From the archives of the dream journal

Just for a change of pace, and because Alex of Train Mama has been inspiring me with his own dreamtelling. I haven't really kept up with the journal for a while; thought i'd pull an old one or two and see if i had any different take on it now. this one's from about a year and a half ago.


a group. a confusion between irl group therapy and supervision and (spiritual/pagan group I was attending at the time). anyway it was a newly starting group, some people were familiar and some were new. and some of the people who were “familiar” weren’t irl. but ___ from group was there, and she was seriously getting on my nerves. but first of all so this particular group was meeting on this island that was just off the coast of the island of manhattan, you know, some heretofore unknown like roosevelt, but this was more interesting. at one point we were driving, me and [group leader] (i think) and ____ and some other girl,

and it was this lush green island with trees and little...ponds or something...for part of it, and ____ was going on and on about how she’d moved there and how much better it was than the city, and i exchanged a glance with [group leader], you don’t like grass and water, do you? and he said he was more into rocks and hills. and i said i liked all the green, but if i moved i’d be glad that nyc was just across the way, and ____ kind of sniffed. oh, and i asked her what the rents were like and she said they were *very* expensive (she had some other deal going on i guess), $600 an hour. and i said, per HOUR? and she nodded, annoyed. and i said, i’ve never heard of rents being by the hour, that would come to, what, like $36,000 a week? more? i was calculating. and she or he said something about it being a very in-demand vacation spot, which made more sense for the by-the-hour rather than by-the-month bit, but i was still incredulous. there was a lot of that, with ____, the arguing.

later, at some other point in the dream, we were being shown to the “room” in which we were to meet, at least part of the time, and it was kind of cool and wonderful, if a bit daunting, here we were in this kind of deserty landscape with big spectacular (pink i think, “painted desert” colors) rock cliffs and little grottos or whatever carved in, caves, rooms, anyway that was where we were, and i think in this bit there were flashes of the madeline l’engle book i’d reread recently, set in some kind of mythical noah’s ark day, so semi-biblical but with mythological creatures and hints of magic,

anyway there was a bit about nephilim at one point, with the wings, although i think we were just mostly studying about them. so at this point we were gathered and waiting for the rest of the group, which turned out to be quite big, we (me and this other girl) counted to be at least nineteen, not counting the people who weren’t here that week. and we were talking about judeopaganism, which was apparently more or less the point of this group. but at one point ____ and i seemed to be seriously in competition for this other girl’s attention. like, the girl was asking us about tarot, and ____ was showing her her deck but she said, oh, don’t pay attention to the numbers, the important thing is (whatever it was) , some kind of kabbalistic thing. and i was all, well, the way *i* do it, there’s no way not to...

____'s implication was that she was doing it the jewish magic way which was of course the *better* way, and i was arguing that tarot was derived from european traditions, certainly not just kabbalah, you could have a kabbalic deck but in this case it made sense to use the more wiccan approach--but then i realized i didn’t recognize ____’s deck and i was sort of admiring it. but so there was serious competition there.

finally the girl asked ___ specifically if there was a gay and lesbian (wiccan? magic? plain old group?) group that she knew of and ____ nodded with a little smile, but didn’t say more than that before i jumped in with, oh, i go to one on wednesday. and i also volunteered that i belonged to a judeopagan mailing list, and was volunteering the url and talking about how scholarly it was, and at some point in this ___ got fed up and spun away, kind of pirouetting off by herself somewhere in the distance. and i was glad. and so then it was mostly me talking to this other girl, and i don’t know if it was a sexual attraction or not, at first it seemed so but then it was more like the girl was younger and eager/naive about all this new knowledge and i was getting to be the kind of “senior” person. but also i liked her a lot more than ___, she was a lot easier to take.

then we were talking about the study materials, there was a packet of some sort (some biblical i guess, some other? magical i guess) and i was trying to sort it all out, and at one point ___ was back and we were arguing (again) about the proper way to interpret some old testament passage, even though i was aware i was probably very much at a disadvantage here since ___ knew hebrew and had actually studied judaism.

and at some other point we were being shown the room, or climbing to get to it in a way, it was lovely but the climbing was tricky at a couple of points. there was also something about keeping it relatively secret, the whole thing, or at least that room--that is the intimation of oppressive forces and having to close and lock up the room before a certain point. the dream ended and i woke up as we were counting all the various participants (nineteen was a large group, i commented) and we were gathering in a circle, preparing for something or other, to get started i guess. intimations of sunset. pink. lots of *learning,* and connecting with groups, and new people as well as familiar ones, and magic, (coming into power? apprenticeship?) and the excitement of it all...