It began with a dream, of standing with a woman at twilight on a grassy bank. Beneath us, a cold black river flowed. The grass and foliage were wet and the water looked icy. The light was fading fast. Although the woman looked like no one I could name, there was a sense she was my mother. There was also a feeling I was in a sexual relationship with her.
Without warning she jumped from the bank and entered the water with hardly a ripple. A few bubbles floated up. She was safely beneath, holding her breath. I wondered how she could survive such a plunge and remain beneath the water. The thought came that I should do the same, but I knew there was no chance I would survive.
I started to come awake slowly, then, and although I did not see this in the dream, there was an overwhelming feeling I had jumped. I felt I could not breathe. The realisation broke that I was drowning and, indeed, that I had drowned.
Afterwards, I could not easily discern whether the woman was a symbol, or a spirit with an intentionality all her own (an undine, maybe, or a lorelei) or perhaps a shadow aspect of myself.
To decide how to read her, it seemed that a ritual was required.
First, I made a drawing of some impressions from the dream, simply to create an image that might connect me to her. Next I made a simple sigil, which I placed inside a luminous plastic glove purchased from a novelty shop. Our statement of intent: It is our will that the woman from Gabriel’s dream will be evoked into this glove, and only into this glove, so that she might communicate with us through the medium of drawing and writing.
Boffo was on hand to place me under an hypnotic trance. Contrary to appearance, Boffo is very proficient; he also made a video record of the proceedings.
Deep in trance, the glove glowing eerily in the dark, the entity took up marker pens and over the next half hour produced seven sheets of marks and messages. Immediately after, we were no clearer on her nature, but the ritual had limited whatever she was conveniently to the glove, and – having given the entity license to depart – this we happily disposed of in the waste-paper bin, banishing thoroughly afterwards.
I AM YOUR CHILD IN YOU. FALL FOREVER DOWN INTO THE WORLD WITH ME FOR I AM NOT OF IT AND WILL NOT FILL THE WATERS OF YOUR HEART.
YOU LIVE IN ME HERE. I AM THE GIRL THAT SWAM IN WATERS. ME, THE MOST TERRIBLE LIAR OF LIFE IN YOU.
THE CAPTURE WILL WITHSTAND THE NIGHT INTO URNS AND WATERS. FOR NIGHT IS THE ONLY ASPECT OF WHAT MAY FOLLOW SOON ON THE HEELS OF TIME. FOR NIGHT AND OVERSPREADING NIGHT: THIS IS ONLY WHAT MAY BE.
THANK YOU FOR SAYING THAT YOU FEEL ME IN YOU. I AM GOING. YOU WILL FEEL INTO ME THE LOVELY SILENCE.
Impressions from the dream.
The deciding factor in determining her nature proved not to be the contents of her messages, but rather what happened further to the ritual, because another dream came that night.
There was a sense that I worked on a team producing foodstuffs, into which I was putting offal from human corpses. I knew this was wrong, but it was the easiest thing to do, and the only method I knew. I had neither the knowledge or skill required to do the job properly. The company and my colleagues all turned a blind eye to what I was doing, but I woke with a sense of having put something filthy and defiling out into the world.
But then, getting up from this dream to meditate at the foot of the bed, a goddess appeared. She was a woman of about 30 years of age, bald-headed, with a vivid gaze that froze my mind in an overwhelming impression of pure sentience that felt neither mine nor hers. There were no words. It was as if her gaze were unmoving, inescapable, because her gaze was my gaze, and each was arising mutually from the other, both entwined inseparably in each and by this means enduring to the end of time.
I realised that the woman in the first dream had been a shadow aspect of Self, which the ptomaine-like poisons of my mind had prevented me from seeing clearly, until the second dream enacted their ejection into the world.
The immorality of my actions in the dream symbolised what might be seen as a crime against Self, but the dream itself was an atonement for this. What initially could express itself only in symbolic terms of sex, motherhood and drowning was then able to appear in a less dualistic form.
The entity addresses her own distorted appearance in the description of herself as: ‘the most terrible liar of life in you’. She states explicitly that she is not of the world, and that even though ‘you live in me here’, yet ‘I am your child in you’; or, in other words, we each mutually give rise to the other. In the rest of what she says, ‘night’ seems to refer to my ignorance of what she really is, and ‘water’ is our mutual immersion in each other, which was my drowning in the first dream. The reference to ‘urns’, in which human remains are interred, is an interesting prefiguration of the second dream: she seems to be saying that images of corpses and drowning are displays of ignorance (‘night’), yet also the means (‘capture’) by which ignorance can be bypassed. And the last line of her farewell is an explicit prediction of the meditation vision: ‘You will feel into me the lovely silence.’
So who was she?
The one who makes perfect sense.
