The Blue Dragon

 I am at sea, there is a giant blue dragon, about the size of a 12 story block of flats.

The dragon has in its hands three people - a woman, a man and a child. They are a family.

The man is black with long dreadlocks, he wears a gold silk dress and trousers. He is quite 'feminine'. The dragon gnaws his head off his shoulders and casts his body aside.

The child is about 6 years old, she has fair skin and blond hair. The dragon throws her along a large arc, her body turns in space until it sploshes into the sea where she drowns.

The woman has dark hair, the dragon holds her in his hands and carries her away. The dragon has killed her family to kidnap her to sing. In the dream I sense it is a tragic situation. The woman has lost her family and there is the sense she will spend an eternity singing for the dragon, that there is no end to her pain and torture.

Followup

(not a dream).

I am in the gym, a new regular visit that I am really enjoying both for getting fitter and as a mediation too. I love also that my local council facility has all ages, genders, ethnicities, body shapes and sizes and I guess, a diversity of economic situations* using the gym. It feels very inclusive and friendly, not how I imagined gyms to be at all which is why I have avoided them till now.

I was on the rowing machine, with the resistance setting turned up to a new high. I noticed at one point an inner voice saying words like "rip it, smash it, kill it ...". I was quite shocked by this voice, inquiring into it I found it to come the "blue dragon" in my nervous system.

I began to be curious as to what would happen if the feminine black man in the couple hadn't been killed, how would I row then? What part of my nervous system did he represent? After a while contemplating this, I settled into a pattern of saying internally "love" or "strength" on each half of one stroke. When I said it would was interchangable, sometimes "love" when I pulled, sometimes "strength".

I can honestly say it was the most exciting, fun, alive, awake, energised and energising 10 minutes that I have ever had on the rowing machine! I felt like I was flying, it was so much fun. It was still hard but also at times I was able to ask inside "what if this were to feel easy?" and intermittently, it would.

Towards the end of my 10 minutes, internally I looked for the blue dragon. I found it behind me, wings open, like a guarding over "love" and "strength". I am not sure if I found the little girl in my contemplation - though maybe she was there in the bubbling joy and feeling of fun.

What I do know though is that as is so often the case - my dream showed me how the trauma in my nervous system was playing out. The dragons "rip, kill, smash it" felt like an old fight response, coming from a more primitive reptilian part of my nervous system, represented by the dragon.

In the unity of "love" and "strength" I found how these qualities can be combined and turned towards achievement driven by care and "power with" - rather than a "power over" relationship within and towards the world.

It was interesting to me that the dragon was there at the end behind the union of these two qualities. In my rowing it felt like a felt sense quality of a larger 'spirit' guiding and protecting.

* As I build my new business and rent a new therapy space, cash is very tight. I started going to the gym predominantly because it was the only exercise facility I can afford right now, because I am now entitled to a 'senior citizen' council funded place, which means each session is just £2.

Because these "pay and play" users have to queue for up to 20 mins to buy a ticket - rather than sweeping through the electronic gates flashing a monthly subscription on a smart phone - you get to see who is cash strapped enough to need to queue. 

Last night after escaping from a forest fire, I found myself naked as a 6 year old girl perched at the edge of an ice flow, dangerous captors pursuing me.

I wondered watching myself, how this little girl would survive so naked and vulnerable ...

To my astonishment and that of those pursuing her, she slipped into the sea - the precision and focus of a slinky seabird streamlined dive - laughing her body pulsed fast and free, totally at home in the ice blue sea.

Two Flying dreams

I have a history of flying dreams that don't end well, here are two recent ones - but the second seems a significant development in my psyche as finally it has a happy ending!

A few nights ago I was back in my usual 'flights ending very badly' nightmare. I was on a plane landing in very windy conditions and it was being buffeted around. I looked out the window and we were just a metre from the ground and I thought "phew we are going to make it".

But at the last minute the plane pulled up steeply and from there on I was in a terrible nightmare, a bit like being in a Stephen King movie! I think at one point there was even a clown flying the plane, certainly there was lots of graphic violence. I won't describe the details of this except for one motif that stands out in my memory - a woman being killed by having her head caved in violently with a sledgehammer.

I highlight this detail as I feel this dream is an egoic one, basically to do with armouring developed against a world perceived to be ruled by fear and violence. In some ways I feel embarrassed that I still have this dream, surely have I seen through this fear based experience of things by now?

However as brutal and graphic as the head caving was, I can't help but feel that something was necessarily being destroyed in this action. That even this nightmare with it's brutality, has its Kali like place in uncovering the true self, an expression of the destruction of thought structures perhaps, that keep me attached to fear and suffering.

