I am a sculptor of clay animals and those luminous hybrid creatures that sometimes appear in our dreams, if we are lucky and if we are paying attention. The slow process of hand-building something from clay can really deepen the visitation of a dream. I have faithfully tended these wondrous images, transcribing them to journals since I was in my early 20s.
Monday, July 12, 2021 (waxing crescent Leo, tarot Empress)
I’m visiting my ancestral lands in Minneiska in the dark of the night. The farmhouse and barn are not visible, not part of the dream as I remember it. A young crew, perhaps my cousin’s grandchildren or residents of Winona and Wabasha county have built a strange, small building where people stay overnight.
I enter the “cabin” and look for my spot to sleep. The construction is odd, haphazard. Lots of raw wood is visible. Angles are not 90 degrees or 180 degrees. Everything seems to have been collected from ReStore or the Salvation Army and thrown together in various rooms.
I enter the only bedroom that is generous enough in space for me, but it is already taken by a young woman. Her backpack sits on the floor. Another room has bunkbeds that are three-high but too tight for an adult to rest inside. All of the other rooms are too eccentric for my sleep. Perhaps this is a youth hostel?
I continue to meander. I open a wooden trap door along the baseboards of one room and find a dog. It’s his home. He is living beneath the cabin. The dream is full of structural details, most of which have faded away.
I decide to head outside. My heart senses the energy of my grandmother and grandfather. It is very strong and fills the sky, the universe. I send them my love.
(Wednesday, June 2, 2021) third quarter moon Pisces / tarot eight of pentacles
Two part dream. In the first part, my mother asks me to heal my grandmother. Lenora has already passed away and is lying on her back, dissolving slowly into the earth. “Healing the Ancestors,” I guess is what Jill Purce would say.
In the second part of the dream, I am successfully healing Cullan’s sore, damaged knees. When I wake up I think of the story he told yesterday of his temperamental coworker who hung up on their Zoom meeting. Cullan has been under stress dealing with this young man, and I have been concerned. Worried. My dream made me feel better. Then, when I saw Cullan this afternoon and he said the testy web designer was leaving for a new job, I had evidence that my dream was precognitive. Louise Hay says knees are about ego. When I came home from babysitting Wyn and told Chris about the dream, Chris said Cullan has been having pain in his knees and his legs from biking.
(Saturday, May 15, 2021) waxing crescent moon Cancer / tarot 7 of cups
I have a lucid dream this morning in a black environment (not my normal grey lucid space). “The dark before the dawn.” Noise from a neighbor’s house woke me up at 1:08 and I am able to recall many details from the dream. It stayed with me for a long time.
The dream:
I own an old, two-story house with two bedrooms upstairs: one for me, one for a man who has passed away. His spirit is still strongly present in his room, in the way that I always experience Jim’s energy when I visit Jeanne’s house. Even though it is my current house, which is a one-and-a-half-story Queen Anne bungalow, in the dream it is two full stories: a farmhouse design like Cullan and Hillary’s home.
I perceive and visit many rooms in other dimensions in the upper floor, but the two bedrooms, the spousal rooms, have the most physical and emotional power. A big refrigerator that looks like the 80s era version in our basement sits near the staircase between the bedrooms. It is full of fresh food. I notice two large, long loaves of bread and wonder if they have expired, since the refrigerator is very old. A telepathic message is sent to me that my parents have provided the new loaves of bread and the other good food. The fridge feels like a safe, a deposit box, full of wealthy nutrition. I experience my parents’ spiritual presence as they move on, gliding through the air.
I head outside. My niece Sarah and her two daughters live one block down the street, but I am able to coax them to move to the house directly next to mine. The two homes are divided by a driveway, as are the two real-world Queen Anne bungalows (our house and the neighbor’s house) built by the same family in 1903.
The dream street is long and straight. Our house faces a berm that faces a railway. The neighborhood reminds me of Highway 61 near my family’s ancestral town of Minneiska, where the bluffs wind down to the highway and the train tracks follow the Mississippi. Tangletown is a high hill on the edge of Minnehaha Creek. Tangletown used to be called Fuller, which is my grandmother’s maiden name.
I focus on the house itself, 100 Rustic Lodge West. The siding is original, aging, hand-sawn wood, reminding me in waking life of my grandmother’s farmhouse, which was built in a lumberyard next to the Mississippi in the late 19th century.
The sky is pitch black, midnight during a new moon. There is a tall ladder attached to both floors of the house but in the darkness I have trouble seeing how I can safely travel up the rungs, especially at my age. I pull the ladder away and prop it against the porch, making it easy to inspect the roofing. It all looks protective and up to snuff.
Rustic cabin at the clay tour in the St. Croix valley.
Day notes:
Chris and I have been worried because his CKD (chronic kidney disease) is nearly at stage 4. His numbers continually drop. He may need dialysis.His liver (cirrhosis from Hep C) is impacting his kidneys, perhaps.
I pulled a tarot card to ask about this dream and got the 10 of pentacles, which can mean inheritance. Family happiness, multiple generations. The elders prepare to leave.
