Summer Solstice came and went. I was Kentucky, enjoying grass and trees and fire flies and Lauren’s wedding. Full moon arrived and left as well. I’ve been sluggish lately, the way all of Tucson gets sluggish this time of year. North and East sides of town have gotten some proper monsoons already, but so far just clouds and winds here, and the promise that rain does exist and will come to my neighborhood soon.
I have been:
>working on sketching my bone set
>attending some workshops at Ninth House
>reading and reading and reading
>swimming in pools, eating hot dogs
>watching an herbalism DVD where a guy says “poultice it!” over and over
>raking mesquite pods out of the yard to hopefully cut down on Peggy’s obsessive bean consumption
>normal summer things
So what’s becoming? Who visits while you’re dreaming? I crack an egg for my Yaga self.
The other night I had a vivid dream where I was back home in Pennsylvania. I was meeting with my ex-boyfriend’s twin brother who lived in this large house on the Perkiomen Creek. It is a specific house, right at the Arcola Bridge that I would drive past often. This house used to be a grist mill some 200 years ago and is almost entirely made of stone. When the creek flooded I always wondered what it was like to be in that house, did all your stuff get ruined? It is a place I have dreamed before.
In this dream, Matt lived there with his wife and collie, and I was there to help him with something. He showed me a hidden box filled with necklaces. The necklaces were sorted into a few groups but were tangled into balls. I picked one up to examine the intricate design. This one was made out of fine paper that had been folded and cut into accordion design, and had the face of a woman in the center. The paper had ornate and meticulously crafted details that told some sort of story. There were several necklaces of this kind, each with the face of a different woman. These were all of his ex-girlfriends. There were 50 or so ex-girlfriend necklaces (for the record, Matt IRL definitely does not have this many exes and even in my dream I thought, “I thought Matt only had 1 or 2 exes. Who are all these women?”). Another large pile was filled with deceased pet necklaces. Matt explained that he made these necklaces by hand and each necklace held a specific bad memory. It was immediately clear to me that his torment and sickness was due to his inability to process bad memories. He had compartmentalized them and placed each memory into a necklace which was then stored away and ignored. I was supposed to untangle his necklaces and help incorporate them back into his life, or he’d never be well. The necklaces and the house itself both felt deeply haunted. A dark, uneasiness permeated the dream. I woke up.
Later that day I got a text from an unrecognized number. It was Matt, who I had not seen or spoken to in probably 6 or more years. He had just texted to let me know something I retweeted was funny, but none-the-less it felt unsettling to see him in my dream and then hear from him out of the blue the next day.
Obviously, there’s a lot of possible dream symbolism to unpack there… necklaces, haunted houses, mills. But I think the wisdom to be gleaned is pretty explicit. Have you attached memories to things and hidden those things away? How can you better incorporate your past into your present self? Maybe it’s time to dig through the necklace collection, to unstick the bad energies, to clear the miasma from this sick house.