The ways we protect our hearts
The ways we protect our hearts. “He took certain liberties to protect his heart.” Only in costumes, only comedies, only short plays. But then he said we could wear whatever we wanted to wear on stage, and write our own lines, and as he told us his new plan for our show, his whole face lit up and I thought I saw God in the room.
Answer all your self questions or else they float there like your lost bodies
The younger version of me could not be pulled through the dimension. Her skeletal frame was frozen and split and hanging from a branch. Her consciousness could not translate. I was sad but I accepted it. What else could I do? Answer the question, they say. Answer all your self questions or else they float there like your lost bodies. The girl drops from the tree as an egg 🥚. I bend in between the worlds to pick myself up. The egg is glowing. Obviously I’m fertile. A man is speaking on a PA system. I only hear the words … “Come be …. Your future is bright.”
A still-frame from a dream
I’m out in the backyard of a strange home that is my home. The sky is dim, like a French noir film. There is a little girl bathing in a kiddie pool. She is not mine, but she is an aspect of me — the young, feminine psyche baptizing herself in the shallow end of her subconscious. I look up and see an inflatable pool toy in the shape of a butterfly floating across the sky. It is colorful and striking against the grey light. The butterfly is both the spirit and the psyche and it belongs to me. It has broken free and glides across the forefront of my mind and thoughts. I reach for my phone to take a picture. I knew it would make a beautiful picture.
Claudia, The Growler
Three nights ago (02-08-2022), I felt embarrassed in a dream. The polar opposite of this dream experience:
Another version of me resurfaced from The Wild. She was on the news, and word had gotten around that she was me, and she was called Claudia, The Growler.
A Growler is someone who one day leaves behind their life and recedes into the wild to go crazy in peace. My mother had wanted to be a Growler too. (This is what I knew to be true in the dream).
Apparently, she had been in exile. I was embarrassed because now everyone knew that this Claudia existed, without ethos or etiquette. And that whoever I had become in the past 37 years would be replaced by this wild woman. Then I woke up.
I immediately thought of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the mother figure to all wild women. I went back into the book “Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype” and searched for solace and clarity. What I found was a manifesto and a newfound responsibility for my life and self:
The things that have been lost to women for centuries can be found again by following the shadows they cast. And make a candle to Guadalupe, for these lost and stolen treasures still cast shadows across our nightdreams and in our imaginal daydreams and in old, old stories, in poetry, and in any inspired moment. Women across the world—your mother, my mother, you and I, your sister, your friend, our daughters, all the tribes of women not yet met—we all dream what is lost, what next must rise from the unconscious. We all dream the same dreams worldwide. We are never without the map. We are never without each other. We unite through our dreams.
Dreams are compensatory, they provide a mirror into the deep unconscious most often reflecting what is lost, and, what is yet needed for correction and balance. Through dreams, the unconscious constantly produces teaching images. So, like a fabled lost continent, the wild dreamland rises out of our sleeping bodies, rises steaming and streaming to create a sheltering motherland over all of us. This is the continent of our knowing. It is the land of our Self.
And this is what we dream: We dream the archetype of Wild Woman, we dream of reunion. And we are born and reborn from this dream every day and create from its energy all during the daytime. We are born and reborn night after night from this same wild dream, and we return to daylight grasping a coarse hair, the soles of our feet black with damp earth, our hair smelling like ocean, or forest or cook fire.
It is from that land that we step into our day clothes, our day lives. We travel from that wildish place in order to sit before the computer, in front of the cook pot, before the window, in front of the teacher, the book, the customer. We breathe the wild into our corporate work, our business creations, our decisions, our art, the work of our hands and hearts, our politics, spirituality, plans, homelife, education, industry, foreign affairs, freedoms, rights, and duties. The wild feminine is not only sustainable in all worlds; it sustains all worlds.
Let us admit it. We women are building a motherland; each with her own plot of soil eked from a night of dreams, a day of work. We are spreading this soil in larger and larger circles, slowly, slowly. One day it will be a continuous land, a resurrected land come back from the dead. Munda de la Madre, psychic motherworld, coexisting and coequal with all other worlds. This world is being made from our lives, our cries, our laughter, our bones. It is a world worth making, a world worth living in, a world in which there is a prevailing and decent wild sanity.
