Brought Into the Fold

I started folding some seven years ago after a strange and potent dream. It was 2006, some seven months before my mother’s diagnosis, when I first dreamed of paper birds. I dreamed of my fingers gliding over creases and angles of white and red coming together slowly in a figure that was more than the sum of its parts. I dreamed that the paper bird suddenly came alive and flew out of my hands, delicate and trembling with the joy of living.

Returning to A Space to Exist

After the fact, I wasn’t even sure what had happened, but I woke up with a sense that the unremembered night had been important. It was the first real snow of the year and if I were being cynical, I might think it was the cold which woke me before my alarm (despite my perpetual state of sleep deprivation). I wasn’t being cynical, though, so I thought first of my Father’s connection to the winter storm--and that’s the true miracle of the thing: that my mind leapt to the unseen explanation.

Some Philosophy to Distract Myself from a Nightmare

My brain’s newest variety of hell is creating vivid dream worlds where my mother still lives but my other family members are dying instead. This time it was my younger brother. There is fear surrounding that. Fear so thick I can taste it….

My little brother was born with a freakish blood condition where, every once in a while, his white blood cells randomly decide that his platelets are enemy bodies. There is no cure, but thankfully, the body’s immune system usually snaps out of its deadly delusion given enough time and proper care in a hospital ward. Still, it took a month for his first episode to end. He was a little boy then, so little he barely remembers it… but I remember.

I remember spending a lot of time in that hospital waiting for him to get better. And I remember the adult in his ward with the same condition who didn’t get to go home at the end of that month because sometimes, the body doesn’t just snap out of it. He has only ever had the one episode, but there is no way to know if or when he might have another one.

The Tower Falls (aka "why I've been absent")

She tried several dreams earlier in the week, when she first sensed what was happening, but I didn’t catch on to the fact that it was her. This time she appeared as herself. She started with the house as a metaphor. It wasn’t a house we had ever owned in real life, but rather, it was the dream house we’d built from bits and clips of shows on HGTV. A bedroom like that, a living room like this, a double oven, beautiful craftsmen woodwork, a Victorian façade… we were arguing over the thermostat.

The World Where She And I Can Both Live

The wheel turns and the seasons change again. The trees are bare and the moon clatters through the branches to pour cool light into the living room. I watch the frozen mist roll in from the valleys beyond the town. Something in me shifts slightly.

----

I know when she is going to appear in my dreams because I feel her, see her, remember her just before I go to sleep. I fear that because she is always dying in my dreams. But this time she is not dying. 

My Feet Are Small in His Footsteps

I got to play the part of a trickster god. The dreamscape was a strange and warped mythology, filled with characters from my life, people who represented things far bigger than themselves.  My role was both eerily familiar and yet crucially different from the one I play in my regular life…

Nightmares and Illusions

It is always the same dream. The circumstances change and set up changes, but the events never do. Over and over. It used to be traumatic, but now I just roll over with a sigh and go back to sleep.

In the dream, she is alive again, but still ill. Deathly ill. I desperately try to get a hold of my brother—to tell him that she’s back and that she’s still dying and that he needs to come and be there.  She never speaks, and she always does the kinds of things she did before she died…

She is confined to a wheel chair or bed. If she has her mobility, she uses it to stumble endlessly around a kitchen island claiming that she just needs to walk (as if she could walk off the cancer—I hated watching her do that, watching her struggle). She does not understand that she is dying. She can’t breathe. Sometimes, my brain likes to mix it up and make it her heart which is failing instead of her lungs, but the end result is always the same: the wide eyes…the fear…that haunting look of surprise and terror…

 She was not ready to go. I don’t care what she said or what anyone else said about what happened that night. I was the one who was there when it started. Death surprised her. She was terrified and all I did was tell her it was going to be okay when I knew damn well that it wasn’t. Her death was not peaceful and no matter how many people tell me it was “for the best”, in my dreams the horrible truth is ever present and gruesomely clear.

This time, I called 911.

That was new. Usually, I just stand there and watch like I did when it happened. Or at most, try to get my brother to come. This time, he was already there in the dream, using a defibrillator to try and restart the heart that was failing in her chest. Her eyes were wide like my last memory of her and I couldn’t take it anymore. I called 911.

The operator answered and with a small pause said, “My records show that the last time you called this number it was because your mother had died, is that correct?”

“Yes,” I said, “She’s alive again, but she’s having a heart attack.”

“That’s to be expected, ma’am. It’s probably for the best. This is much better than respiratory failure.”

I look over where she is arching off the bed, her eyes bulging. It doesn’t look better to me. But I can’t think of anything to say and the operator hangs up. My brother kept trying to save her.

I wake once again left with the image of her eyes showing pain and fear….

I don’t dwell on it for more than a few seconds. I have a life to live—I can’t spend it remembering her eyes.

