, is this appearance just an FYI or do you expect me to act on it? Is there something you want me to do?

 I hesitate to give full permission for them to answer me—because I suspect they will. I ask other questions through my actions: just how badly do you want this? Will keeping the lights on be enough to make me not worth the bother? Will you raise your voice to talk over the fan? If I am impure in my womanly way, and not in white, and far away from the designated shrine, and sitting at a table I eat on and work at…will that be enough buffer of human reality to keep you from answering?

Some part of me fancies that I am playing the scientist (as my atheist family would expect me to when making such a serious decision) when I insist on being rational and controlling the variables: I will shuffle the cards in this particular way and deal them in this particular way which relies on randomness and numbers more than intuition. I have picked a new deck I feel little connection to, and I know very little about it, so I am unfamiliar with the symbolism and images and will have to rely solely on the accompanying book for interpretation and not my own intuition.

But I don’t want to seem unwilling, either—because I’m not. I just want to know if this is really Them or just craziness talking through me. I just want to know if I am really “keeping one foot always in the unseen” or if I am simply stepping into fantasy. A small part of me wants the answer to be that this is no fantasy, and it is that part of me which wants to find my old drawing cloth and turn down the lights and go back to my old ways, and light the candles, and purify as best I can.

I compromise. I will draw the cards on my cloth, but I will still draw the cards careful to keep myself separate from the reading, and there will be no music or mystical funny business, just slightly dimmed lights and a single candle—at the core, this will merely be me, fresh from a shower, sitting in my living room at a table, stating my intentions and humbly asking for confirmation or doubt as They see fit to give me either: Is this you; is this real?

I will return and record when I am done.

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It’s Them.

I am not imagining this; I am not making it up in my mind.

The yes/no mechanism of the spread showed three in favor, two not. The last one I turned over was the deciding card, because they apparently like suspense, and when I first saw it, I thought it was a “no” card because the image looked upside down (I was using reversals as “no” and uprights as “yes” since this deck doesn’t assign meanings to reversals), so I had a moment to go “whelp, that confirms it” and get a good feel for exactly how strongly I had been expecting that outcome and exactly how much more comfortable it was to think there is nothing to all of this but an overactive imagination. But on closer examination, my heart skipped a beat when I saw that it was indeed upright after all. It was just the style of the art that made it momentarily look reversed.

At first, I was still underwhelmed even if I was mildly surprised. After all three out of five isn’t an overwhelming or resounding “yes”— the chance was 50/50, hanging on that last card. It was the content of the cards that pushed me toward believing the general outcome was right. Reading the descriptions of them made me cry for how brutal and spot on they were—however, even that I could have talked myself out of given enough time. But there was one final, unmistakable sign, not only of Their hand in the reading, but also of Bast’s confirmed presence in this:

The center card representing both me as the seeker and the “core” of the present issue was the single card (and I know it’s the only one because, believe me, I checked) from the 72 card deck which happens to contain an image of a solitary house cat. A house cat that is suspiciously similar to the one in my dream. And who is standing beside a woman who reminds me vaguely of myself. On a card whose meaning perfectly fits what I’m facing.

I’ll admit that was a nice touch.

By my estimation, there was only a 1.4% chance of drawing that specific card in that specific place. Even the scientist in me can’t deny that’s one hell of a coincidence given the circumstances, especially since I had no control, not even subconscious control, over the fall of the cards…and that estimate still doesn’t even touch on the chances that the artist who made that particular deck (which I purchased several years ago as a collector’s piece without any intent to ever read with it) just happened to draw a housecat on one of the 72 cards when the meaning didn’t call for it and the cat isn’t mentioned in the artist’s description of the symbolism. I checked my other decks, and six of the other seven didn’t have any images of house cats at all much less on that specific card—hence I doubt the image is common place—and the one other deck I own that did have depictions of house cats didn’t have them on said card (the other deck with cats in it was, ironically, my first deck and the one that They helped me pick out back when I was a teen—the only one selected before I was Kemetic).

Touché.

I believe in you now.

Another Bast Dream...because, apparently, I am going insane...

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.

Encounter with the Devouring Lady...

It is not that I am incapable of trusting medical professionals, it’s that every time I go to see one, they inevitably do something to me which makes me not want to go back...

