(Saturday, October 2, 2021) waning crescent Leo / tarot nine of wands
A highly vivid dream, full of thousands and thousands of clearly visible elements, impossible to remember or record them all.
This dream takes place at my Rustic Lodge house. The front door opens to a large, Victorian-style living room (my grandmother called living rooms parlors) with a very tall ceiling that angles up to the back of the house. The parlor is full of decorative elements: gold-leaf fabric, velvet, floral wallpaper, chandeliers, carved wood and plaster, side balconies, more. It is much too much.
My move to the residence is recent. Two strong young men have come over to lift a few items and relocate them on the main floor. They are waiting for notification from a drone or some other sky-contact to inform them when it’s time to leave for a more playful task. Wyn is standing with us in the living room, paying his usual close attention to how things get done. I call this his engineering mind, he calls himself a construction worker. The friendly men receive their message, although I do not see or hear it, and they wave goodbye, heading into the woods at the edge of my house.
I start to work on the dramatic parlor. Wyn watches. Cullan is there too. I pull a big strip of patterned wallpaper off of an interior window and discover that part of the trim is missing. Cullan hands me a piece of wood and we fix it. The overkill of Victorian decorative elements and DIY disasters overwhelms, crushes me.
The dream shifts to a huge upper floor furnished by a young female teacher, a previous homeowner. In my dream-mind she looked like Emily, the waking life previous owner, a speech therapist for the Minneapolis school district. Every corner, every tiny space of the room is packed full of female-focused books, toys, art supplies and notebooks for writing. I’m overwhelmed again. I pull a fragile, chaotic bookshelf down from one wall. I tear away a wide strip of wallpaper and find a full row of windows beneath it. I need to empty this room and simplify. Open the space.
The dream shifts again, to the basement. This dreamspace was furnished by Emily’s husband Charlie. In the dream he was an elementary school teacher, but I don’t know if that is true in waking life. The basement is horrific and huge. It is full of male-focused toys and games. Some of them feel very negative, as boy-toys sometimes do to me: guns, video war-games, equipment for sports that can be physically damaging. One door opens to a dark, narrow brick hallway with a yellow fungus-coated toilet at the end of it. I panic and realize I need to put a wooden barrier over the door. Immediately. There are small boys meandering about and I want them to be safe. (The format of the room is similar to my waking house basement studio, which has an old dismantled bathroom and is near a red brick wall.)
Deeply saddened, I become aware of a large space next to this basement room that resembles a laundry. I see a double cement sink through a doorway. It looks like the sink in our waking basement. The area is full of adult men interacting in a pleasant way, but I have strong suspicions about the environment. To the men it is a secret party room. (When we bought our waking house, there was an old refrigerator used for beer near the laundry.)
In the third dream shift, a woman is outside, near my backyard. She informs me that her house is in much better condition and worth substantially more money than mine. In the dream I feel she is being egocentric, un-neighborly. I would not treat anyone that way.
One day later, the dream returns in a flash during my waking life: I see an image of my higher self, with arms widespread like the protective angel in the Lovers tarot card (Rider-Waite). I’m floating at the very top of the angled parlor ceiling. My higher self is many sizes larger than living human beings.
Day notes:
I get frustrated by the sloppy DIY projects Charlie left behind. Some could have been done much better. Some are OK. There is a lot of old asbestos tile in the basement and that worries me. Lead-based paint. The gorgeous limestone walls need to be resealed.
When I had my yearly tarot reading with Marlene in August, she assured me that we absolutely chose the right house. She said the projects will get done over time and I should be patient. Don’t worry.
A few days after this dream I discovered that the bathroom toilet is slowly leaking from the basement ceiling. A plumber is coming on Wednesday. Our backyard, now full of damp wooden mulch, is populated by hundreds of mushrooms and one-billion-year-old (harmless) yellow fungus.
I have been upset with my brother-in-law handyman (Bob the Builder). A month ago my sister Jo told me a story that our sister Jamie shared with her, saying Bob had raped Jamie over a year ago. I decided I would let Bob finish two projects he started early this summer and then find another handyman, but when Bob came over on Thursday, I got the other side of the story. Living with Jamie, who has bipolar disorder and OCD, is nearly impossible, as I already knew. She physically and verbally attacks him. She threatened suicide on September 24. He showed me the text on his phone. I told Bob to make sure the next time this happens to call 911 and the National Suicide Hotline.
OCD comes from my mother’s side, bipolar comes from my father’s side. I remember visiting my grandfather several times at the old Willmar state mental hospital. His aunt committed suicide. There are at least five generations of diagnosed bipolar disorder that I am aware of.