A Wild Ride

The First Part

This is going to be a weird one.

Weirder than usual.

Listen – I don’t think that I am a “witch” by any contemporary usage of the word. But I do think I absolutely meet the target criteria for the Euro-American witch hunts.

So  - I’m just going to do what I feel called to – but I’m not going to boost this around a lot. This is my unmitigated woo. This is the part of me that trusts my relationship to my dreams.  I don’t obey them, but I respect them.

I often share my dreams by writing something intellectual and agnostic and moving and a wee bit poetic about them.  Because I think dreams are funny, weird, bad, beautiful poetry anyway and I’m interested in all the poems that our dreams write to us and about us.

Especially the dreams that seem to be about all of us.

But I also write these complicated essays around a certain kind of puzzling, confounding collective dream when I know I need to share it, and I need to “package it” in something that makes it easier for me to bear and expose.

To sound a little more intellectually sober and convincing.

I had a friend once, who wrote a play loosely based on my dream work and on me as a character. “I” in the play was still a therapist - so far so good - who’d had a psychotic break and was in an inpatient psychiatric unit (yes, it stung).

But listen I know why he did this:

He did this because I also told him that when I was an actor, one of my favorite monologues was of a woman in an inpatient unit who had to convince a panel of psychiatrists that she really was Amelia Earhart. I don’t remember the playwright, or the name of the play but it was a beautiful monologue, and the only way to play it was this: As Amelia Earhart, to loved what she loved, to have been through what she had, as an actor truly trying not to act.

I mean, I used that monologue for everything and never got cast but I didn’t care because I loved it so much. I used it to audition for boring romantic comedies.

It just moved me somehow. I didn’t consider that I was essentially saying to casting directors: “Hi, my name is Martha Crawford, and I’m weird!”

Or maybe just wyrd. A couple of toes in the underworld.

And the rest firmly on the ground.

Except for when impossible fateful incomprehensible things happened: Like when my body invented a new cancer the week that Donald Trump was elected, and I started collecting dreams about him because I was so sick that I couldn’t think of anything else, any other skill or ability that I retained, that I could contribute from bed.

The possibility of leaving something weird and useful behind when I’m gone - seemed worth it. I wasn’t ambitious about it. It was simply a good, weird thing to do.

I think that my friend saw that. I think that it mattered to him. And he probably also thought that I, and my various wyrd undertakings were bonkers too. That’s love, right?

My point is – this post is from my non-rational self, the same part of me that thought it would be good to collate three thousand dreams about Donald Trump while on chemotherapy.

I still think it was good for me and good to have done.

I really am Amelia Earhart!

Jung wrote through his dreams in the Red Book, and bound and circulated many copies of the Seven Sermons of The Dead – among those who knew him well and were also really intense dream geeks – because let’s face it:

Not everyone is a dream geek.

And when you read through any of Jung’s deep dream-yoga texts of course there is something intensely personal about them but also something not at all personal. Like, annoyingly declarative. Biblical. Archetypal. And the declarations almost drown out the personal aspects. Or the personal aspects are there but feel truly trivial.

Like reading the Epic of Gilgamesh.

And let’s face it: not everyone likes reading the Epic of Gilgamesh.

I happen to re-read it every handful of years because it tickles some utterly strange, incomprehensible sensation in me.

So, if you don’t like the Epic of Gilgamesh or Babylonian mythology and you aren’t a dream geek – and you don’t like witchy chicks  - no need to read further.

I’m going to be sharing a dream because I think it is an image of what lies ahead perhaps just for me, but perhaps also for others who are like me, or adjacent in some way.

I think this dream is one piece of a shattered and shattering and potentially reintegrating collective reality.

Just one piece.  

You have your own instincts, intuitions, fears, denials and wounds. Your own fate and luck and your own suffering and disasters your own myths and stories you tell yourself to get through - and I have mine.

So, I share my piece in case anyone wants to hold it up alongside their own.

I secured a domain last year - collectivedreaming.org – that I’ve been imagining through with my niece – and we haven’t even had a meeting because the world is on fire and who needs more to do right now.

I just really wanted a small little place to hold up all our big dreams alongside each other and just look for a minute. Especially when the world is on fire.

I hear dreams of other people that astound me every day. They comfort me and inspire me. Just the dream itself. The beauty and the strangeness of them. The David-Lynch-Wim-Wenders-ness of it all.

The dream world in and around such danger points, inflection points are their own strange fairy tales and folklore, the kind that haunt somehow but don’t quite make modern sense - that show us the collective crises we are facing from a different frame.

So I’m just going to share the dream here. Bare. Without analysis or strain or poetry or interpretation.

And then I’m going to sit with this one for a long while.

