A Gun in my Pocket

 I am walking up a hill with a friend, the police are coming the other way and searching peoples pockets for guns. They search my friends pocket. I am scared because I actually have a gun in my pocket. It seems like the police are going to walk past and miss me, I feel relief. But at the last minute a male police officer walks towards me and asks to search my pockets.

I say you are going to find a gun in my pocket, and he shouts loudly at me to lie on the ground. He goes to my pocket and pulls out a gun wrapped in an Asda bag. I say let me tell you the story of how I came to have a gun. He says it doesn’t matter, it’s illegal. I am shocked because I thought I had been careful to buy a legal gun.

I begin to tell him the story anyway - I have a client I am scared of, and that’s the police have failed to protect me, and that’s why I have a gun. I think about saying I was on my way to put it in a gun dropbox, ready to get rid of it.

Tony and Sarah are nearby, tony looks pleased and says "she is going to tell her story" (a midgendering but it feels relevant that it is the 'she' part of me represented in this dream). Inside I feel a little worried, have I exaggerated things? If I tell my stroy, will someone be angry with me and I will get into trouble?

We moved towards the police car, and everyone starts to pick up rubbish. It's quite odd that they are all pausing to do litter picking at this time! Next, the policeman takes a big old, solid wood writing desk out of the police car. It is mine and I ask why he’s leaving it on the side of the road. He mutters something, and I take it that he can’t take the desk to the police station.

I am scared, that is my old writing desk. I don’t want it to be left and get lost, here on the pavement.

Reflections

Police man a protector part. I have Tony my actual safe masculine encouraging me to share my story. But the police man leaves the writing desk on the road side. I feel guilt that I might get into trouble, these are my protector parts.

Conversation with friends unearths the following: “trauma demands attention” and “it needs healing somehow". A family may heal a perpetrator by feeling his feelings and processing them for him, through our own body. I have over focused on my dad’s side and the murder on that side of the family. In a recent constellation - the incredible power in my maternal ancestry was reflected back to me. 

Everyone stopped to pick up litter. In Lofoton I “went to the source” of my maternal DNA in a mountain lake. The location we were visiting was the area where my MtDNA halpo group originated from and I felt this in 'visionary' ways. At the lake I saw something deep in the water - even though it was really icy cold and deep, determined I dived down and pulled something out of the water. It turned out to be a piece if litter! It was a milk carton - with images of cartoon violence on it - tom and jerry whom I used to watch as a child, filled with casual violence. The lake was huge - but the violence was tiny in comparison to this huge river of life.

Trauma demands attention, it may flood us and it’s all we know or feel. But that river of life is vast and this carton - with its cartoon drama violence - was tiny by comparison.

Also note the Asda bag - capitalism wraps around this story - around the gun and the need for protection, protection rooted in violence. This is more than an individual story of personal trauma history. Its a story of capitalism and how it is intimately entwined with violence, with an immature aspect of human psyche.

Plant Medicine

 I am going to a plant medicine ritual, I am with a friend. We meet the Shaman, he seems like a guy who runs the local phone shop, rather than a Shaman as I would imagine.

He starts to talk to us about the plant medicine, he makes a point about plant medicine being colonialist and extractivist. My friend who I am with does not understand what that means, so I explain.

As I am explaining, the man leading the ritual slips some medicine into a glass of Prosecco that I have in front of me. I feel a little uneasy about the surreptitious nature of this delivery. I drink it anyway.

As I am drinking it a woman explains something to me, I realise that I am maybe already hallucinating. She says that the plant medicine will open a veil, but only for some people. She says that some people may wait over 100 years, and the veil will still not open for them. As I am pondering if the veil will open for me, it opens. I am looking at a painting on a canvas - a zip appears which I undo - and I am suddenly in contact with all that it is.

I had bought a question about my life into this ritual. I realise that the being that I am encountering, cares nothing for my day-to-day life. This realisation is not bad or disturbing, it just is. The woman who had been talking to me laughs, not un kindly, maybe as you might laugh at the naivety of a child - at the thought that the being of the universe would care about my day-to-day life.

