soultide

I could never tell you what I did the day before, or where I laid my head that night. These things seem unimportant at the time. Maybe some of my dreams are premonitions although usually they feel more like memories and occasionally I have the bizarre sense of deja-vu even whilst asleep. But my waking mind is rarely aware beforehand of where I will travel that night, so it is difficult to piece together the cause and effect of why I dream as I do.

That night I surfaced into a REM cycle with an uncharacteristic lucidity. I was on a beach, a stony shore that rose rapidly into rounded green hills. Oddly enough a small gauge railway ran from somewhere unknown to a station, on the line where pebbles met grass. I guess I'd just missed the train as people were walking up the platform towards me but I couldn't see how they had arrived there. Shortly afterwards I realised none of them could see me either.

Down by the surf were the one's they had come to visit. It's not a way I'd usually describe them in waking life, but here all I could think of them as were the beautiful youths. Late teens maybe, long haired, a sense of timelessness and innocence about them. They were aware of the newcomers, waiting for them maybe whilst carrying out their activities - running, playing ball, dashing in and out of the surf, a few just sitting in thought.

I got a sense of untouched and uncorrupted masculinity. Men still on the edge of childhood, but without crudity. Some say the characters in one's dreams are symbolic of ideas and emotions rather than people from waking life. On this shore I felt like my Animus had split into facets and peopled a landscape. Or maybe I could lay claim only to one, and somehow I had reached a place where all girl's masculine souls resided. Perhaps with what came later that theory is nearer the truth.

There was no such doubt about the symbolism of the visitors. Out of the station came the Teacher, the Philosopher and the Priest. Here to open the minds of the youths to horizons beyond the sea and the hills. With them came a shadowy woman, nameless. I caught a muttered comment from one of the boys. 'We might need Her later...'

So the scene was almost set, but as the outsider I could see beyond the confines of the immediate world - over the hills and far away as many tales would have it. Indeed far over those green hills was a tower and there lived the King, although living was maybe not an apt description for his existance. I got a sense of sadness, shadows, loss. Someone undefined and hungry for real emotion, total fufilment. The King owned a Thief, but I could not describe any part of him to you, other than that his sole purpose was to steal from others what the King no longer had, and maybe never did have.

One of the oddest sensations in a dream is that of time passing without the normal boundaries of sleep and awakening. I never left the beach and the main characters continued with their business of learning and debating without ever really communicating to me what it was they studied, or why. All I remember is that time went on and one at a time the youths began to fade and then disappear, in such a way that their departure was an unnoticed as my continuing presense.

Apart from Seth. He noticed me eventually, he noticed the increasing absense of his companions. I found him sat on a rock, frightened but full of self awareness. Of all the things in this dream his name was one of the oddest. I don't know anyone in my daily life called Seth, it's not a name I see on the rare occasions I watch tv, I've searched the books I own and found no reference. Long afterwards I scoured the internet for a slightly more mystic connection, all I found was references to an alternative name for the Egyptian God Set - the archetypal fallen angel and hanged man of the tarot.

Well whoever he was, fallen angel or my own animus, we talked. He alone could sense just a little of what I could see, far away in the tower. I tried to comfort him, give him strength to resist the Thief, who would steal his identity, youth and life force for the fading monarch over the hills. He fought hard, was so beautiful, but finally even he faded and was gone. All I was left with was a deep sense of loss and his own words to me - 'post the guardians of all who gave you self belief'.

Some dreams fade even as we open our eyes, some stay so vivid that the next day you can often feel as if you never properly woke up. This one touched something so deep in me I'll probably spend the rest of my life trying to understand every nuance of it. Although I often return to the same dreamscapes time and time again, and have what I can only describe as serial dreams, I've never walked that shore again and Seth never returned. Maybe like the classical scapegoat his purpose was the sacrifice, to save me from being stolen at a time in my life when my own self belief was in danger of being lost to a King of my own.

All I can say is it hits you somewhere deep inside..and some how, it seems more non-fiction to me..too moving and full of emotion to be fiction..
Magestica

it's truth magestica. 10 years old and still no dimmer