It isn’t on my mind as I drift through my day. But later I am driving to Wal-mart and suddenly realize I am thinking casually about how different the world is without her, and yet, how nothing seems to have changed.  I don’t push the thought away, and a moment later my mind has continued the train of thought and arrived at musing about how I now know exactly which songs on my mp3 player will make me cry with the memory of her because they are the ones I never play. I am surprised at the next revelation: I could use those songs to make myself cry. I now have the strange ability to feel deep, genuine pain whenever I want to. It’s a strange thought to have, I realize, and I let it pass, returning to the normal order of my day.

I spend the evening practicing card illusions and wondering at my choice of activity. Shouldn’t I be beading? Writing? Meditating? Anything other than practicing silly card tricks… I am suddenly seized by guilt. I haven’t made any offerings to Netjer or Akhu in a while. I haven’t been in the shrine room formally in days due to purity, but I don’t have that limitation anymore. I should go. Surely I am shirking my duties to the Names and to the faith. I even missed the Dua on Wednesday because I was practicing illusions and lost track of time.

It was not required of you to go, says a small still voice from beyond my conscious mind.

 But I should have gone. Failing that, I should have gone to the fellowship chat the next night. There is no answer from the quiet part of me which is watching the cards tumble deftly through my hands. But I cannot leave it alone. I am ignoring terrifying dreams about my mother, I think, and I am the only one still honoring her so late in the wake of her death. Shouldn’t I make an offering at the Akhu altar tonight? Shouldn’t I be focusing on her?

You will attend the Dua on Sunday and honor her there.

 There is no arguing with that: I fully intend to make sure I am at that gathering. As well as the other gatherings scheduled for the weekend. I start for the second time on a flourish I am having trouble with. I am engaged in the task, but I still feel guilty. I still feel like I’m just goofing off. Shouldn’t I be doing something productive?

This is productive, the voice reminds me, it is part of our work. The answers we seek lie within. Now focus. 

I do.

Under a Magician's Spell

He was middle-aged, and yet, youthfully handsome. Strangely familiar, and yet, oddly compelling. Dressed in a suit of black and red, with a white shirt on under his coat, his white cuffs gleaming from the stage. He had a mysterious and slightly menacing presence about him that definitely fit his profession. I had seen this magician’s show once before, earlier in the dream, and I knew there was a part where audience members were selected to be hypnotized onstage before being impossibly “teleported” into various boxes on the other end of the stage. We were at that part. I remember looking around and realizing I was the only person sitting in my section--the earlier show had been a full house. I moved closer to the others to be less noticeable, worried that I might be selected if I stood out too much in such a small audience.

“No, not me,” I thought, “surely anyone skilled in hypnosis would recognize that I am that kind of person that cannot be hypnotized.”

I avoided making eye contact with him, looking down and to the side toward the other audience members, because I was certain that would show him how defiant and unhypnotizable I was. But then I saw the people in front of me turn around and look back at me when he pointed to his last selection. Damn. He picked me anyway.

I stood and went because I didn’t really want the attention and awkwardness of saying no.  As he stood before me I worried about what would happen. I was prepared to have to fake it since I was certain I wouldn’t be able to go under even if I tried to, and because he seemed nice and I didn’t want him to be embarrassed. He looked me over and smiled in a way that gave me the feeling that he must have seen something he liked. He told me (and the audience) that I was a sensitive, and an excellent candidate for hypnosis—I got the sense that he had changed his plans merely because of that fact. He said that mine would be a deeper trance than normal and that he would be able to show things that would otherwise not be possible.

 He put his hands on the sides of my head, and though he covered my ears, my hearing was sharp and crystal clear as I heard him say the words that made me feel disconnected from myself. (I also remember how it felt—it was the same rush of heat and energy through my neck, the same burning, that I felt during my “panic attack”, and it was accompanied by the same sense of losing control, but somehow not as scary as usual). I felt my awareness of my body go fuzzy and sink low until there was a dull, heavy feeling about it as if every part of me had simultaneously “gone to sleep” as a foot might when sitting in one position for too long. However, I was still curiously aware of where all of my body parts were, even though I couldn’t feel them and was completely blind— in total darkness with only a vague notion of what was going on around me. I could still hear him clearly—in fact, very clearly, speaking about what he would do with me.

He started with the simple. I could feel him raise one of my arms as a demonstration to the audience, but then I stopped working to pay attention to my arms when I was satisfied he wasn’t doing anything dangerous with them. I got the sense that there was a lot more going on than I thought there was. But it didn't matter, because I was more interested in his presence in my mind. He was hypnotizing. More than his words were, he was. I could sense his eyes and could almost see them. I got the feeling that he was with me inside my head. I was content with that, really, but then I heard him mention a tight rope and my attention came sharply back to what he was having me do. I am terrified of heights and have terrible balance. He was quick to reassure when he felt me reach for control of my legs.

 “We won’t use a very high one, she’s already done a good deal in this trance. I would not want her to fall out of it into a more literal fall.”

