sdi

τὸν δ’ αὖτε προσέειπε περίφρων Πηνελόπεια:
ξεῖν’, ἦ τοι μὲν ὄνειροι ἀμήχανοι ἀκριτόμυθοι
γίγνοντ’, οὐδέ τι πάντα τελείεται ἀνθρώποισι.
δοιαὶ γάρ τε πύλαι ἀμενηνῶν εἰσὶν ὀνείρων:
αἱ μὲν γὰρ κεράεσσι τετεύχαται, αἱ δ’ ἐλέφαντι:
τῶν οἳ μέν κ’ ἔλθωσι διὰ πριστοῦ ἐλέφαντος,
οἵ ῥ’ ἐλεφαίρονται, ἔπε’ ἀκράαντα φέροντες:
οἱ δὲ διὰ ξεστῶν κεράων ἔλθωσι θύραζε,
οἵ ῥ’ ἔτυμα κραίνουσι, βροτῶν ὅτε κέν τις ἴδηται.
ἀλλ’ ἐμοὶ οὐκ ἐντεῦθεν ὀΐομαι αἰνὸν ὄνειρον
ἐλθέμεν: ἦ κ’ ἀσπαστὸν ἐμοὶ καὶ παιδὶ γένοιτο.

And then prudent Penelopeia said to him,
“Stranger, dreams are wayward and mysterious
things, and they don't all come true,
since they stray through not one gate, but two:
one made of horn and the other of ivory.
Those that come through the carved ivory
are wily and carry false messages,
but those that come out of the polished horn
come true whenever one might see them.
But I doubt my weird dream came from there;
oh, it would've been so welcome to me and my son...”

(Homer, Odyssey XIX 559–69, as translated—hopefully not too badly!—by yours truly. There's some cute alliteration in the original: elephantos “ivory” with elephairontai “wily,” and keraon “horn” with [etuma] krainousi “come [true].”)

Something in the air of late—may your dreams issue through the gate of horn...

I was following up on a reference I came across to Plutarch, a part of which reads, "therefore death is sometimes accompanied by pains, sleep always by pleasure."

Is it a common belief that sleep is free of pain? It is not my experience: some of the worst pain I have experienced has been in dreams; for example, of being shot by a firearm.

I dreamed that my wife and I were in an unfamiliar town and saw that they had a farmer's market going on. She loves those, and so we went over to browse. One of the stalls had a tray piled with soap-like bricks of aromatics. My wife grabbed a turquoise-colored one, smelled it, and said, "Mmm, ephun! Yes, please!" and bought it on the spot. I had never heard of the plant before, so I looked at a nearby sign, which simply said, "Turquoise: ephun, good for dreams." I picked one up and smelled it, but just like in the waking world, my sense of smell didn't work and I could smell nothing.

I woke up and wrote the dream down, just like I always do, and did a web search for "ephun," but found nothing. While meditating today, I had the brainwave to try searching for it in Greek ("ἴφυον"), and it turns out it's simply spike lavender, which is, indeed, good for dreams.

It's a pretty specialized word and I've not encountered it in my studies, so it seems my dream has taught me something. (This wouldn't be the first time, though it is the first time I can say with certainty that it wasn't something that I could plausibly have known but forgotten.)

I dreamed that I was a senior in high school and I showed up at some nearby after-school type of program, held I assume in the basement of a church or community center or something. When I got there, it turned out that I was much older than all the other kids, who were all seventh- or eighth-graders. "Oh, I'm sorry," the person running the program said, "while the program is meant for both junior-high and high-school, we only really have junior-high kids this year." "It's no problem," I said, "I'll stick around anyway; I brought my laptop and I'd only be reading at home, anyway, so the change of scenery is nice." I sat at a nearby table and started reading some book of mythology or other.

Now, one entire wall of the room was a great, big bookshelf, filled with all kinds of books. I overheard one of the other kids, who looked like she was of Pacific Islander extraction, complaining, "Why do people only print stupid European books? I don't care about knights or princesses, I want to hear about my people's history!" The other kids shrugged at her. I looked up at her and asked where her people were from. "Hawaii," she said. I said I knew just the book and asked the teacher if I could hook up my laptop to the projector they had on the ceiling, and a few minutes later I was reading a book about Pele to everyone, which I had borrowed from the Internet Archive, while I put the pictures up on the wall. After the story was over, we had an impromptu discussion about folklore and why it matters.

I asked everyone, "At what times do we affect the population?" The kids inclined to answering called out, "When we're born and when we die." "Good," I said, "but you missed a time: now, in this very moment, in an ongoing manner." I emphasized that without an ongoing existence between birth and death, there's nothing to connect the two, nothing making a count at any point in time meaningful. That meaning has to come from somewhere: maybe God sustains your existence, or maybe your community sustains your existence, or maybe your existence is self-sustaining, or something, but if there's no reason for you to exist, then who cares? What's the point?