Because what happened a few nights later was extraordinary ...

A lighter way of flying

I have been taking some wonderful herbs, and in my dream last I met my herbalist. She had constructed a flying machine out of scraps of flowery fabric and hazel poles. She took me for a spin up in the clouds over a beautiful woodland. "Not too high!" I yelled at times, she laughed and we never went to high. Indeed it was a delightful experience.

Next we went up again in a different but similar flying machine. I understood this was one I had made, it still had a very natural and home made feel, but where as the last one was just "like Mary" (my herbalist) the design of this one was very much me. It had broad wings and a triangle like structure at its core.

In the craft were Mary, myself and a man who had joined us. I was in charge of flying this time and we went over woodlands and then the sea. It was a very delightful journey! Then the time came to land the craft and I became uncertain wondering "do I know how to land it, I am not sure that I do?".

I worried that I had not been studious enough studying the manual and perhaps now I was putting my passengers at risk. Still I carried on thinking "how hard can this be?" and just focused moment by moment, on little micro adjustments of my hands and body, each dipping the craft a little lower again and again till we were rushing close by the ground at an exhilerating speed!

In fact it reminded me of the landing during a hang gliding experience I had undertaken some years ago Hang gliding in Rio 2014

I was scared but we landed safely. We were a few fields away from where I intended, but I checked with my passengers and they all seemed quite capable to find their own way to their intended destinations. We had some discussion and then parted ways, I felt very happy.

And upon waking, I am amazed that finally - I have had a good outcome to my flying dream!

ice channel melted

I am with a man, we are on an open hillside looking down an a huge glacial channel of ice cutting a great fissure into the surrounding rocks.

He says "we can move this" and levers himself into place at the top of the channel - back braced against rock and feet straining to push the ice. It seems ridiculous that we could move so much ice but I join him in the endeavour.

To my surprise it begins to shift and soon the ice is on the move, crunching and creaking it's way down the mountainside. We follow behind it giving it a helping push now and again, but it happens mostly easily and without effort and we have time to 'surf' on on the shiny surface left behind as we follow the flow down the mountainside.

We skate laughing all of the way down till we reach the ocean, where I see that the salt is slowly breaking the ice plug into a vast ocean slush puppy. The mood of this event is joyful, playful but also contains within it a sense of awe that so much could be moves so quickly and effortlessly.

trapped pregnant woman

There is a pregnant woman in a squalid flat, all dark as if the windows are boarded up.

I understand that she is captive, has been held there by her captor for some time. She gets up off the bed quietly and starts to move around the flat. She moves as if she believes she is tethered at the ankle by a chain, only when I look at the place I expect the chain to be trailing along behind her, there is nothing.

There are I believe camera's the 'he' has set up on the ceiling - but are they working though?

She moves around the flat looking for things - a knife? A weapon? An exit...?

She heads towards a room and in typical horror movie fashion she is moving towards a room where we (the audience) know that something terrible happened before: we are all screaming "No, don't go that way...!" but of course she does not hear.


She enters the room and I hold my breath. It is even darker, even more squalid in here and the space reeks of a crime. She looks to the end of the room and there are thick floral curtains full length curtains, a patio window maybe...?

She moves quickly towards them, with a dramatic gesture pushes them open. We (the audience) are now ahead of her and see her face close up looking down in horror for several seconds: 'what has she seen' we wonder!? Is it perhaps the 'last victim' - a corpse all mangled and rotting?

Next the camera pans back and pregnant lady is standing...

on the edge of a cliff. It is a dramatic and beautiful scene, maybe Cornish - high cliffs, blue sky.

Silently she topples forward off the edge of the cliff to her freedom.

(strangely I do not get the impression that she crashes on the beach or the cliff face, in fact I suspect there may have been a big wooden double bed with white cotton sheets suspended in mid air and that after her fall, she in fact found herself waking up, as if from a bad dream, in this beautiful bed?)

3 red setters

I am a red setter (the dog) swimming in the sea. I am the dog but I am also a human presence watching myself. I have 2 other friends (also red setters) and we are having a fabulous time diving, surfacing, swimming underwater, playing together. The part of me that does this is ecstatic, the part of me that watches knows that a tragedy is unfolding.

I dive, surface, dive, surface all of the while looking for my friends - to connect with them in my ecstasy (think of a dog running around on the beach, plunging into the sea and you will know the kind of joy that I mean)...

Only I become aware that I have not seen one of my friends for a time? I am now at the shoreline, scanning a vast and increasingly unfriendly looking ocean, with red setter number 2 at my side. We scan the horizon desperate for sight of our friend but to no avail, and with a sinking feeling we realise that he is lost under the waves of a sea now gone grey and cold.

