I'm in a cooperative house on a quiet corner in suburbia, south of San Francisco. All brown wood and big windows. A warm house. I like it here out of the fog belt. But I'm not sure I live here permanently--may be just subletting a couple months. The situation's confusing; people are slowly but steadily arriving, filling up the house. Well--not human people. They look human, but that's just cover. They're gods.

One of my housemates, a Chinese girl about twenty, an artist, recognizes one of them. Gwan Yin the Moon Lady? Or an American equivalent, anyway--a goddess of compassion. But passing for human like the rest. She arrived as part of a family, in a big old car. Definitely a goddess, though--when my housemate recognizes her her jaw drops in awe. She goes up to the visitor and suddenly looks only waist-high next to her! Yet the goddess looked normal-sized, standing alone. It's her relative spiritual size I'm seeing--and it's not like my housemate's a spiritual dwarf! A generous soul, in fact, though subdued now, awestruck. She starts to bow to Guan Yin, but keeps going--kowtows in ancient imperial style.

The goddess looks touched, and pulls her up, and hugs her warmly (same size, now!) saying "This is America! All created equal, right?"

I recognize her dimly, too. We've met. She was...oh, the ingenue-goddess who played the Singing Firebird, in Firebird and Minotaur. Wow, that dream was years ago! This is some reunion!

Later, in the mild summer evening, I'm winding down my day, getting ready to sleep. A lot of excitement, with gods visiting and all. I'm tired. But I hear noises on the porch and go out to check. It's two young women, Fishel and Frish, supposed to be twin daughters of the family. But they're undercover goddesses too. Fascinating ones: when their cover slips, they have canine snouts and big brown whiteless eyes and mobile, pointed ears, and shaggy wolf-tails. I find them really cute and want to pet them. I tell myself "Goddesses aren't pets" but the urge lingers. So adorable!

I know I've met them too, repeatedly: I even lived with them once in Russia, in a dream called The Boris Badenov Solution; they were absent-minded mad scientists (but cute ones)... oh, and they were the Anubis Twins, too, in Firebird and Minotaur. I've always liked them, even though they're ancient goddesses of the hunt and I'm a vegetarian. So what? They never hunt me, and friends don't criticize friends' diets.

Overhearing them, I learn that they and the Firebird are somewhat specialized gods. People who came to America from choice, or whose ancestors did, can call on the Twins, while only people brought here as slaves, or who fled here as refugees, can call on Compassion. They're not supposed to work together, or even meet, for they aren't thought of as compatible. Humans are supposed to recognize only whichever one's the appropriate deity--the other(s) automatically get seen as merely human.

I find this weird. I readily recognize all of them, and LIKE all of them, and see them as perfectly compatible. But then maybe my heritage includes both kinds of ancestors. And their rules ignore a third group: people whose ancestors (or past lives?) have been here all along--Native Americans. Or maybe I just can see them all because I'm a shaman, not human.

I don't want to choose between them! Instead, I want to try introducing them to each other, see if they can make friends. It's time to change their old rule--it's too limited.

I leave the door open for them so they can get in, and go to bed. I'm tired, and there's time. Gods are still arriving in the night.

Might as well relax 'til all the players have arrived...

