Miércoles con los Amigos Invisibles vol 9.

Remembered last night's dream.

Act one, I was outdoors in a beautiful woodsy / fields sort of place. The place-tag in my mind said it was India, but since I don't have a clear concept of what India looks like, the actual foliage was the type of plants you'd find in America. Summer day, blue sky, good temperature, slight breeze. Everything looked extremely alive and smelled wonderful. I wandered around for awhile, smelling and looking at and enjoying everything and (by so doing) drawing in happy mana like it was on sale.

I'd had a conversation with Dad, actually during the week before he died, about traveling. That week and the ones previous he'd wanted to talk guns and money-making schemes and such and I'd kept pulling the conversations to things I wanted to talk about, like Wretched Slum and traveling. We were discussing a dream I had quite some time ago that seemed to me was a real traveling dream, but that had gotten cut short before the images in it fully developed and I'd never been sure why. I was standing in what felt like a gargantuan loading dock, but one not currently in use, looking out through the friggin huge entryway at a gentlly rolling hillside of lush green grass with like early-morning mist on it. And in the dream I'd inhaled deeply, trying to smell the grass and appreciate its prettiness. That action kicked me out of the dream, back into my body, and possibly awake. Dad pointed out that in a real traveling situation, you've pulled yourself up out of your body and are connected to it by a tether of whatever the energy is that invisible people and stuff are made of. Mana, I might as well call it. After all the word literally means, "What is it?" So if you try to draw on environmental mana whilst actually traveling, it weakens the connection between you and your body. Incarnate people--for their spiritual health, I think--are supposed to get all their mana filtered through the body. So his theory was that I got kicked out of the dream experience by my own reflexes (possibly with polite help from whoever was trying to communicate with me) when I was about to do something that would endanger me. My silver cord just snapped back like a rubber band.

Told you that story to tell you this. In last night's dream I was sucking up happy mana like a sponge. Which I can thus take to mean I was not traveling, but rather staying inside my own mindspace.

Act two I don't have good images for; I only remembered it upon further review, and had initially thought this was act three. I was in somebody else's house. She vaguely reminded me of lady boss but I knew it was a representation of a relationship type and not a representation of a person. The house was wood-paneled, not brightly lit though visibility was good, reasonably well-maintained and decorated, but unfamiliar enough to me that I didn't feel quite at home. I was doing something on a computer or helping the person figure something out on a computer, and I'm unclear on who thought who was doing a favor for whom. But somebody was being helpful despite having second thoughts and I don't know what was up with that.

Act three me and Goth (yes, dream-person in the form of my ex-girlfriend Goth) were walking down a street and decided to go into a Japanese restaurant. I mainly knew it was a Japanese restaurant from the language the signs were printed in and the fact that the decor included those nifty walls made of paper. Much like the house I was in earlier, the lighting was dim but visibility was very good. But I couldn't see beyond the main "public" space of the room we were in, and didn't think to look more intently. I didn't actually see anybody who worked there or other customers, just got the vague sense they were around somewhere. Weirdly I did notice a hanging plant (or unlit lantern?) and one of those stand-up fridges full of cold beverages that they have in like Dunkin Donutses or other places where they sell beverages but it isn't a mainstay of the business.
So me and Goth sit down, and this guy comes up to us and takes one of the empty seats at our table. He is dressed business casual and well-groomed but still manages to seem unkempt and nervous with his doughboy figure and anxious body language. Looks sort of foreign, but in a way where you couldn't tell what country he's actually from or whether he's local. He has like a clipboard or something, but we can sense right away that he's a dweeb and is just going to waste our time bothering us without even working up the courage to ask us out so we can say no and be done with it. Eventually we do get him to leave our table but he just goes and sits at a nearby table, as if hoping we'll change our minds. Goth is pissed at him but thinks it's funny, too, 'cause he isn't a threat, just a dweeb.

It wasn't till I was running for the bus this morning that I had the following thought. If, in fact, the dream-person in the aspect of Goth with me was my the little girl, then I am way mentally healthier than even I suspected! It would make sense, too, because the last time I remembered seeing the little girl we were actually sitting down and talking. (Okay, yes, she tricked me into getting nasty bug-worms all up in my hand, but I could totally handle that. Plus I should have known better than to stick my hand in anything in a forest made of things-about-to-die. And she doubtless thought it was funny.)

If that were the case, then our relationship has progressed to the point where we are allies. Arriving at place together, sitting together, being accosted by dweeb together, rebuffing dweeb together, sharing thoughts on reaction to rebuffing of dweeb. That's, like, at least a steel trust level. Maybe all the way up into silver since we had a level of emotional understanding and agreement as well. For her to appear in aspect of Goth is also very telling because of my associations. Girl who is beautiful and dangerous, proud and impetuous, possessive, vindictive and in many ways callous--but as sweet and cuddly and eminently desirable as she is scary crazy. This, you understand, is the balance of my memories of Val as I saw her when we were dating. And five or six years ago this same aspect of my psyche was represented by a scary spider who confronted or leapt at me, from whom I fled in panic every single time. So for her to take on the image of my sexy yet scary ex-girlfriend is a massive and to-be-celebrated improvement.