I am overweight. Morbidly so, if you believe the BMI charts. I’m six feet tall and well over three hundred pounds. Just large enough to have ankle problems and to not fit comfortably in airline seats. Believe me when I say that I am aware of this fact. Medical professionals seem to think that no one must have told me before that being overweight is bad or perhaps they think that hearing them tell me that I need to “get serious” about my weight is all I need to be transformed from a state of sickness to a state of health. And of course, everything is due to the weight: nothing else matter, no symptoms I report are seriously considered on their own merit, because “Well, you know…you’re really very overweight”. They give you that look like you’re not worth dealing with, as if you should know already that, as a fat person, you don’t have the right to be healthy, and that being forced to deal with you is far from the highlight of their day.

But he did deal with me, albeit reluctantly. I just wanted to know if my panic attacks might have a physical source before I sought psychological treatment for them. That’s it. And maybe wondered if I could get a sleep aid to help me break the insomnia.The nurse asked some questions, confirmed that what I was talking about sounded like possible panic attacks, and took my blood pressure. It was 150/100. Her eyes got wide and she looked at me with that fake reassuring smile people give small children to try and convince them that things are okay when they’re clearly not.

“I don’t know what those numbers mean,” I told her.

And it’s true: I didn’t. Because blood pressure had never been something I’d actually dealt with before—not anymore than to be told all my life that mine was “a bit high”.

“Well…” she took a deep breath and then sighed, “given the stress you’re under it’s probably not dangerous because blood pressure does go up with stress… but normally, a blood pressure, sustained, this high, is not good. It’s getting into stroke territory.”

I don’t know what a normal person hears when a nurse says that, but in my anxiety ridden brain, all I heard were the words “stroke territory”. After realizing I looked scared, she quickly excused herself from the room assuring me that the doctor would be in shortly. He spoke to me only for a few minutes before filling out slips for me to go get lab work and an EKG. He met me back in his tiny office and didn’t even bother to come all the way in or sit down with me.

 “So…lab work won’t be back for a few days, but you’re EKG is normal,” he said leaning against the counter.

“So I’m not going to die from this?”

“Well, not today,” he said, in a way that heavily implied to me, in my half-psychotic state, that he hadn’t put tomorrow out of the realm of possibility, “so I guess the question is, did you come to me because you just needed that reassurance or did you expect me to do something about all of this?”

“Well,” I stuttered, “I don’t know…what do you think?”

That is why we go to doctors isn’t it? I mean, tell me if I’m crazy, but is it not a normal expectation that the doctor will make that determination?

“I think you need to get serious about your weight,” he sighed with exasperation, “and stop making excuses for yourself. But if you’re spinning your wheels with this anxiety thing, and it sounds like you are, there are products that can help with that—if you’d be willing to try them.”

I nodded and he scribbled a prescription for Celexa. He said nothing about the drug or what it would do to me. He didn’t discuss side effects verses benefits. He didn’t even wait for me to read what it was before he started out of the room. I got the prescription filled on my way home, and, worried that I was the only one who seemed to care if I died or not, I also picked up a blood pressure monitor. At home, I tried to look up the information I had not been given by my doctor. I read all there was to read about Celexa and determined that it was an antidepressant that was also used to treat panic disorder. I was a bit concerned about the dire warnings listed telling me not to stop taking the drug suddenly—it’s a four week process to wean someone off of it.

But…I figured that the doctor did prescribe it. So he knew the risks of the drug and must have decided that they were minimal in my case and that having to wean off of it later was a cost worth the short term benefit. I felt a little bit uneasy, but I took it as directed.

Should have’s are dangerous because we use them to blame ourselves and others use them to blame us for things we cannot rightly carry blame for. Yes, by conventional wisdom I should have asked more questions. Yes, by my mother’s own warnings, I should have listened to my instinct. Yes, by sheer logic, I should have waited (as my doctor should have waited) for the lab results to come back first. But “should have” doesn’t always apply when you are not in a state of mental competency: and I was clearly not competent to make those decisions. I was scared and anxious and desperate. And the doctor is the one responsible for the “should haves” when his patient is not in a state of competence to do so herself.