NOTES

• Fishel and Frish first appeared in dream 14 years ago, in 1989: The Boris Badenov Solution. They reappeared, plus Compassion, in 1996, in Firebird and Minotaur. But seven years is a long time; I didn't realize the Anubis Twins in "Firebird" were Fishel and Frish returned! But 'third time is the charm'; the dream itself prompted me to look up the other two. Dreamworkers should watch for this sort of extraordinary recall in dreams; its technical name is cryptomnesia. So... three dreams of these goddess-twins, regular as a heartbeat, every seven years. Weird!
• Canine deities: like Anubis, the canine-headed Egyptian god! Makes me think of Egypt, of Joseph, the first recorded dream interpreter, and Pharaoh's dream predicting Egypt's crop-futures: first seven lush years, then seven of famine...
• Guan Yin (or Kwanyin or Kannon, the Moon Goddess of China and Japan) has always meant compassion of course--but here, as Firebird, innocence and idealism too.
• Fishel and Frish are huntress-twins, a bit like the male Warrior Twins common in world myth. I think they mean predation, or maybe appetite would be fairer--the unapologetic pursuit of your tastes, hungers, desires. Following urges like dogs on a scent.
• The three goddesses' compatibility: The dream suggests desire and compassion aren't as incompatible as many religions say. Not all desire is devilish, even if it gets a bad rap in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism! Trust me--as an ex-anorexic, I know firsthand that there are worse things than following your appetites. Urges have natural limits. It's denial that breeds fanatics!
• Their sexiness: the dream's saying something about sexiness too. Dreaming or waking, I'm only attracted to women whose souls are big, and as sexy as their bodies. So if all three goddesses turn me on, that's a sign their souls are all my type--that is, more similar than history's made them out. They may like each other--and get along, despite the ancient ban.
• Myths modernizing: on TV today, Joseph Campbell said "we need to update myths." Well, the myths themselves seem to agree. Segregation and hierarchy and bloodlines... all wrongheaded. Guan Yin said it: "This is America--all created equal, right?"
• ACTION: Patience! The gods aren't all here yet. Fourteen years, and gods are still arriving in the night. But at least the ones who are, are getting along.

FOUR YEARS LATER

I'm posting this dream as a sort of corrective. I built the World Dream Bank AS a corrective, of course, to balance the two trends of dreamwork I see dominating this decade at least:

1. sleep-researchers' doubt that dreams mean much of anything at all, and
2. Jungian and New Age over-emphasis on deep symbolism and mystical thinking--neglecting the daily, the literal, the obvious.

...sometimes! Not always--there, I disagree with Jung! Some dreams are sharp and immediate; and some are their own worlds; and some are concerned with others, not self at all. But some, like this, are just one step in a long developmental dance. And seeing the dance as a whole, and comparing one dream to others in previous turns of the great spiral can help (if you can spot the echoes! Not always easy...)

Yet such dreams are rare in the Dreambank. Not because I don't dream them! But I tried to choose vivid, satisfying, complete stories. Color, magic, sex, humor, bizarre images, yes, but I still wanted coherent stuff; not chapters in some immense murky saga. I had an agenda; I was out to show dreams are life, living experiences as real as any other; some of your best times. Not mere symbols, and certainly not universal symbols. How boring, if we all had the same inner life!

I wanted to correct a Jungian bad habit--archetype-hunting, treating all dream-thinking as alien to the conscious, mystical, impersonal. So I looked for focused, coherent dreams full of personality. And found them! But they ARE a biased sample--just 3-5% of my own dreams, plus (as I write this) a hundred or so dreams from others. I could have built an equally big site of purely Jungian dreams! It's been done, so I chose not to. Nor did I want a nice dull site full of average, incoherent dreams. It's been done too (see Bill Domhoff's Dreambank.net at UC Santa Cruz. Random raw dream accounts from semiliterate people--rather like reading random blogs and saying "So this, then, is literature.")

But Fishel and Frish and Firebird IS a Jungian dream. It's not a story, but one scene from an epic I don't know the end to--my life. And I included FFF to point out (especially to dreamers having a lot of FFF-y dreams) that they aren't necessarily fragments, broken, worthless. I need to correct the impression that I always dream coherently, in neat little stories. Or, for more cynical readers, the impression that I'm lying, writing fiction. Neither is true. I dream all sorts; I just presented what I guessed were the most interesting types.

But based on my email, that's given others a false impression of my dream PROCESS. My dream-journal has blank nights (usually but not always sleep-short); nights of incoherent dreamlets; great isolated images; coherent dreams I can't clearly recall; dreams with messages I don't understand, now or ever; or messages I do get, that I judged uninteresting to others; dreams like this, mere recurring themes in a Jungian lifelong symphony...

I just selected out all the catchy tunes and posted them, that's all. WDB is biased toward readability--forgivable in a website, I think. But dreams like FFF just aren't readable as stories, and yet have value. I want to acknowledge that--and help sensitize readers to the potential in undramatic dreams.

Sometimes the gods arrive quietly. Incognito.

See you in 2010, I guess... for our next installment.

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