THAT DAY

Today, in therapy, a miracle--no more bizarre childhood memories come up! Positively unnatural--all the major players seem accounted for! Yet this week's dreams seem to be urging me on down to one last level, older and deeper. But what's deeper than infancy? Past life, the spirit world? I didn't expect that, nor did my therapist Shelley, but she agrees the dreams seem to be saying there's more. Next week!

THAT EVENING

TV. On Working, Pfizer protests the secretaries' exclusion from the lavish Xmas party for management. It's not justice; he wants to impress one so she'll date him. The boss catches on, and tells him she's being promoted above him, goads him into saying "She's just a secretary for God's sake!"--while the boss turns a speakerphone secretly on, so she can overhear. Mean, yes, but Pfizer, usually the show's token idealist, was pretty hypocritical.

Aw, quit avoiding the issue--shelve skepticism and read up on pastlife therapy! I start with therapist Michael Newton's Journey of Souls. He says in his experience detailed reviews of past lives (or the spiritual contracts operating in your present life) often take several steps, agreements and verifications--like getting into a safe deposit box. Such memories, like memories of early childhood abuse, can interfere with daily life, and mustn't be dredged up casually.

So before sleep, I ask my dreams yet again for information from past lives. Remind myself that I've been negotiating to see them in all those archeology dreams I've been having. And in them, I've gotten conditional permits from various guardian spirits. Now's a good time to face whatever's bothering me--I'm on break, so I can fall apart for a while without losing a job or even missing school. I'm ready. So why have the dreams been nagging me? What's there?

THAT NIGHT

I dream I'm in an old, cold, drafty hunting lodge: Damocles Hall. Looks English, 19th or early 20th century... and I bet no one's cleaned it since then, either! Cobwebs. It's long, narrow, tall, and jammed with junk. Tools and pans and weird rusty gear hang from the rafters and walls, dense and shadowy over my head, so smoke-darkened I'm sure no one's touched it in generations.

The rafter-junk hangs so low, my head's at risk; I must wind warily between sharp metal tools. Relax and I'll lose an eye.

A huge, rowdy dog comes in. Or is it a wolf? An outside creature, not allowed in. Plays with a smaller dog who IS allowed in. I shoo them both outside. I want to play with the wolf too, but getting rowdy in here could set the pans swinging and clanging for hours--that's why the bigger dogs got banished.

I admit this chain reaction of pots isn't quite the Sword of Damocles, but it's loud and scary... for some items really ARE old weapons and really COULD cut, if left swinging at head level. Is any of this junk still useful?

A woman asks me about the stove. It's a layered old monstrosity--antique gas burners, welded onto a heavy iron wood-burning stove a century old. Above it, a crude hood of foil or aluminum sheet metal, formed into arches. Cheap-looking, and too low over the stove for me: it gets in the way when I cook. But given the nightmare hanging from the rafters just above, it's the only thing the installers could do short of a massive remodeling--and then we'd have to sort the hanging junk of Damocles.

Leave the house and lead two people through a gate into someone else's garden. Skirt the back edge a long way, till we reach a gate opening on a green hill--the commons, where I relax. This trespassing route is our only direct access--there's been a right-of-way here for centuries, established by long tradition and common law, but as the woman I led comments, "It feels a bit awkward, barging through their yard, doesn't it?"

"Well, yes... I feel odd invading their privacy. So I cling to the wall and look the other way..."

At last I walk back to Damocles Hall. Inside, I meet a girl with a wolf-grin, in a short red dress. She has the exact same aura and energy as that wolf-dog--I think it's her! A cute werewolf. I tease her, and get bold enough to stroke her velveteen dress as if it's her pelt, and she growls happily. She likes me!

But I WANT to dance with her and romp like wolves and get wild. And we can't, while that frightful old stuff hangs over our heads! Move too fast, and what'll come down on us?

• The lodge and tools = literal? A past life on some British farm? The vividest dream image in a long while. But they could be symbolic, too. The old tools may be the old dreams I'm typing up, OR old traumas from past lives.
• "Relax and I'll lose an eye" = lose an I! Lose my current self. Self-image anyway.
• Low ceiling over stove = low standards in this life, lack of ambition! Because anything higher will mean sorting through the hanging stuff from past lives!
• The right-of-way... so the way out of past-life issues to a clear area leads through another's garden where privacy issues are a problem. Is this another person, or a different life of mine? I have the right to go through--but I'm still uneasy.
• The girl in the red dress I want to play with = on Working, the Christmas party had a nasal-voiced girl in a red lowcut dress, who rigged a wire like a big halo so a sprig of mistletoe hung over her all evening... so she could force reluctant men to kiss her.
• What hangs overhead like mistletoe, or the Sword of Damocles: the fear I'll let myself be entrapped by someone I don't even really LIKE!

Answer: get outside!

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