Dream-o-Meter: I am Lost in Oceans of Light

On Tuesday night I had a very intense dream that I can't quite shake. I woke up in the middle of the night in a sweat and scribbled everything down. It felt like something greater than a dream-- a spiritual experience of sorts.

I'll try my best to convey it, but it might be hard...


Dream:

I was in my bedroom with Narc, quarreling. He had told me that he was moving to LA because he had just sold his script, and I was upset. We weren't fighting about exactly that, but it definitely had something to do with it. I started to cry and said that I wanted to call my mother.

"Don't call your mom!" Narc said. "It's your birthday. She wants to think that you're here having fun, and it will just upset her!"

I agreed not to deal with it on my birthday, but to address it the next day. He convinced me to go to bed.

"We'll deal with all of this in the morning," he said.

So the two of us got into bed and went to sleep. The next thing I knew, I felt hot sunlight on my eyes, and so I was sure that it was morning. But when I opened my eyes, it was twilight, and my bed was outdoors. I recognized the setting at once. I was on the movie set of Bram Stoker's Dracula, (one of my all-time favorite movies.) The bed was sitting on top of the steps leading to the garden.

(To the left is a picture of the film set, where my bed was in the dream).

Narc was still asleep in the bed next to me. And there was music. Looping over and over, and shaking the trees was a part of the alto line in the fugue in the last movement of Mozart's Requiem.

Lux aeterna!
Aeterna!
Lux aeterna!
Aeterna!

Lux aeterna aterna Lux aterna aeterna lux aeterna aeterna lux aeterna aeterna lux aeterna aeterna lux aeterna aeterna lux aeterna aeterna lux aeterna aterna lux aeterna aeterna lux aeterna aeterna lux aeterna aeterna lux aeterna aeterna Lux aeterna! Aeterna! Lux aeterna!

I shook Narc to wake him, but he wouldn't budge. I decided to get up to investigate. I turned and faced the garden in front of me heading into the maze. (To the left is a picture of what I saw, only the fog was greater and the twilight darker in my dream!)

I began to hear a dull thudding in my ears, kind of like a heavy techno-beat, the shallowly sung alto line still echoing over it. I wandered through the maze, tentatively and anxious.

In the film, Mina runs through the maze at night looking for her friend, Lucy. She finds her on a stone bench being "ravaged" by Dracula in wolverine/monster form. In my dream, aware of where I was, I half expected to find the same scene. I did reach a clearing and see that very bench, only there was not a soul nearby. I noticed a writing desk. It was a Queen Anne style desk made from a dark cherry wood. I sat down. There was a black pencil and a sheet of paper on the desk in front of me.

The thudding in my ears and the incessant fractured Mozart seemed to escalate, and so I looked up. It was then that I saw, sitting on the bench in front of me (about 15 feet away) a woman. She had long flowing dark hair and a dark cloak. her skin was pale and her arms and face were round. She was colorless though... It was as if I were looking at a motion picture taken in black and white. And she had no eyes. Her eye sockets were empty but for dazzling beams of light radiating from them, shooting forward and uncomfortably illuminating my face.

"My eyes," she said.

I was terrified.

"My eyes," she repeated.

Her voice was feminine but sounded dead and it echoed.

"My eyes, my eyes, my eyes," she repeated again.

Then her voice became disembodied from her. Her refrain "My eyes" was now looping over and over along with the techno-like thuds and the Mozart motif. The accumulated effect put me into a trance-like state.

I picked up the pencil and paper before me and started to sketch a pair of eyes. For those of you who don't know me in "real life," I like to draw and frequently draw the same sets of symbols. I have been prone to doodling and sketching eyes my entire life. So I sat half-hypnotized and drew a beautiful pair of eyes.

Just then I heard an enormous fluttering. It was a fluttering of wings. An oversized raven with a frightfully sharpened beak was swooping towards me. I feared it would pluck my eyes out, so I cringed, and ducked behind the desk.

"Do not be afraid," she said. "You share my name."

The raven came and perched on the edge of the desk. Its beak was magnificent, very sharp, and made of a translucent amber. While I stared, the bird picked up the paper and flew the short distance to the woman still seated on the bench. She seemed to pluck the eyes right off the page and place them onto her face.

She stood. Suddenly her cheeks seemed to hollow as she morphed into what I can only describe as one of my drawings. (Again, I know for those of you who don't know me "in person," you don't really know what those drawings look like.)

Suddenly the green walls of the maze began to harden into green glass. I was terrified, as I have had a repeated mightmare about green glass for years and years.

(I know that seems kind of strange and I don't want to give the whole narrative of that other dream, but for the purposes of this story, in that other dream, some guy beats me up and then breaks a stained glass window and slashes my eyes out with a piece of green glass. I had that dream so many times and it was so visceral to me that I now have a "bad luck" association with emeralds and won't wear them.)