I continue in a strange fragmented reality - it is like being a very small part of a vast  painting - the painting is undulating, pulsating, colourful and abstract. The colours are perhaps a little like a Monet.

The scale of this painting (and my smallness within it) is incomprehensible.

FB In My Dream

 I have been getting sucked in somewhat by the "reels" videos on FB. I feel this showed up in a dream quite dramatically!

I was in some kind of sports hall, gymnasium, the kind you get in schools. My body had been hideously transformed. I had a "space helmet" globe over my head. My body was built of metal rods like a camera "tripod". What a hideous hell scape existence.

I looked around and could see other people in this state too. At the edge of the gym I became aware of an elderly white man with his hand on a control button. Then next to me, someones head exploded inside their space globe helmet! Brains and blood sloshed inside the globe as the tripod body collapsed. And then another and another ...

I looked back to the old white man and realised the exploding heads had something to do with him. I waddled bambi like over to him with my awkward tripod body and could see the "internet" symbol used on laptops hidden behind a family portrait. I could see he was twiddling a dial, turning something up through this internet symbol that was making peoples heads explode!

I saw that some people were escaping this and their heads weren't exploring, even though they had the helmets on. I was curious about that for a moment. But then my partners turned up without helmets and struggled to unscrew the helmet on my head. My real body returned with and was there with their bodies. I was human again.

Wow, I must GET MYSELF OFF FB! This felt like such a reflection of how social media is being used to reshape peoples sense of self. It reflected something in my psyche in allowing myself to be drawn in by the "reels". Someones hand is on that dial manipulating the flows of information to their own ends. This is never more clear than in this era of the unholy Trump/Musk alliance (Trusk?)

A meeting with wealth 2

 This dream follow on with the themes in A meeting with wealth:

I am with a friend Caroline: IRL we were colleagues at one time, her business accelerated past mine, she was featured in many magazines / TV / newspapers. I have sometimes felt envious of that, though I realise doing so would have trapped me in sexuality work (she is a sex bod practitioner) and so wouldn't have been a good thing for the changes that came later in my working life.

We are with two men in an unfamiliar country. They all want to go to a bar, she seems to be with one man (man 1) and indicating that the other man is interested in me (man 2). He is very wealthy and wants to buy us all drinks. I am reluctant and resistant to the whole idea. Internally, I have vague memories of having 'another love' - I think maybe the other love is my current partners Tony & Sarah.

I end up going to the bar anyhow. We drive there in an old fashioned car, maybe from the 1920s. Man 2 heads up to the bar buying us all drinks, he is smiling at me. I am still resistant to this whole affair. Then I recall - I have written a piano piece - a very complex long work. Its my best piece ever (maybe the last one I composed before I stopped playing the piano in my late teens). 

HE HAS BEEN PLAYING MY PIANO COMPOSITION.

I suddenly realise that  he has been engaging deeply with, appreciating and playing this piano composition of mine. It's confusing and I don't know what to do. I realise he might be someone loving, caring and good for me. But due to his trying to relate with me via his wealth (in the act of buying us all drinks) I have felt rejecting of him.

Earlier in the dream sequence:

I meet an elderly woman. We are in a group talking. She says "I seek to gently push women out of sex work". I explode at her. "What right have you to infatilise them and decide what is best for them? Its up to them if they want to leave sex work or not. Do you ask them that?"

She gracefully withstands my challenge, firmly being with it, not bowed by it but not biting back either. 

When I wake up I recognise this elderly woman as a guide that I have seen in my dreams before a long time ago when I was doing sexuality / tantra work. She came once and led me through a field of blue bells. Another time she applied healing ointments to my body.

I lie in bed wondering if this elderly woman guide gently led me out of my sexuality focused work into the work that I do now. If she did - I am deeply grateful to her - as I write this now I want to express my gratitude to that guide and say sorry that I shouted at you in my dream! Thank you for guiding me with my best interests at heart, before I even knew what they were.

Also reflecting in the morning, I recall that I read a book on Autism (Aspergirls by Rudy Simone). In it she said aspergirls often know very early on what they want to do in life. The more closely they can stay with that (either as a hobby or profession) the happier they will be.

