Rates of Exchange, Chapter 1
In the dream, I was conscious of dreaming. I could not direct the dream for some reason; perhaps my subconscious was insisting that I pay attention.A gray snake, about a meter-and-a-half long, taken out of a box and handed to me. I held it while its tongue flicked in and out. One red eye gazed at me. What do snakes think, I wondered. The snake started to work its jaw back and forth and it dropped a small black piece of plastic from its mouth. The sound of it hitting the tile floor made me think of Lego. My left arm started to throb - the snake was tightening its grip, its scales turning red as it started head-butting my right hand while I tried to grab it behind the head. I missed on the first few attempts and it bit my thumb, hard, but it left no blood - it had no teeth. I handed it back to the other person in the room and looked for the piece of plastic. It was a battery cover from a camera. When I stood up with it in my hand, I noticed a cat backed hard up against the wall. The cat was in pain and I looked for the snake. The other person in the room - a woman - had a different snake, long and thin and white. The gray snake was in the wall and had swallowed the cat's tail and was trying to pull the rest of the cat through a hole in the wall that was intended for an electrical outlet. I reached into the closet next to the hole in the wall and felt for the snake's tail. I found it and pinched it hard. The cat bounded across the room, released. Its tail was denuded half-way up to the stub. The snake recoiled itself around my arm. I lay down on the couch and the snake curled on my belly changing colour - red, gray, red, gray... I fed the snake breadcrumbs while the woman in the room showed me various Tarot cards. The Ace of Pentacles, The Knight of Wands, Judgement, The Emperor, The Nine of Pentacles, The Wheel of Fortune, Strength, Death.
posted by STA at
16:37
11 Comments:
Ian directed me to your blog
Snakes are a fascinating dream metaphor. To the native american indians, snakes are the truth guides. In the eastern Indian tradition, snakes represent the kundalini energy
"Realities of the Dreaming Mind" by Swami Sivanda Radha
is a fascinating read...she was a German journalist in the 30's,i think, then took off to india, then set up a center in B.C.
You're absolutely correct - the coiled serpent and the microcosmic orbit - powerful themes.
the two snakes, the male & female energy
your snake: the red your root chakra, the grey your your sacral chakra, then the snake resting on your solar plexus, your 3rd chakra...anything to your left, death, but why head butt your right hand? Only you can know about the cat. the battery, kundalini that powers your camera's vision. the red eye not just what a snake thinks but what a snake sees from that 1st chakra perspective
Or, the red - chi/kundalini manifesting in the physical, seeking outward becoming. The right hand - physical manifestation of ego, restraining basic life force. Conflict, clearly. Ego vs id with the super-ego constrained in the dream-state, aware but not able to control. Gray - blocking energy/mid tones/indeterminate force/disharmony.
red: there is no outward becoming until there is full grounding
Gray: yes as usual, i'm a little over optimistic and imagined the gray actually being silver....but gray could also be dirty/muddy water & as you write disharmony, confussions in thought & action, resulting in the curled up confused state of the power center, the solar plexus.....
....but all metaphors aside......the life force is still only getting breadcrums to eat!!!!
Keep 'em hungry, C. Keep 'em hungry. It will be interesting to see just how the character with the dreams is related to the other events in the story.
Well, thank you then for the intellectual and visual food (the only piece mising is sound), yes hunger is an amazing driving force....until the day that one realizes that everything one hungers for is actually found within oneself...
I do have two burning questions though:
1)Why Beauty & Chaos, because their is exquisite beauty in chaos and/or exquisite chaos in beauty?
2)What sound do the Northern Lights make? where and when is the best time of year to catch them?
C,
I don't do audio because it is such an immense emotional trigger and the reaction of the listener is often based in association which I can know nothing about. Something that I might find glorious might be the piece of music associated with a miserable time in someone else's life. Audio of any quality is a bandwidth hogger and, also, given that many people I know listen to music while working at their computer, I'm reluctant to produce an inadvertent Philip Glass concerto.
I chose Chaos & Beauty because they are both apparent conditions - therefore a pun on blogging (every piece of data presented digitally is a copy), because they are states of grace without attachment, and because they are literal parallels to the view I occasionally take of the world.
The aurorae are best viewed near a pole. They occur as a result of the solar wind interacting with the Earth's magnetosphere 100km and above the surface of the earth. Yellowknife is a good place to see them - in winter, obviously. Bundle up. Try and synch that up with the greatest level of sunspot activity
What sound do they make? Hmm. People have described the experience a hissing or crackle with a faint high whine. It should be noted that anything that close to the noise floor may be obscured by even the most minor case of tinnitus. Unless of course the means of conduction bypasses the cochlea - electromagnetic field, in other words. Technically then, what they are hearing is the solar wind interacting with the mag-sphere which produces the lights, not the photon activity itself.
States of grace...grace is one of those words i can never quite get my head around (like metaphysical), what exactly does it mean?
Without attachment.... "B"eauty and "C"haos are on the level of Plato's forms. They exist in their own right on a subtler level and thus without attachment. Actually, physicists and mathematicians have posited 10 dimensions or levels of consciousness if you will. Chaos along with the universal/collecitve unconscious being part of the 4th dimension, which can be accessed through archtypes and tarot. Ego,ID, superego are 3rd dimension conceptual bridges to the 4th.
Beauty,yoga, tai chi being actually from the 6th level of consciousness, a dimension made up of geometric absolutes.
Barbara Hand Clow writes about the 10 levels of consciousness quite eloquently
I think I will head to the south pole to the catch the aurorae, but then again the frozen desert might speak to me some day....
- As does the Abhidhamma, but I will look at the B.H. Clow books. Thank you for that.
As to the frozen desert vs. the South Pole, you will have to be there during their winter (our summer - that Earth's-rotational-axis-not-being-perpendicular-to-the orbital-plane thing), should you want to see them in their glory. You will find Antarctica colder than its northern counterpart.
Adhidhamma...looks like i've got my post call reading.
Have a look at the Institute of Noetic Science website, you might find it of interest
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