Author: Denise

(Saturday, September 14, 2013)  Monday morning (dream group day) I awake from a dream that makes my heart race and makes me smile at the same time.

I am lying on top of one of the double beds in the main upstairs bedroom of my grandmother’s simple farmhouse. I hear a great commotion. A young man who is my physical match comes tearing through a large white door to my left. He slams it shut and throws himself against it in horror in an obvious attempt to keep out some terrible presence: the King of the Vampires.

But the King of the Vampires is powerful beyond imagining. He kicks the door down and brutally crushes the young man beneath it. The King stands on top of the heavy wooden door, pressing his immense weight onto the fragile body beneath him, the same way I’ve seen a hawk kill a finch. His stance is regal, proud and terrifying. I watch him fill his lungs with great gulps of air, each breath inflating him to an even greater size. I expect the King to reach under the door and finish off my double by strangling his puny neck, but he simply turns and walks away into the darkness.

After a few moments the injured young man crawls out from under the door, barely alive. He slinks along the floor and into a second double bed (located at my left) to recuperate from his injuries. I quietly allow him rest, but soon I point to the open doorway and state the obvious: “WE NEED TO GET OUT OF HERE.”

I tell him we can escape through a bank of three windows in the attic. There is an attic ceiling hatch inside the closet at the foot of the bed where I am lying. I push the hatch door aside and pull myself up through the small, square opening. Once in the attic, I find myself beneath a thick black cloak that covers the entire room. I can smell the dust and age of the floorboards beneath me. I feel the rough heaviness of the cloth on my back and shoulders. In my plan, we crawl like rats under the cloak to get to the windows, crack one of them open, jump silently to the ground, and run like hell.

I watch as my partner’s fingers claw through the opening of the hatch. Only at this point do I wonder: is this a human being or a vampire? Suddenly his shoes appear at the top of the hatch. He’s hanging by his feet like a bat, and he’s wearing brown wing-tips.

Too late to do anything about it. He’s in the attic now, and the protective cloak has disappeared. We’re both standing in an ornately decorated room that is blazing with lights, with no drapes on any of the windows. There’s a flat-screen TV playing a movie in the middle of the room.

I look out the single window beneath the peak of the roof line. I see the Vampire King walking eastward, away from the house. He turns his head, sadly, making brief eye contact with me, but then continues on his journey.

Dawn is breaking. It is safe to leave the house and I let myself out through the bank of three windows under the eaves at the side of the house (impossibly, these windows also face east), shimmying down the outside wall. I am uncertain whether I, too, am a vampire. In my dream I find this an amusing irony.

Day notes:

I shared this dream at The Dreamsters Union meeting. I decided to wear my long black skirt and a black top in honor of the dream. I shared that the structure of the dream matches the devil card in the tarot: shadow lovers

On my afternoon walk a couple of days later, I found a dead bat in the middle of the trail.

Vampires, at least in the popular canon, are all about sexual desire.

Jungian essay on the vampire archetype (click link)

Vampires are eternal, the human soul is eternal. Vampires do not share the human amnesia about past incarnations.

This dream seems related to my waking dream bardo images. Vampire King as Dweller on the Threshold.

From Van Morrison, lyrics to Dweller on the Threshold:

I’m a dweller on the threshold
And I’m waiting at the door
And I’m standing in the darkness
I don’t want to wait no more

I have seen without perceiving
I have been another man
Let me pierce the realm of glamour
So I know just what I am

I’m a dweller on the threshold
And I’m waiting at the door
And I’m standing in the darkness
I don’t want to wait no more

Feel the Angel of the Presence
In the mighty crystal fire
Lift me up consume my darkness
Let me travel even higher

I’m a dweller on the threshold
As I cross the burning ground
Let me go down to the water
Watch the great illusion drown

I’m a dweller on the threshold
And I’m waiting at the door
And I’m standing in the darkness
I don’t want to wait no more

I’m gonna turn and face the music
The music of the spheres
Lift me up consume my darkness
When the midnight disappears

I will walk out of the darkness
And I’ll walk into the light
And I’ll sing the song of ages
And the dawn will end the night

(Saturday, September 14, 2013)  Tuesday morning I awoke with no sensation of residing in a physical body. Everything in my awareness was pure image. So I was only awareness, since I had no body at all.

The images were psychedelically vivid, composed of an infinite number of layers that morphed and flew through space at a dizzying speed. I thought, “This is what Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche describes as the bardo between life and death.” I was being shown why meditation practice is a vital preparation for leaving this life: a trained and focused mind is the only path through the terror, power and distraction of the images in the bardo.

(Journal entry from July 27, 2012)  Today I saw Dr. Liu for my acupuncture treatment. She took my pulse, after which she never says much. So I ask how it is. She says it is getting better but that I have been very depleted. Depleted in the kidney meridian, which is causing my bone, vision, memory and breathing problems. “Kidneys rule the bones” is what they say in Traditional Chinese Medicine.

I have always thought she was treating me for the exhaustion that followed Chris’ illness last year. Today she says my kind of depletion happens at birth and she asks if I was a preemie. This level of depletion also happens with children who have suffered starvation. She says she was born during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when 20 million Chinese people died. She was lucky: her parents were university professors, but even so she had no hair on her head until she was three years old. It was the wish of her parents that she study acupuncture so she could heal herself.

Tears flow down my cheeks as I listen to her story. And a few days later I recall this mysterious dream from 2009:

Kidney Dream 04.24.09

I had the strangest dream last night. I awoke in a kind of bed made of old wooden planks (like an old farm wagon), filled with snow. I was being operated on to replace a kidney. The snow was somehow numbing me to the pain; there was no anesthesia. Then I turned over and a transplant was performed on the other side of my body. I was fully awake.

At the time of the dream I made this comment: “Kidneys filter toxins from the blood and build red blood cells, I suppose it is a purification dream.” I also uncovered this information, before I had any thoughts of going to an acupuncturist, or of learning T’ai-Chi:

Kidney function in the body is described as Yin Water in Zang Fu theory. This can be seen as the Yin of the Yin, and should be noted as the time in nature when things are congealed, condensed and covered. A great symbol for this is the seed buried beneath the snow. It holds the memories of all the plants that have produced it through the ages, and in this memory lies the pilot light of its species. The Yin within Water is the time of rest during which this seed sits and waits. It is the will of the seed, the fidelity it has to its origins that is really stored inside.

Zang Fu theory connects the Kidney to the storing of the Zhi (memory) spirit, which is often translated as “will” or “fidelity,” and we can see this connection in the seed, the winter and the ocean. The Kidney is also connected with the reproductive function of the human being, and this is easy to see with the seed metaphor. Through the controlling of the water metabolism, the Kidney also plays a role in separating the clear from the turbid, which is a major function taking place during the winter time.