Of Death and Vampires
The next two dreams are from the night immediately after the revelation of the Aragorn self. In the first, I am working for two different churches which are situated side by side. On the left side is the Church of Light, a Christian church. The priests in this church say that the the Church of Dark next door is staffed by vampires. But when I visit the Church of Dark, I find that the priest there is not a vampire at all, he just sees things a bit differently. In fact, spiritual vampires are alive and well in both churches, as are saints.
In the second dream I am a bodyguard hired to protect a teenage woman. I drive her and an unknown girlfriend of hers to school in the morning. After we get out of the vehicle she arranges for her body to touch mine suggestively and then tells me that she knows everything about me. "Everything?" "Yes, everything. And I know that we are going to be lovers, and that my parents will soon die and we will inherit everything." I attend classes with her, which of course makes the teachers ill at ease. I find that I am learning interesting new topics.
The scene switches to my employer's house. The young woman's father has asked me to bring him an ancient manuscript, but as he opens it he suffers a paper cut and a drop of blood appears from his finger. There is a smile and a glint in his eyes that seems close to satisfaction. I go to the bathroom to retrieve a bandaid, but by the time I return he has gone into convulsions. I find his wife in the kitchen and as she goes to see her husband, she says "We have been expecting this for some time". The dream ends.
The first dream seems to be a general statement about religious prejudice and my current religious understanding, which is that of a Christo-Pagan or Esoteric Christian. I am caught in internal dialogue between these two adjoining worlds. In both the Christian and pagan traditions there is both healthy nurture and spiritual vampirism, this vampirism being the draining away of spiritual vitality and growth, sometimes for the sake of individual power, sometimes for the perpetuation of an institution, but most essentially because of each individual's fear of growth and change, an undying clinging to outworn death-in-life.
In the second dream, the dream ego has taken on the indentity of Aragorn, the protector of youthful innocence and energy. In previous meditations I have understood myself to be the regent of my own soul, and this is a similar theme. The omniscient young woman is of course Sophie, and her callous sounding statement about the impending death of her parents needs to be taken in the metaphoric context of this dream: her parents are in fact the outworn concepts of my own Self, who are in the process of experiencing a Death/Transition into a new mode of consciousness. In attending school with Sophie I am further initiated into esoteric knowledge and wisdom - for many years school or university has, in the language of my dreams, been an image of spiritual progression within community.
In the second part of the dream I had a sense that Sophie's father was in fact a spiritual vampire, held together by an unhealthy parasitical clinging to a life whose time had past. In asking for the revered document, he seemed to know that in this ancient wisdom lay his path to escape, that a trivial paper cut would give him his overdue release. The most logical interpretation of this document would be as an image of the story of the previous night, the discovery of Aragorn and the foolishness of the ego's current position. With a degree of happiness and relief, thus dies the old self.
Sophie's shadowy girlfriend is of course the ever elusive Eirian, who played almost no role in this dream.
A final note: last night I inadvertently stayed up too late, and then lost even more sleep due to the time change. But although am tired, my energy level remains high - they are two quite different things!
the fan catching fire in the wall is like the image of a jet engine igniting. It may sum it up best to say that what I am doing right now is listening to hard edged Creed rock music while burning rose incense candles: i.e. masculine plus feminine both very much in evidence.