"That something which provides meaning," I said, "is called folklore. And that's why you," I pointed to the Hawaiian girl, "want stories that provide meaning to you. These aren't dead stories, after all: you take them into you, and you grow them and change them within you, and eventually you'll give new versions of those stories out again with your own meaning. For some people, your ancestry is where you find that source. I don't care much about mine, but I find meaning in the old Greek myths. But where you find meaning doesn't matter: what matters is that you do, and that you share it."

After the discussion, the person organizing the program asked me to come back the next week and read another story.

When I woke up, I laughed to myself, "Oh, dream-me is so much more eloquent than I am!" The above is my best recollection of what I said, but of course it feels pale indeed compared to whatever I said in the dream.

A bit over a month ago, I had a strange dream.

I was walking through a forested campsite, the kind you see in state parks all over New York. It was getting on towards evening. As I walked past a picnic table, I noticed it had what appeared to be a typeset page torn from an encyclopedia on it. I picked it up, and read, Benevolent and malevolent beings come into existence in pairs, and so every benevolent spirit has it's matching malevolent spirit, and vice versa. If one finds oneself so afflicted by a malevolent spirit, if one reaches out to its matching benevolent spirit, the two will recombine and cease to be. Suddenly, night fell, and I heard a howl. I started running, and sure enough I was soon being chased by a wolflike creature: I couldn't see it, but I could hear its heavy paws on the dirt, feel its hot breath on my back. Thinking of the page, I mentally called out to the wolf's mirror-being and poof!—the wolf disappeared and I awoke.

Now, to be clear, the encyclopedia entry is just science fiction: spirits don't appear and disappear like sentient particles and anti-particles. (At least, I'm pretty sure they don't: it fits with no metaphysics of which I'm aware, and anyway my divinations on the topic have all said it's just dream-logic.) But the basic idea of reaching out to a benevolent being to counter a malevolent one stuck with me. Different kinds of beings exist at different levels of consciousness: the states of love, hope, joy, and so on mix with the states of fear, uncertainty, doubt, and so on about as well as oil and water. If you can raise your consciousness, beings of lower states can't touch you.

"Raising one's state of consciousness" isn't exactly an easy thing to do, but as a mystic, it's something I've been practicing for nearly a decade now. I can't say how, exactly, it works, but I know what it feels like and it's something I regularly practice during prayer. (If I'm honest, I'm certain my deity's doing most of the work, pulling me up much like I hoist my daughter onto my shoulders. Even so, it's an exhausting state to maintain for long!)

Anyway, I wrote this all down in my diary, figured it was interesting if abstract, and filed it away. I didn't think I'd ever have occasion to give it a try—but so I did!

Last night, I got up in the middle of the night last night to go to the bathroom, and when I came back into the bedroom, I had a feeling of something terrible watching me from the closet. The door was open, which was a little odd since I keep it closed, so I went over to close the door and I felt something of a horrible malice leering out at me from the darkness. I could almost see hungry eyes peering at me, long limbs hunched as if ready to pounce. I closed the door—this took some effort as my every reaction was to "get away"—and got back into bed. It wasn't long before I felt the malevolent energy stalking over to the bed from the closet.

I remembered the dream I had, and the theorizing I had done around it, so I immediately began to pray and trying to raise my mental state to where it is when I meet my deity. This got quite a response: my deity said, Hang on, and waves of rage poured from the whatever-it-was, and I felt—literally felt, with my physical senses and not my spiritual ones—a violent and bitter tempest rage around me, but I felt safe and serene in the eye of the storm. It took effort to keep my mind focused on love and not fear—I'm naturally a very fearful person—but I held on to the mental state as best I could. After a minute or two, the wind subsided and the rage stalked away. As it did, I heard my deity say, Good. Remember that trick, and I drifted back to sleep.

What's further interesting is that this whole thing was presaged in my daily geomantic reading:

Notice the Rubeus (malice) in the eighth (spirits) and eleventh (benefactors), crossed with Acquisitio (plenty) in the ninth (dreams, specialized knowledge) and right witness (me). I've seen "crossings" like that a few times, and they usually seem to indicate a contest of sorts. I have a number of examples among my notes; someday when I have more time, I'll need to go back over them and see if I can pull a theory together about them.

Anyway, this was a very strange experience to me. Prior to this, every spirit I've encountered has either been at best quite friendly, or at worst playfully neutral. It just goes to show, there really are monsters out there, and yes, sometimes they creep out of closets.