The part that watches the scene nods sadly, she knew that this was coming, she had already seen it.

the foxes lair

I am at a small sea-front park with a beautiful young girl, about 6 or 7 I am pushing her on a swing. Our attention is caught by a commotion on the beach so we all run over.

We find a crowd has gathered around a creature that has beached itself, it looks like a cross between a seal and an eel - it has beautiful big round eyes and the plumpness of a seal, but a length and razor sharp spine more like that of an eel. We are considering how to save it and I think that I step forward and begin to move it; but then it manages to flip and push itself back in to the sea without assistance.

Now I am moving into the sea following the creature. I have no body and no need to breath and move effortlessly through the dark cold substance. I see dogs, lots of dogs - they are forming into a long train, each one holding the next ones tail between it's teeth (the pattern they form doing this reminds me of DNA? of the basic chains and molecules that form life...)

I follow their train into the darkness, as if being guided by a length of string I had left to find my place back to somewhere really important.

Deeper and deeper they take me till I reach a wooden door, it is wide, old, heavy and made of thick wooden beams of the kind that might be salvaged from a ship wreck. The door is closed but I sense it will soon open. I am greeted by a presence, the spirit of a fox. His presence is huge, but not at all malevolent. He is much bigger than the dogs and looking again I realize that they are all beagles, the dogs that used to be employed in the hunting of foxes.

Only in his lair the fox is the king and the dogs are his loyal servants.

I stand awaiting the opening of his lair with a feeling of peace, knowing that I have been seeking this doorway for some time, and finally, I have arrived.

(later in the day when I am swimming, the dream surfaces once again from my subconscious, only this time the fox is a shark and the dogs are sea-lions; this daytime reconfiguration is althogether more fearful).

The school and the ocean

I am with a former art teacher of mine and we are in a school. A dignitary is soon to be visiting (OFSTED maybe?) and we are doing the placed up.

We are in the sports hall moving out old furniture, broken shelves, and painting the space blue, silver and pearl metallic (like the inside of a mollusc). I notice that some if the painting is shoddy, it has been done too quickly, the paint applied too thickly and without sensitivity. I point this out to my teacher who quickly rectifies it without pause or fuss.

We are being helped by school girls, one of them has gone out on top of the building to look for something and is reporting back to us via video camera. She is on the roof of a skyscraper and close to the edge, she seems oblivious to the danger and I fear for her.

Back in the sports hall I am playing a word game now with some of the girls. We have little blue and red foam 'pellets' (like little pills) and they open out to reveal words within. We open our pills, deep red, deep blue, deep red, deep blue...

the girls are all childish teenage excitement - of the kind that comes about with the opening first flush of puberty - climbing all over me, I find I am annoyed with their exuberance.

The words in the pellets are all related to the sea, or seafood - "mollsuc", "starfish", "mussel", "sea shell" - each word as it is opened seems to release with it the essence of the sea and I find myself lost and overwhelmed once again in the beauty of the Ocean Goddess.

The Whale

I find myself plunged suddenly awake into a cold and choppy sea. I splash about confused then hearing men shout I remember the chase and their intention to kill. I begin to swim out to sea but a black and white killer whale bears down upon me, its great jaws gaping open: I stare into the black void feeling sure I have come to my end.

But s/he turns and presents me with a back like a raft and I realise s/he is my friend and wants only to save me! I straddle the great back and grab hold of the rubbery fin, which flexes under my grasp. A spasm of fear grips my thighs, the whale responds and OFF we go!

I can barely breathe as we rush through the water and soon land no longer even exists. We dive down and then surface, dive and then surface - from the dark depths of the ocean to the slate grey mirror of the sky. Together we embark on a dive that is deeper than I have ever experienced before and at that moment I begin to feel fear:

all that I am is rushing darkness and void and a deep intuition telling me which way is up.

I grip tight onto the fin, re-establish the connection of my thighs and wonder ‘should I have trusted so implicitly?’ But down there in the darkness sensing the vastness of the form I know without question that s/he is my friend and I am safe.

The Wave

I am on holiday by the sea, watching a girl playing on the beach. I know this girl is really I - younger and more vulnerable - I am my own guardian angel looking compassionately on.

She rides the waves allowing them to pick her up from behind, carry her forward and deposit her a few metres down the beach. She is like an aquatic mammal equally at home on land and in the water, slinking back and forth across the shores boundary.

I glance to the horizon and see that a larger wave is approaching. I want to warn her but realise I have no words and am confined to gesture alone. I begin to wave my arms and instinctively she looks to me: through some private sign language I manage to convey to her the danger.

