Last night in the glade, K and I quickly found ourselves in one of my institutional dreams—and I trusted to him as a guide. My Presence as […] caused some reactions—muted reactions, still—from the dream personae. He counseled me to try to find my way outside. So I went to a window that looked like it went outside, and I cut through it with ____________, kicking it out (which was an odd kinesthetic sensation for my foot)—on the other side, though, it morphed into more of the interior, with a garden veneer. It was almost like my mind didn’t know how to get outside, didn’t want to get outside. So, I reflected, with K—what to do? Slicing to the outside the direct way didn’t immediately work. Changing the dream became one path. I tried chalking up a door outline, a bit Changeling and Beetlejuice, and this seemed to work better, as did gesture-projecting, projecting while gesturing outwards, something like [Elethis]. I found myself in the wood.
I suspect part of it is specific desire and will—I have a vague wish to dream outside the institution, but I don’t know where. I’ve spelled for “Saiyûnor” and “Haisuith”—but while I have those words and broad concepts, I don’t have a concrete grasp of what that includes. I probably want far more specific images and settings—the Summerlands plains, the Dark Wood in the Shadow of Elethis—a forest and wood more generally.
Another alternative are “the forests of Corunor.”
If part of my institutional dream problem is a matter of desire—to break out of those dreams and to dream of what I want to dream of—magic, woods, waters, night, windy places, deserted streets, etc., fey, the Otherworlds, the gods, and more—well, I also have a similar head space issue while awake. My mind and spirit have trained to dwell in institutions and work states, and I have to reclaim/recover after the fact. The Otherworlds recede and then they rush in, and I wonder “WTF, was I that blinded to them?”
—Screens trying to suck my attention to useless shit—
—but the institutional dreams suggest a deeper level of halthaya beyond what I have consciously. Yes, the mind and spirit respond to the experiences and sensations of the day’s experience—the day we’ve had—but there’s something more.
[work] is not that distant from outside and [city] and home. I’ve gotten okay at emerging from that. [unis], these are larger things—institutional entities and campus-scale egregores and spiritual domains. I feel I had an experience of [uni’s] ‘scape in Koranith today, and I was not consciously aware of it at the time. And I think [city] has something similar—
—specific will leads you to an active Presence and intention. But these alterior experiences at [uni] and in [city] reflect another level that has a soporific aspect, or it has. A bit mûl-ôl, a drag, though I wonder if one can negotiate that.
In a sense, I want to navigate and negotiate this underside, the professional side, and the Otherworldly. I think I want to explore my Presence in that “Underside.” And that Underside may point to new magical potentialities.
Is Underside closer to the LW? The LW can include Dead lands and that sort of thing, but the concretized, reified aspect of things may also be a strong factor. Hell, it may have such an influence on people and myself—that might explain the soporific element and that Paxson associates with LW locales for the dead.
—Remember shadowed gaze—
The dead appear in buildings and institutions often. Their ghost dramas reflect the kind of droneism behavior we not in—well, institutionalized behavior.
Stress does something similar, though. Anxiety. The LW and those go together, or can, like contracting into pattern, order, habit, reification, the limiting of potentiality towards actuality to—what?
If potentiality -> virtuality -> choice -> action -> actuality -> what? Is the LW Law and the HW Chaos, with the MW trying to balance in between?
That is why rousing the dead to proper consciousness can be a task. Why Odysseus needed black ewe blood.
The Abrahamic cults are LW cults in a way—especially Xianity and Islam—trying to contract the world’s potentiality to one actuality—Judgment Day, [etc.]. To turn all the world into the LW and the Dead.
I suspect I want to learn how to negotiate the LW just to remain Present & Bridging overall.