That struck me as a humble thing to say to an audience and a sign of a very responsible magician, even though in some part of me I knew that I had no way to know that he was telling the truth… and that he was saying it mostly to keep me from fighting the trance and breaking out of it.

 I wasn’t aware of anything else that happened while I was in the trance. There may have been a tightrope walk, there may not have been. Time seemed to run fast and skip ahead; either that or I had no concept of time at all. The next thing I was aware of, outside the darkness, was the aftermath when I was suddenly released from the trance. I remember waking up on stage into brightness and confusing amounts of noise from the audience. I was standing in a different place then when I had gone under and holding a bowl of fruit. Then I was quickly shuttled back stage by his assistants where I found a note from him saying, in not so many words, that we should perform together and that at the very least, if I had questions I should stick around in the backstage area until after the show so he could answer them.

I waited for him. Excited about the prospects of being part of the show and full of questions to ask…but mostly just wanting to see him again, in fact, that was the main reason I was excited. I would have gladly volunteered to be part of a whole slew of performances so long as it meant having more contact with him. My consent was implicit in that and whether or not to say yes hardly seemed a matter worth considering. It almost felt like there was some relationship that had been established. I wanted to know more about it, and more about him.

But I never got that chance.

The dream slipped before the show ended and I found myself somewhere else doing something totally unrelated. I was in a fancy parking garage, looking for a place to park and fixing a cell phone cover. When I suddenly realized that something was different, that the proverbial rug had been pulled out from under me, my sense of disappointment was so strong it jolted me into lucidity. I realized the theater was now completely unreachable, and that the memories of what had happened there were more important than trying to find it again. Even against the normal sirens’ call of what can be done with total lucidity in a dream, I merely used it to wake myself up so I could write down the earlier part.

This was not a normal dream. For one thing, the memories of my dreams are not usually so distinct and clear upon waking. For another, the last part of it, where I became aware of going back into the normal dreamscape and got jolted into lucidity by the stark contrast, confirms that there was indeed something different about what I had experienced in the first part.

I’d say I don’t know what it means, but I’d be lying. As I’m writing this, knowing what questions I have been asking in divination lately, I start to wonder if that wasn’t part of the point: perhaps the show hasn’t ended yet. I might still be standing backstage. In any case, I have a suspicion of who that magician might be, and if I’m right…

..then at least I know where to go to ask my questions.

*eyes the smaller shrine in the shrine room, which is cloaked in a curtain of black and red and with white accents*

Dreams of my mother

I dreamed about her last night and a fairly painful and intensely personal conversation with her followed at my waking. Something is already different—I could feel it in her response. It’s like she’s just now realized she needs to address these things with me and wants to before she finishes her journey. I can’t decide if keeping it from her in her final days, if pretending that nothing was wrong between us, was a merciful decision or a cruel one. I can’t decide if I did that on her behalf or on mine. I wanted to retroactively fix the relationship we’d had all my life by simply deciding it no longer mattered.

Her memorial is today, a few hours from now, and this is not how I intended to go to it—thinking from this place in my mind. I’m dressed up in newly purchased clothes. Because this has been billed as “a celebration of life” and the only dressy clothes I had already were black and that seemed inappropriate to the spirit of this gathering. Blue and white. That’s what I will attend in. The clothes are a bit too small for me (small town shopping is a bitch if you’re a 4x like I am) and I have to wear a slimmer underneath to look right in them. I put them on a few hours before so I could hopefully stretch them out a bit and assure myself that they won’t break in the middle of the event.

It’s all so mundane and so catered to what other people want and think. I’m always so worried about whether or not I’m doing everything “right”. Did I dress right? Did I send invitations to everyone I was supposed to? Did I pick the right colors for the flowers? Is my necklace too flashy? Should I wear a necklace at all or go without jewelry?

If I had my way I’d grieve alone at the base of the shrine, just crying and wishing I understood things better. No other people required.

Was I supposed to do that already? Is this supposed to be closure? For who? Me or them?

For better or for worse, it was my mother who taught me to ask these questions. I have spent my life trying to please her, alternately getting angry at her or myself when I couldn’t. She tried so hard to make me what she wanted me to be and I’m just not that. But I managed to fool her near the end…

Is that why I’m having these dreams? Did she find out and now she’s disappointed again? In me or in herself?

I went to a family event at my best friend’s house yesterday. I watched her and her mother as they tried to be calm with each other for the day and not argue. It lasted for most of the time but eventually they bickered a bit because they just can’t help driving each other crazy. Yet…it’s undeniable that they love each other deeply.

So…it’s okay mom. It’s okay that we didn’t always get along. It’s okay that we’re not carbon copies of each other. It’s okay that we had the relationship we did. And we’ll figure out how to go on from here together. I don’t know if you can sense the injuries I limp along with, the damage inside me, but if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that the flaws and baggage we carry are what make us human. You didn’t do anything to me that every mother hasn’t done to her child. I’m strong enough to see this through.

Love you always.