She begins to run for her life - the wave is carrying mud and debris that will smash her small body to a pulp if it catches her. But she is young, fit, her pace and luck is good - she reaches safe ground on some rocks just as the wave crashes in.

The scale of the wave is utterly awe inspiring; energy and form, the pliant watery creature is forced upright into a towering wall.

The Ocean Painting 2

I am with a middle-aged woman, we are guests in someone else’s house: she is quite large, motherly, but insecure too and seeks my advice.

She tells me she paints: it is something she does on “her own, unrecognised” and has “no outlet for her work”. I remember she has shown me a painting the day before - a colourful abstract piece it was ok but not amazing.

She pulls out another recently completed painting; it is morning time and we are outside, I feel fresh and bright in the early light. Her husband is there too and he watches us mutely.

I hold her painting and look into it: a small picture of a grey stormy ocean, oil on canvass board. I find myself becoming absorbed in the tumultuous sea, rolling with the waves and cast about by the wind. I sense and see rocks rising up out of the water, jagged primal forms: I become the beginning of time, the emergence of land.

I recognise in the work a memory of my own work, a picture that I painted when I first returned to college as a mature student in 1996. My painting was huge: a blue and red sea crashing against rocks, a giant orange globe spinning and throbbing in a psychedelic sky. It was quite abstract and dramatic and it tried to express the beginning of time.

What impresses me with her painting is that it doesn’t try to do anything – it simply is.

I tell the woman how much I like the picture, because it is so real. She is pleased but tells me she is frustrated: she wants to know how can she get her work ‘out there’, how can she earn a living from this. I sense that this question has something to do with her pride.

I start to tell her of the things she can do – she can buy the Artists and Writers Yearbook, which lists greetings card manufacturers who will print her work. Or she can subscribe to the arts magazine ‘a-n’ which has lots of opportunities for exhibiting.

But as I tell her all this I wonder in my soul ‘how would this beautiful painting translate into a greetings card? Wouldn’t it’s magic be lost?’ I feel uncertain about the opportunities that I am trying to ‘sell’ to her and my voice sounds hollow as I speak.

Is it possible I wonder to translate her beautiful painting into a commercial product without losing its essence?

I climb into a car with her and the (still silent) husband. We begin the journey home though I realise as I gaze at the scenery passing by that I don’t know where this is.

Black Rock

I am at sea again, on a large boat that is cutting through the water at a tremendous rate: I stand at its prow. I see something appearing on the horizon, as we move closer I realise it is a large black rock rising up out of the waves. I realise that we are on a collision course and start shouting to raise the alarm.

The captain turns the engines to full speed reverse and we come to a halt only just in time, grazing the surface of the rock as we turn. Everyone on board congratulates me: we would surely all have died had I not seen the danger ahead. As we cruise around the base of the black rock, which is the size of a mountain, rivulets of water pour off its surface: evidence of its recently submerged state.

The rock is black, dense and razor sharp – like granite maybe. But is also is shot through with shining metallic threads: iridescent lightening bursts of precious metal flashing throughout the darkness of its body.

We get off the boat and explore the surface of this new land.

The Sea Picture

Three dreams in the same night:

I dream of a picture frame, framing the sea. The water starts to pour through – the whole ocean, gushing out of this one small ornate plaster work gold leaf picture frame.

I am in a room in a house (the ocean outside now), I am trying to lock myself in as 3 huge she walruses are outside trying to get in, I am not sure if they are friend or foe. They are fat, copious she walruses (sometimes they are black women) – friend or foe, mad even?

Dead rabbits - I dream I have some dead rabbits, I bury them in a shallow grave under some moss – the moss forms itself into a word, what was it? I cannot remember.

I have several dreams that night also of small white delicate spring flowers growing in the moss. They are beautiful.

The Oil Rig

I am at sea on an oil rig like structure. Woofa (my dog) is there. It is chaotic conditions. We need to drop anchor and an old fisherman salty sea dog comes to show me how. Big anchor on the end of chains, he throws the anchor into the water. He tells me to hold onto the end of the chain but I loose it and he says ‘don’t worry, it will raise to the surface naturally anyway.’

Woofa jumps into the sea, and she is, I know in my minds eye, swimming around on the sea bed (she is in a sad sorry state and I want to protect her again). I worry that the salty old sea dog will drop an anchor and trap her down there – he brushes this fear aside. She surfaces (as she always seems to) and I am so pleased and relieved to see her.

She is grey now, the colour of the ocean and I can hardly see her against the grey choppy sea. There are more small dogs on the rig now, they are young, fit and free – they don’t need my care and they run around and play independently.