I was fine for the first two hours— then everything went all to hell.

SSRIs (this category of drug) do not affect everyone the same way. Instead of a calming me down, it did the opposite and I quickly took the train to crazy town once it kicked in later that night. I noticed the tingling first—up and down my arms and sides-- the same sort of tingling you get from putting your tongue on a nine-volt battery. A normal, right thinking person would have simply chalked it up to a side effect of the medicine and made a note to call their doctor the next day. But in my paranoid, anxiety ridden brain, I jumped to blood pressure being the reason for any symptoms I felt and I convinced myself it was a sign of a stroke or heart attack beginning. After all, it was now after midnight, technically it was tomorrow, and he never said that I wouldn’t die tomorrow.

I found myself checking my blood pressure—it was lower than it had been at the doctor’s office, which was reassuring, so I tried to go back to bed. But moments later, the tingling was a slight nerve burn sensation, and it was impossible to sleep through, and I was up checking my blood pressure again. And I kept checking. Repeatedly. Because the numbers kept going up. Soon, it was higher than it had been at the doctor's office. I found a chart online which showed normal to high blood pressures and compared the numbers I was getting to the chart. Eventually, it hit the upper range of stage 2 hypertension. That’s as high as most of the charts online go. I surmised, that yes, indeed, I was now dying.

This led to a panicked call to a friend and a 2am emergency room visit, where an emergency doctor was openly frustrated with my daytime physician for not explaining things to me better. See, there are actually four stages, and stage 2, while not good for you and definitely the point at which you need to see a doctor and start making changes to diet and exercise, is not deadly in any way shape or form for an otherwise normal 28-year-old. And it would have to be one's average blood pressure to even warrant as much attention as I was giving it.

“It’s not good to have your blood pressure this high,” he told me, “but only in the long term. Because over time that will weaken your heart and yes, later in life, you could be at a risk for stroke. But you have years before that will happen, not days. You have plenty of time to make lifestyle changes. I recommend a low sodium diet, 20min of walking each day, and between those two things you’ll lose a few pounds and be fine and have no more problems with your blood pressure. Even just cutting out the sodium and caffeine will bring it down ten points or more.”

“So 167/107 won’t kill me?” I asked, glancing nervously at the monitor I was hooked to, wanting to make sure I was really okay.

He smiled, “Miss, there’s a woman in the room next to you whose blood pressure is currently 280/140. Your body is flexible. The blood pressure spikes you see in your numbers are moderate at best, they are concerning from a long term health stand point, but they aren’t dangerous. Get this anxiety thing under control first, then worry about your blood pressure. If you need to feel like you’re doing something, start cutting back on sodium and caffeine and you’ll see an improvement.”

Why can’t all doctors be like that? Why can’t they all inform instead of chastise? Why can’t they all educate instead of resorting to scare tactics?

There were other symptoms that I experienced while at the hospital, however, enough to convince him that I was having a negative reaction to the drug. His recommendation was to immediately stop taking the Celexa. He explained how the drug worked and further explained why I felt physical symptoms from my psychological anxiety in the first place—to paraphrase what he told me: basically, the brain only has so many resources to process all the complicated nerve signals of the body and when our brains are preoccupied with severe anxiety and stress, our ability to do so is hampered. Signals get crossed and symptoms are felt even when there is no cause for them. Focusing in on those symptoms causes more anxiety which in turn makes the symptoms worse. It’s a cycle of negative feedback. Celexa and other SSRIs are, in theory, supposed to help break that cycle. But having severe side effects only agitates things further and makes the drugs not worth the trouble.

“And no more checking your blood pressure,” he cautioned, “it’s just going to make you feel more anxious and that will only make it higher and so on. You’ll always end up working yourself into a worse state than you started in.”

I was relieved to finally have someone tell me what I most needed to hear: it’s psychological. Disconcerting and scary, but not physical and, ultimately, not life threatening. I stayed at my friends house that night because I was still too anxious to be left totally alone. As I lay in the dark of her living room, staring up at the ceiling where the LED charging light of her laptop made a frail halo of blue light, I suddenly realized that, in all the confusion, I had missed the Zep Tepi beginner’s class chat. I didn't worry about it, but I was annoyed. Then, that got me thinking: what I really needed was a medicine I couldn’t get in a doctor’s office.

