Dream Log: Ghosts and Rockets

I wanted to keep the latest installment of Wizards, Workings and Walk-Ins above the fold because the feedback it inspired was so fantastic I didn't want to stem the flow, but I needed to write an addenda while the information was still fresh.

One of my greatest pleasures in doing this blog is the feedback I get here, all the more remarkable given all of the crap you see out there on the Internet. The 'Net is such a wonderful tool in so many ways but the fact that so many people use it to dump their mental garbage may well destroy it.

Dreaming is a very powerful thing. Andre Breton said that in our dreams each and every one of us is the perfect artist. To the Surrealists-- and indeed to the ancients-- dreams were as important as waking reality. Scientists still don't understand them- and I'm sure a lot of your fundamentalist materialist types would love to eliminate them from the human experience forever, which is one of the reasons they push all kinds of horrific pharmaceuticals down our throats.

My marsh dreams struck a chord out there and there were some fascinating examples and suggestions offered by Secret Sun readers. But I caught myself about to say that I never dream about UFOs when working on a follow-up and realized that was totally untrue. I've had some insane UFO dreams, one recently of a shape-shifting UFO that split in two and partook in this strange machine dance while I stood on the athletic fields of my old high school. And then of course there was this dream, which I blogged about four and a half years ago.

Last night I dreamed that an enormous, mile-wide UFO was trying to phase into this physical plane over the Tappan Zee bridge. The force of this action was destroying the bridge, very much like the Point Pleasant event. I was primarily concerned with how traffic would get across the river, which is 3 miles at that point. The water was littered with construction debris and floating cars.

Then there's another recurring dream of what I can only describe as ghost rockets. The first example of this I remember was in high school and I was standing on the edge of Cohasset Harbor (right near where the exteriors for Cher's house in Witches of Eastwick were shot) and what I can only describe as a hole in the sky opened (remarkably similar to the image up top, actually) and the rockets came out of it.

Of course during the waning years of the Cold War I interpreted them as Soviet missiles. But I'd have a similar dream several times after that. And then of course there was this dream, which was about actual missiles.

While working on the Silver Star series, I had an astonishingly vivid nightmare of being trapped in Manhattan during a 9/11-like scenario. Only this one was a 'dirty' bomb that arrived by way of a cruise missile. My friends and I watched it zoom overhead as we lunched in Bryant Park. People were bursting into radioactive flames all around me.

SWAT teams were on the streets preventing people from leaving the city, because we were all contaminated. I couldn't get a signal on my cell phone so I couldn't call my wife and tell her I was all right. And at one point I was chased by an armored cop down a staircase. It was real as life - I woke up with my heart pounding, drenched in sweat.

I have more dreams of an apocalyptic nature than I'd like to admit. But last night another kind of ghost visited my dreams. Here's what I wrote on the FB page:

Rik Clay came to me in a dream last night. It was a very strange dream- it took place in Grand Central Station. Rik was very small and dressed like an elf- he wanted to work with me on The Secret Sun (we were talking about collaborating on a project before he died). I told him I would like that but first I had to find a way out of the station so I could drop off some artwork with a client but I kept going in circles finding rooms filled with strange people in strange clothes.

There was a dining room filled with old ladies in traditional Lithuanian dress. They were eating paprika rice. They told me I was the Antichrist but I told them it was just a mask. I looked in a mirror- it was indeed a very scary mask.

Did I mention I re-watched Fire Walk With Me last night?

That was very strange indeed but there's another ghost dream, not my own, that I wanted to share with you. Here's what I wrote back in October for a Re-Enchantment Dialogue:

I apologize for not posting the past few days. One of my cats- Ootschka aka Orange Cat- is terminally ill and it's been very stressful and upsetting for me, as are the usual freelancer tax-time follies. Ootschka was a real trouper for a while and her illness allowed us some very deep bonding experience. But now she's suddenly stopped eating, and seems to be looking all of the time at something the rest of us cannot see.

I've been through this a lot-- Mrs. Wibble and I have always had lots of animals (we had 8 cats and 4 dogs at one point). But this seems to be particularly hard. It may be because Ootschka has bonded to me so strongly-- last week she slept with her arms wrapped around my hand like a kitten-- but also because I've been exploring the deeper realms of my unconscious through visualization and meditation (as well as beginning some creative projects which we can discuss later), which has tied into our discussions recently.

So I've been wide open in a way.

I followed that with this:

I'll tell you what- since I've already been crossed off Richard Dawkins' Darwinmas card list, I'll do you one further. I wrote about this here a few years ago, but I'm beginning to suspect that animals at least definitely reincarnate.

Of course, I blogged about this phenomenon way back in the day as well.

Now last week my wife volunteered at a local animal shelter and met an orange kitten- a boy- who she said acted just liked Ootschka. We'd been talking seriously about the Big Noonce coming back to us and both of us has the same thought: could it be true?

What made our minds up for us was something our daughter told my wife over the weekend. She said recently she's been having a recurring dream of Ootschka appearing to her in a younger form. She said she had the same dream five nights in a row. She doesn't know about the kitten: I'm not even sure she knew about my wife volunteering at the animal shelter.

But reincarnation or no, the synchronicity of it is just hard to ignore. When things like that hit, I pay attention. And I have to say that doing so has produced some pretty impressive results over the years.

And in the end, all that matters to me are results.