I’m going to read the Enuma Elish and then sit with it some more.

Maybe I will write “a real” essay about it at some point, or more than one. When I know what it has carried me through, or not. Whether it is catastrophizing or wishful or spot on. When I have more clarity and appreciation for the warnings, dangers and gifts it brings.

And dreams are tricky bastards. Like Oedipus and the oracle, they’ll tell you there are dangers ahead, but they omit vital information. Like whom the hell your parents are. (Whom. Not who?)

Take this as invitation to sit with your own dreams, your own myths and wonder about the strangeness and the horror and the beauty and the heartbreak and the primordial forces we are negotiating.

~~~~~~~~~~  

March 2nd

In the midst of political collapse, with an extraordinary cluster of planetary constellations in the night sky I have a hyper-realistic dream a dream that leaves me shaking when I awake but not only from fear, but from the intensity of it all. I don’t think I’ve ever woken from a dream shaking before.

It is nighttime, very dark

We are crossing the Hudson river, from west to east in a ferry -  up near the George Washington Bridge, the south side of the bridge heading to the east/Manhattan side. Washington Heights is now covered with the tallest skyscrapers.

There is one very tall tower made of black glass right on the edge of the cliffs, right at the drop off from the Heights.

I am going to some kind of "experience" there that young people and influencers and such are flocking to. Younger people are making me go. It is way past my bed time.

The ride or the experience is called Leviathan. It has been built into and around the imposing black-glass tower as a feature.

We enter the experience from the very top floor and queue up to take a seat in some kind of dragon train.  There is an immediate 90-degree plunge straight down the entire height of the black tower- through a pitch-black tunnel, and below the building,  plunging alongside the steep palisade cliffs along the Hudson, into the cold black waters below.

The plunge first feels like a scream-thrill, jump-scare – but somehow superficial, cheap. Universal Studios.

But we keep falling into the dark waters, sinking deep below – in an extreme storm and huge waves. We occasionally violently come up for air, but plunge down deeper again before we can even wipe our eyes.

This feels truly life threatening. Not a gimmick. We could all die.

Our dearest old friends, our kids’ godfathers - have come on the ride with me- but they are on other cars much further behind - and are not nearby.

The ride  - I do not know if it is still a ride, an experience – or if this is a wild malfunction and we are a tragedy gone far off the rails.

The dragon train sinks down deep into some kind of underwater pit. It is darker than dark.

At some point I see a small cabin with lights in the window at the bottom edge of the water pit. I leave the ride – which has stopped, settled on the bottom-  and head toward the lights.

There is a  group of people inside that are inhaling some kind of steam or mist  from boiled medicine plants.  A nice gay man, who seems like someone I’ve met once before somewhere - welcomes me in and puts me in front of the steamer: I am exhausted and kneel on the floor and inhale the steam. The nice man supports my back.

In this dream, underwater, in this pit, I inhale the steam and have a hallucinated vision of an older woman with long silver hair, a primordial mother or grandmother, bare chested, who has been shot with a long arrow at an angle- into her heart through her right breast.

I wonder if she is Tiamat although I am not sure who she is, a Babylonian goddess maybe? Witnessing this mother-murder – her own children have done this to her -  seems to be the necessary bottom of the ride.

Oh, it is a ride. This is the experience.

There is a sense that she knows her death is inevitable, she bares her chest to the arrow or spear, closes her eyes, and accepts the blow. There is a sense that her dying is a kenotic self-emptying  process, a generative dying. Something more powerful, more vast, more beautiful will be born of this.

After this I am able to start the ascent back to the surface.

Like Meow Wolf, or Sleep No More , there are exit routes through positioned along the way. It seems that everyone doesn’t get off at the same place.

The stairs back up are well lit. The stairway is a long journey in itself not too steep, through twisty, white-washed tunnels with small shops like on a Greek island. But these are all small museum like display rooms with videos of farmers and naturalists, and indigenous artisans making beautiful smart intimate objects – blankets, weavings, tools, food, dyes. Another room is filled craft and art pieces made by people in recovery and in psychiatric care and incarcerated - all who have never stopped making beautiful things through their pain.

The creation of beautiful things sustained them through their pain.

I know I will intersect with my friends soon and I want to wait here and show them this.

We all make it back to the top to exit but I tell them to wait a second - I have to re-pack all my things in my backpack that come by on an airport-like conveyor belt.

I somehow have many new things and have lost many old things on the ride.  

~~~~~~~~~~  

I don’t know what it means.  I don’t care.

I’m just going to listen to this strange story and tend to how it makes me feel.

I love and feel strengthened by strange stories, dream poems.

I tell you, I am! I am Amelia Earhart!

And I encourage you to listen to your own.