In my dream, I was aware of my other dream and I was frightened to be surrounded by all of that green glass. (Especially because of all the business about "eyes" and the fact that in the other dream I end up blinded.) The garden seemed to darken and transform itself into some kind of hyper-Romantic ruined churchyard in a maze of crystallized green.

"Haven't you felt my hand on your throat?" she asked.


Her voice, again, echoed endlessly. The thudding in my ears felt worse. It felt like an ear-ache and a punch in the chest at the same time. I didn't answer.

She extended her arm out in front of her and glided towards me with no greater movement than that. Her hand reached my throat and I felt her fingers clasp around it. It was an incredible heat-- an incredible burning sensation. It felt like my neck was melting, but it wasn't painful.

Suddenly, the glass walls everywhere shattered in an enormous cacophonous roar. Bits of glass sprayed up into the air, turned into emeralds and began to pour down on my shoulders. I screamed until my throat was dry and shielded my eyes.

"Bad luck! Bad luck!" was all I could think.

And then all was quiet.

I opened my eyes and I was surrounded by snow. There was no horizon-- no trees, no mountains, no structure in sight. Just endless snow and a sun-bleached sky. My feet were cold and wet, as I was barefoot and ankle-deep in it. It was as if I were in the middle of a blank sheet of paper. A wind blew and chilled me to my bones. I had to squint my eyes from the brilliant white light washing the landscape in blinding brightness.

It's then that I woke up.

I wrote down the dream then and there, but had nearly forgotten it by Wednesday morning when I got up to teach. I was teaching the early Christian Church in Roman Empire and one of the topics I was covering was "asceticism" and the founding of the monastic movement. I was talking about The Life of Antony and made reference to the depiction of hermits in Byzantine iconography. None of my students could make the visual connection, so I told them I would bring in an example and scribbled a note to myself to find some picture to show them.

After class, back in my office, I went digging online. Googling "St. Antony," I came across several websites listing the Saints. I was procrastinating, and had to fill my office hour with something, so I started looking up various Saints-- the patron Saint of singers, for example, etc. I looked for the patron Saint of writers (for Narc) and found that listed among them was St. Lucy.

I don't know anything about St. Lucy except that I had been fascinated by some images of her depicting her with her eyes on a stem. (In fact, I even put up a post about that back in October). So when I saw her on the list of "patron Saints for writers," I decided to learn more about her.

As I read of her attributes, I started to feel strange. Listed among her patronage, in addition to writers and (obviously) blindness and eye disease, were sore throats and stained glass. It's then that I remembered my dream.

Strange... strange.

The music in my dream, Lux Aeterna: The name "Lucy" is "light" or "bringer of light." The setting of the dream-- the garden from Dracula: In the movie, Mina runs through the maze looking for her friend "Lucy" and finds her on that bench. There was all that weird "eye" imagery in my dream. There was the presence of stained glass in my dream. There was a focus on my throat in the dream.

And here are the strangest parts-- When I was little (around age 2-3), I randomly insisted that everyone call me "Lucy" for a year. Then one day I got tired of it and went back to my given name. I know that sounds strange, but that's how my mom tells it! And in my dream, the woman said "we share the same name." AND, the weirdest part of all--What day was my dream taking place? The day after my birthday-- December 13th. What day is St. Lucy's feast day? December 13th!!!

I honestly had no conscious knowledge of any of that, but sitting there at my computer on Wednesday morning, I had a weird feeling that I had some kind of visit from something in the spiritual realm in that dream. Why did I "happen" to be looking up Saints the morning after that dream? I just don't know...

After that, I left my office and went to Church. But it was Ash Wednesday and the church was crowded and I didn't want to be among the crowds.

I'm not a Christian, in that I don't believe that Jesus was the Son of God or that he rose from the dead, so it's strange that I'd dream of (or be visited by) a Christian Saint. But I do believe in ghosts (I think) and in some kind of spiritual existence after death (I think). And I do think something strange happened in that dream, although I can't quite figure out what it was. I know what a normal dream feels like. There was something different about that dream.

Of course, though, it was just a dream. I'm just not sure what it all means. I asked B what he thought, and I asked Narc. Both of them gave me the same advice-- to sit with it and to let its message come to me.

So that's what I'm trying to do.

Anyway, I guess that's it for now.

I still need to tell you all about my Wednesday night at Narc's, but not now...

(Btw-- in case I left you wondering, the strangeness of Monday night's "inactivity" in the bedroom was resolved, much to my relief and I got my Birthday present.)

I'm not sure when I'll post next--maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe not until Monday! I'm having dinner with Contessa tonight and then going home to crash. God knows, I need the sleep! As for tomorrow-- it's another date with Double-T. (I'm a little nervous.)

Have a great weekend everyone!

-h-

PS: John Donne wrote a poem about St. Lucy's Feast Day which used to be the shortest day of the year on the Julian Calendar:

A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all;
Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.