Friday, July 8, 2011

Revisiting A Labyrinth....

....in a dream, a variation on a previous dream: the ruins of a Roman colosseum/labyrinth, built on a steep mountainside in Italy, a confounding maze of precipitous stone steps which I was forced to negotiate if I wanted to go anywhere. At one point I stepped off the steps to retrieve something I'd dropped -- a watch, I think, and once I departed the solidity of stone I quickly began to sink up to my knees in a mire whose gravitational pull was nearly impossible to overcome. I did, however, pull myself out, minus the lost timepiece.

There existed everywhere strange and startling beauty: fountains sprung from cafe tabletops and a numinous light shone through the triangular sprays of water. I met poets and I slipped through secret passageways into restaurant kitchens where the frantic & fragrant bustle of a dinner rush was in full steam. Steps appeared and disappeared before me, changing depth and height in the moment I raised my foot to move forward.

At one point I turned a corner to a thousand-foot drop-off, the path narrowing to a mere thread of stone. A man close on my heels pushed past me, turned and shook his head, continued on. I backed up and changed direction.

My attempts to capture any of this with my camera continually failed: blurry, overexposed or lacking any light at all, or a mechanical failure. The only record I could take with me was in the retelling.

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(And yes, it's rife with symbols and metaphors.)

8 comments:

  1. hello
    came ocer via cro's blog
    wanted to read about the Rabbi

    nice eclectic blog here!

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  2. warnings and adventures ... so many things in one dream. I really believe we get life messages in our dreams.

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  3. Oh my yes - it's your life jumping around in your dream mind, working it all out. That impatient man could also be your male side - what would Jung have called it? Animus?

    Great dream and great re-telling. Reminds me of some of Sheltering Sky. The travel in unfamiliar lands and the excitement/fear factor.

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  4. Your dreams are a whole lot more interesting than mine usually are. that's frustrating when the camera won't work -- it can't, the dream world is not photographable. thanks, sp

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  5. John, glad to have you here!

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  6. Dolores, I believe that our dreams are overflowing (most of the time) with symbols and metaphor that, in our conscious hours, our brains can't quite process. If we pay close attention to these things in our dreams, we can often find a direction.

    And then, sometimes a dream is just a dream....

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  7. Tara, interesting comment about the impatient male side. I'm going to have to give that some more thought.
    xo

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  8. Sussah, I like what you said about the camera not working in the dream world!

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