The imagery of spreading the soil of my psyche in larger and larger circles until it becomes a continuous land, resurrected from the dead, is the same imagery as last week’s resurfaced audio. The Universe confirms your journey over and over and over again until you pay it attention.
I can’t be embarrassed or ignore Claudia, The Growler. I know the answer is to not feel embarrassed, and to instead wear her like my soul. She’s returned from exile. She wants to live beside me. I breathe her wild and it infuses everything I do.
The Mandrake Man Dance
I held on to that space between wake and sleep and these mandrake-like creatures slid out of the trees and a did a dance for me. They introduced themselves as “tree men” and that’s why I call it the Mandrake Man Dance.
The Legacy House
n. a property that has maintained its historical and/or cultural significance over multiple generations.
My “legacy house” was run-down and boarded up. I walked a long way in the dream realm just to stand guard in front of the house and protect it.
Squatters had broken in and ruined all the plumbing and stolen all the copper. Nothing worked inside and it was unlivable. But still, I stood guard.
I knew my family had forgotten this house. They no longer stopped by for their shifts.
I wanted to gut the place, pay for someone to come and haul all the trash away. But then I was told, “It’s not your responsibility to clean up your family’s mess. They can help too.”
This was never just my house. It has gone to shit, but I am not responsible for protecting or preserving it.
Then I woke up.
The Catfish Museum and All Points of Possibility
Catfish: Points of Possibilities created by AI Art Machine
I am given a tour of an underground water museum. The tour guide takes me to the catfish exhibit. I see a catfish swimming toward me and I see it’s skeleton and how it forms and grows.
I can see sound waves and the potential of energy before it is “activated” in the water. The potentials appear as dots or points. I see the catfish navigate all the possibilities at once.
A propeller appears in the exhibit and it is churning my subconscious, like the deep waters.
At the end of the tour the guide gives me a jack-in-box toy made out of paper, but instead of a jester it is a catfish that pops out. I ask a lot of questions and the guide pawns me off to the exhibit programmer who is disinterested in telling me more. He mumbles something and turns his back toward his computer.
I take my folder of informational pamphlets and my paper catfish-in-the-box and I say I am ready to leave. This dream is an invitation to see the potentials of my life and desires.
All roads lead back to yourself
In dreaming life I pulled a tarot card. I saw myself in a sacred circle surrounded by other versions of myself pointing what felt like staves/wands/arrows. At first I felt cornered — was this something to ward off?
No, my subconscious interpreter said.
This card means that you are never worried about a missed chance. These are all versions of you existing after each road taken. Opportunity after opportunity will continue to arise. All roads lead back to yourself. You are never lost.
10 of Arrows
All roads lead back to yourself
“For all the supernatural lust in your eyes: BELIEVE”
Dream Journal, August 2, 2011
Disclaimer: I was 27 when I had this dream. I feel like anything written or experienced in your twenties should have a disclaimer.
I was walking the streets of San Francisco, sometimes it was Oakland. Irrelevant though, because it was acting more like an old lover. Acting as if it had forgotten me, never loved me, moved on to better things. Still, I stepped onto every curb and turned every corner trying to remember what drew me to fall in love in the first place. There was a boy, like there always is, and at every crosswalk we met. I tried walking in front of him, tried leaving him behind like so many had done to me before, but somehow we kept crossing paths. My destination/destiny became a broken-down bookstore where Spacewaves was performing. Suddenly, I knew his name was Camus and that he was their new drummer. I said, “Fine. You can have me.” Then, I dragged him into the bathroom and made out with him, like I was drunk, but I wasn’t. Not even on love, I don’t think. I left him there and as I walking out, a stranger with an Indian accent, stopped me and said, “Don't be afraid of Camus. Rule him the perversion in your life. For all the supernatural lust in your eyes: BELIEVE.”
Note: When the Indian stranger said “perversion” he also said “purpose,” like at the same time.