Now that I had determined that there was no real physical danger, there was no need for a physical remedy. Meds were not the solution to my problem. This was grief; this was a wound of the mind and a wound of the soul. It wasn’t a long term, chemically based, anxiety disorder; it was a short term reaction to a specific event. All I had needed my doctor to do was rule out the possibility that it was more than that.

I sighed. What I needed to do was what I should have done instead of taking the anti-anxiety meds: I should have lit a candle and sat in shrine and asked Them for help. Because doctors can’t heal your soul. But gods can.

“So how do I fix this?” I asked Them softly, “How do I make this stop? I feel like I’ve lost myself. I feel hollow and wrong.”

And I did. I couldn’t tell if it was the medication or the anxiety, but I felt detached from my soul. I felt like I was trapped in my skin, unable to reach anything deeper inside of me. I felt like I was only my body, that I lived only in my flesh and that my inner world was somehow lost to me.

I tried to sleep, but my body was still racked by the side effects of the drugs and the eclectically pulses going up and down my arms kept my attention despite the fatigue I felt. Suddenly I was startled by a weight on my chest and a shadow blocked out the blue light against the ceiling. One of my friend’s three cats had come and curled up with me. He purred loudly as he settled in. It was a calming feeling and focusing on the purr instead of the tingling in my arms helped me doze off.

I don’t recall the dream in its entirety. But I remember still being in the living room at my friend’s house, sleeping in my dream as I slept in life with the cat on top of me. Except, in the dream, there was something between me and the cat: it was a rectangular object, balanced on my body, and the cat sat atop it. It was sometimes thin and sometimes thick. Sometimes light and airy, sometimes like stone. Sometimes flexible and sometimes stiff. It changed so frequently that I simply accepted all its properties as being true all at once. Eventually, the cat stood and looked down at me over the edge of it. A voice spoke from somewhere beyond what I could see.

“It lays the foundation of a house of Bast.”

Suddenly I felt something give and the plate was pushed into me, as if the weight of the cat had punched it though my skin into the hollow interior of my dream body. It startled me awake and I found the real cat still lying on top of me peacefully. When he saw that my eyes were open, he calmly licked my chin. I sat up and he jumped to the floor indignantly and watched me. I looked through my blankets, trying to find the “barrier” he had been sitting on, convinced it should be there somewhere since nothing could really go inside me. Then I realized that the barrier had been part of the dream as well.

“A house of Bast?” I asked aloud as I thought on it.

Why that? I had never had any contact with Bast before. As I pondered what it meant, I realized that the dream had left more behind than an odd phrase: I still felt the symptoms of the drug in my blood, but I felt it clearly in my body—my soul, my mind, were separate underneath it. I was myself again. My being was out of my flesh and back in head where it belonged, the two were still undoubtedly connected, but connected the way they were meant to be—in balance. The hollow “space” inside me as gone, filled again with the familiar essence of my other souls, and there was something warm and tight wrapped around that inner me, a barrier and pathway—connecting, yet keeping everything in its place where it belonged.

I thought on it for a while until the feeling of that difference faded and I couldn’t remember how it had felt to not be normal. My mouth was dry so I got up and flicked on the light so I could get a drink from the kitchen. When I came back into the room, I happened to glance at the entertainment center next to where I had been sleeping and noticed the little altar. My friend is a kind of spiritual pagan, and like me, she keeps spiritual things out in her environment. In this case, an object immortalizing a beloved feline that passed a few years ago, and on top of a box behind it, a statue of Bast.

I remembered it now. I had bought it for her in Las Vegas at the Luxor—before I became Kemetic—because I knew how much she loved her cats. The altar she had made with it was homage to her pets. Bast had pride of place as her personal touchstone for protecting her four-legged companions.

The reason for the dream suddenly made sense— I had been sleeping under an image of a Name and had prayed for help before going to sleep—but the dream itself… I had not known Bast as a healer, a protectress yes, but protection? From what? The drug perhaps? And then there was that phrase: foundation of a house of Bast…what did that mean?

I don’t claim to know. But I suppose it at least gives me something to research today while I wait for this drug to wear off.