Being outside makes it a bit easier to relax and to see Chaos and even other realities. Part of it is that I respond to trees and sky and wind, but relaxing into awareness is also a factor. But touching and navigating Chaos—especially jumping, sliding elsewhere, well—I find that a bit easier to envision outside, meditating, and staring at trees and tree limbs. It’s what learned long ago from Odin, after all. The Secret of the Trees, as I’ve previously learned, lies in the suggestiveness of the branches; if Adorno is right and art involves immersive alternate worlds that stand in difference to “this” “normal” “existent” world, then trees and similar branching pathways serve a suggestive, immersive function, or can be made to do so. But city streets, roads, halls, & rooms, more—all of the liminal pathways (duh) can serve these purposes, as mages invest them with aesthetic significance and meaning—and then occult significance and meaning.
It can be easy to slide and fall between, lose yourself. In that sense, it’s like losing yourself in a dream, new dream personae (though, even while lucid, you are still/have a dream persona, even if you’re a persona that knows you’re a dream persona). So sleight of mind—enough submersion in to the dream(s), enough lucidity and awareness, these things are necessary—to gain the right state but also to remain in power. You can also be jerked back, and that strikes me initially, tentatively, as a “bad thing,” but taking friends with you…that’s a good thing. All worlds and all lives are dreams, after a fashion, and our awareness of them is always mediated (whether as art or delusion or dream).
Beyond this, I feel reminded about [glamour]—the Tuatha and sidhe (even the alfar) had subtler but more interesting magics than fireballs and lightning (mind you, such things can be done, but science and tech is more—well, use a sword or crossbow if you want to “blast” someone, or go to a realm/dream with death rays). Fate, Wyrd, curse, bless, healing, etc.—these are all done, but _____ and others remind me that faerie glamour involves just doing things. Don’t penetrate your belief in what you do or can do, but you have to shape others into accepting what’s going on—into “buying” it, but mostly not resisting. _____ quick-silvered because she didn’t realize she was, she did it.
She wasn’t trying, but she also still did it, even unawares. These feats and their ilk are possible when we unburden ourselves of disbelief and self-defeat. Glamour is not illusion, or at least not just or mere illusion. The Abrahamic religions and the technocratic, corporatist paradigm (and its pantheons and mages) have done their best to make it believed to be illusory, all magic itself delusory (they can do that with Dee but not Newton because they need/want calculus and physics and his paradigm where useful) have worked to make it such, but that sense slips as we move into new cognitive notions and pomo paradigmatics. There’s a reason the conservatives rail against pomo but use its fluidity as much as they can—because it opens power and potentiality.
But pursue this line of thought—and [glamour]. Lucid dreaming—try to dream journal again.