It made me reflect - what is the earliest thing I can recall wanting to "be"? I wanted to be a nun, as a very young girl thats what I wanted to do. I realised in some ways I have done that; i.e. I have followed deeply a spiritual path, engaging with themes of awakening / enlightenment.

What I forgot in those reflections though is my piano! I didn't want to 'be a pianist' so I totally overlooked it. I was the youngest pupil ever at the Kenney School of Music and Dance. I was wholly absorbed by playing the piano from a very young age all through to my late teens when I started travelling and having a piano in rented accommodation was impractical.

A song has also come to me lately - the first song I have written since I stopped composing in my late teens. Here below are the words of that short simple song.

Here comes the river man.

Deep down feel me, 

I am with you.

Flowing freely, 

This heart holds you.

Oh carry me, 

Back to the sea.

Surrendering,

Into her deep.

Riverman,

Now we are free.

Deep down feel me, 

I am with you.

Flowing freely, 

This heart holds you.

Here comes the river man ...

A meeting with wealth

 I am at dinner with a man, he has long thick black curly "Italian" hair, like a number of men I have been in relationship with or attracted to.

At the dinner table I know (implicitly) that he has separated from his ex partner and that I am being 'tested' somehow as a suitable future partner. I feel anxious and insecure. He speaks to me but not directly, he speaks through insinuation, hints, implies things but never says them directly, then sees how I respond.

Most of the time he looks young and very very handsome. But there is a moment as the dream goes on that he looks very old, his skin is pale, dry and very wrinkled. He ages fast for a moment before my eyes and I am suddenly not sure what age he is.

He seems to want to know what I want, but it also feels like a test too, one that I am bound to fail. And so I do - feel like I am failing. I feel that he is looking down his nose at me. I finally feel that I have lost him and so - therefore - I have nothing to loose ...

At this point something emerges within me. I feel for the first time like I have a clear and direct sense of self. I am no longer dancing around internally trying to "live up" to whatever it is that he wants in order to "get" or "win" him. I feel myself fully and clearly and no longer 'care'.

I begin speaking and I say ...

"I want a relationship with you, one that is authentic. Simple and direct. One that is not based on game playing. I want us to be kind to one another."

Something changes with these words, I feel it and I wake up feeling it.

The weekend before

I had set up a short relationship constellation with my shamanic group. Someone represented me and someone represented wealth, I wanted to look at my relationship with wealth.

I set the constellation up where I thought the relationship was. I was standing in the centre (nearly) of the room, looking out of the window. Wealth was behind some distance back to the right of me, looking in the same direction.

This represented a relationship where I felt that I had not tended to, or looked at wealth in my life. I asked for the constellation when I realised through conversations that everyone in the group had wealth (property, assets) except for me and suddenly felt a sense of shame. I do feel many kinds of "wealth" in my life, but just not wealth of the financial, savings, investments or property kind. It wasn't something I "looked at or towards" in life, so of course I don't have that! I was busy looking elsewhere.

In the constellation my representative turned towards wealth - and began a dance of slowly trying to connect with and get wealths attention - nut wealth kept backing away. My representative was slowly chasing wealth around the room!

My rep said "I want a relationship with you". Wealth didn't respond, so she gave up in the end and went and stood elsewhere. The "elsewhere" was I noticed more central in the room (standing at the centre of your own circle, a good place to be) and she was no longer so preoccupied with something in the distance out of the window, she seemed more present and to have arrived in the space.

At this point, wealths representative, he felt like coming and standing next to me. At first he had his armed crossed, but cheeks clenched and seemed very closed. He said he felt a bit like a seargant major, or a bank manager maybe. Eventually though he softened and seemed to open a little more to me, he uncrossed his arms. My rep said "this is a good place for now, its not the end, but its a good place for now".

This dream felt like a continuation of this constellation. The man in the dream was "wealth": I wanted a relationship with him, I was chasing that but he was retreating and not really being relational with me. In both dream and constellation, things only change at the point when I have nothing left to loose and "give up" and stop chasing him.

These dream themes continue on another night A meeting with wealth 2.