I have two vivid dreams my first night in Phoenix.
In the first, I am able to put my hand inside of Chris, as if he has a womb. A cup of tissue sits inside his pelvis, like a bowl. Parts of the tissue are dying, disintegrating. He wants me to create a new, healthy bowl for him. This makes me impatient. I tell him that is his responsibility, not mine. But then I feel very guilty and ashamed.
In the second, I am visiting my parents’ house. It is a small one-story cabin, like Cullan and Alea’s house. It is decorated in white, but above the chair rail are the most intense, sparkly images of giant cartoon animals: Disneyesque squirrels, bears and a full, fun menagerie of critters. I awoke still very affected by the surrealistic, lucid aspect of the images.
(Friday the 13th of May, 2016) half moon in Leo / tarot: four of wands reversed
A dream with two halves, one indoors, one outdoors.
It’s twilight. I enter my bedroom (through a door from the outside of the house) with some friends and family. The room is very large and square. My king-size bed sits in the center. The comforter on the bed is made from the same fabric (Belgian linen), in the same color (pale pollen yellow), as the eurostyle accent pillows I recently bought from West Elm. That much of that color is a little startling to me. I caress the gentle summer fabric with my hand in a contemplative fashion. The softness of the linen is soothing and sensual, but common. It’s not silk. The flax has a subtle, pleasant scent.
My companions depart from the room for the outside, through a second door, and Richard W. from the IASD enters through the first door, which is behind me. I am quite surprised to see him as he has not visited my dreams for several years, at least that I remember.
He is completely comfortable with me, as though we have known each other for a long, long time. We are both aware that his presence marks a profound change that is coming into my life. Someone is leaving, someone is arriving. He is supportive, intelligent and creative. Solid. Loving. The stressors that are so common in my current life will heal and disperse. That is the message he has brought with him.
I move on to the outside of the house, which is an expansive walled garden. A courtyard. Bonnie and my sister Jo are already there, waiting for me.
The courtyard is full of garden beds that have been neglected. Planted by me, neglected by me. I move from bed to bed with a shovel and start digging up perennials from the black soil. The earth has hardened from abandonment and needs tilling, composting. Bonnie and Jo follow behind me: they have my back. At first I think I will need to hire a professional gardener and buy new plants (I feel overwhelmed) but as I continue to dig I realize many of the perennials have spread and had babies. There are exactly the right number and kinds of flowers to create fresh new gardens. I can do this. I have everything I need.
Day notes:
I have this dream the morning after my return from Phoenix (an exhausting trip). My first feeling is that it is about a return to working with the earth in my clay studio. I visited the ASU art museum and sensed that the time for studio work is immanent. I am caught up with gardening (weeding, planting) and done painting bedrooms till fall. So I have time for art again. If I want to submit anything for the 2017 IASD show I need to begin soon.
It is such a balanced dream. Beds for sleeping, dreaming; beds for flowering. The fabric of summer in the twilight of my life. Late bloomer. Courtship in the bedroom, flowers in the yard of court. My male side has my back, and my female side as well; complete support for self-sustenance. When I dig into the unconscious I discover that the roots of flowers have been spreading and giving birth, without my awareness.
Richard appeared in my dream of Ben Franklin (Poor Richard). Bonnie was in that dream too, which ended up being highly precognitive, and also a past-life memory, according to Sabine. The character of Harry the Magician looked a lot like Richard, but not exactly. Is this dream character a guide? Or is Richard visiting my dreams? He sent me a lovely FB post on my birthday: “Dream Deep, Dream Long, Dream Humor.”
To notice a bedspread represents your open sexuality and outward beauty.
Linen represents luxury, elegance and the need to slow down and appreciate life’s finer things.
Courtyards allow you to be inside while you are outside. They are associated with wealth, openness, self-expression.
Yellow is the color of the sun, kingship, St. Peter’s robes, peace and harmony, hope for the future. Envy.
In the Dakota medicine wheel yellow is the color of the east, beginnings, sun energy, illumination.
The garden is a symbol of earthly and heavenly paradise, the cosmic order.
The Song of Songs compares the garden with the beloved.
The walled garden, entered only through a small portal, represents obstacles to be overcome on the way to higher spiritual development.
The enclosed garden also symbolizes intimate areas of the female body.
There is a door for entering the bedroom (the inner courtyard), and a door for exiting the bedroom. Probably the same in the garden (the outer courtyard). Like chambers of the heart.
The taxi got me home from the airport at 1:30 this morning. Chris had a beautiful bouquet of flowers waiting for me in the dining room. He has had good results from his 24-hour heart monitor test. The cardiologist said his afib is intermittent, not constant. She was very pleased.
Phoenix (and the southwest) are full of walled gardens.
My father’s family has experienced what seem to me to be an inordinate number of tragedies that are not duplicated on my mother’s side.
My aunt Carol was killed on her sixth birthday, run over by a pickup truck driven by her father, my grandfather Edwin Luther.
My great-aunt Tone died in a car crash in the same intersection where her husband had died 40 years earlier (in an automobile accident).
My cousin Ken and his three-year-old son died in a small plane crash over South Dakota.
Ken’s sister, my cousin Jan, ran her car off the side of the road into a ditch. When she was discovered many hours later, her body temperature was down to 72 degrees. She never fully recovered.
My cousin Nicole contracted Mary Lund’s Disease at the age of 27. She had to be air-lifted from Minot to the University of Minnesota where she was the first woman to receive a Jarvik 7 artificial heart. She eventually received a heart transplant, but contracted Mary Lund’s Disease for a second time a few years later, and died within days.
My cousin Kevin was born so profoundly disabled he never learned to talk. He was unable to sit up on his own or even feed himself. He passed away at the age of 7.
My grandfather’s depression was (understandably) severe. He was hospitalized multiple times. I remember visiting him at Willmar State Mental Hospital when I was very young.
The only mirror of this in my mother’s family is the death of her father Bernard Sheehan when my mom was three. There was a snowstorm, and some men were gathered in the back of a truck, heading out to do snow removal together. My grandfather fell out of the truck, hit his head and died.
The greatest Sheehan family trauma I remember is my godmother Marguerite’s death at the age of 42 from cancer July 5, 1965. I was 8.
Perhaps this family vibration strengthens my patience and understanding of Chris’ medical stressors, caused by his train accident at age 19. Waking dream, family dream.
