THE DREAM

Stephanie and I are in the ocean. At first it seems like we are standing in fairly still water, maybe up to our waists or less. We are talking. Stephanie is wearing a short sleeved dress or shift. I don’t know what I am wearing. At a certain point, big swells begin to come in and it is inevitable that we are completely wetted. We give ourselves over to this.

Then I see some fairly large waves coming in--now we’ll really get wet, go under as the breaking wave goes over us. We do and it’s fine.

We start to go in to shore. Stephanie is a bit ahead of me. She is in shallow water. The water is beginning to pull back and recede and I am pulled back and out, as a large wave gathers itself. Stephanie looks alarmed for me. I indicate that it’s all right. As the big wave comes breaking towards me, I give myself to it and it carries me right up onto the sand--like a great body-surfing ride. I get up and tell Stephanie that was a great ride. We walk up onto the beach, to a place where we seem to be camping.

NOTE

"Stephanie" is the late Stephanie van Zandt Nelson, with whom I did dream work for about 15 years.

THE PAINTING

• The basic composition for Oracle--Sea Change came from a watercolor I did in Malta of an oracle stone at the temple of Hagar Qim. The circular openings carved in some of the stones may have been used to transmit sacred information or chanting to the worshippers within.
• But when it came to the view through the oracle hole, I didn’t paint the landscape that I’d actually seen, but an image from the dream.
• The spirit face looking into the hole has shifting glowing colors like an egg-shaped stone from China that Stephanie had given me.

--Jenny Badger Sultan

EDITOR'S NOTE

This could be a simple dream of friendship, but it may well be that Stephanie here means dreamwork! At first they're wading; the waves get bigger, they're in deeper. But rather than finding this frightening, Jenny rides the wave...

--Chris Wayan

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