Two nights ago, my dream had me taking a vacation with my family to some island; the climate was very warm, all tropical-like. Near the shore was this amphitheatre type open area where everyone was watching this depiction of Jesus being killed, buried, resurrected, etc., like some sort of Christian mystery play. Between the burial and resurrection, I wandered off, bored true but mainly just feeling very out of place. I wandered along the beach and although I’m not normally a beach person at all, this one was completely deserted and I found myself truly enjoying the sights, sounds, smells, and feel of the shoreline. I decided to take a swim, and started to get pretty far out, swimming against the rising tide.
Some distance from the beach I saw some kind of monstrous head briefly break the surface of the water ahead at speed, and though, oh, crap! Of course this would happen! Needless to say, I immediately decided to swim back for shore just as fast as I could, but it was too late because very quickly I had been caught in the jaws of some kind of monstrous shark-serpent hybrid; I tried to fight with my fists as the creature shook me around by my legs, but that effort was just a gesture in futility. My break came when a huge wave hit and knocked me free of the creature, eventually to wash up on the shore.
I lay there in the bloody sand, not really up to the task of standing up, and gradually came to notice this spiritual female presence in front of me. I looked up and it was a regally pretty woman who looked young but whose whole manner suggested considerable age and wisdom. Somehow I instinctively thought of her in this dream as a disir, a kind of female family guardian spirit from Germanic folklore. She said nothing, just gazed at me with a distant dignity, and I lay there bleeding with equal stoic silence. After a moment of this, she simply beckoned and turned to head further inland; I was too hurt to stand and walk, so I began to drag myself along behind her, and she seemed way too ok with that but this was a dream so I guess dream me would never tell a lady to go fuck herself regardless of callousness lol.
After some time of venturing inland, we came to this massive rock, rising up suddenly and alone in the middle of the island, the size of a small mountain easily. Looking again I saw that there were a pair of plainly carved, solid-looking wooden double doors set into the rock, and the disir knocked, upon which they opened on their own. She went in and so did I.
Inside it was dark, but a largish room was hewn out of the rock. The place was well-appointed with generally low wooden furniture of dark colouration, leather, hunting trophies, mediaeval weaponry - pretty much like some kind of hunting lodge that happened to be inside a solitary mountain in the middle of an island, i’m sure you know the kind lol.
There were two other female figures inside, dressed in armour and helmets, carrying spears and shields. ‘Dream me’ immediately knew them to be valkyries. My disir walked over to them and said something that I couldn’t make out, and the valkyries replied that their master was away but I could sleep there. That I would miraculously heal, at a slow and steady pace, for as long as I could hold a magical spear over myself perfectly still.
When they said ‘sleep’, they didn’t mean a bed apparently, because what I got was a cold stone slab much like a dead body might be laid on. After pulling myself onto this and flopping down like one of the dead myself, I was handed the spear by my disir, and held it over myself parallel to my body, slipping into a deep trance that I knew would last for a very long time, eventually fading into these beautiful Wagnerian strains… (I guess the source of this dream has a sense of humour)
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The dream that immediately followed found me me several male family members both alive and dead, on a large (for its type) fishing boat. I knew somehow in the dream that it was the place where a sunny and warm island had once stood, but other than that I didn’t know of any significance or anything that might once have happened there.
At ‘present’ in this dream, though, it was a vast and deep lake at very high altitude, surrounded by mighty, snow-covered mountain peaks. At different places on the distant shore I could make out what looked like the deserted wreckage of many similar boats, and some of the frozen wrecks were -old-!
Many generations of my forebears were on the boat with me, but I was the only one actually fishing, while they watched silently. I caught a few during the dream, and an old woman I suddenly realised was on my immediate right at the front of the boat would hold the net for me to deposit the catch into. In the dream I instinctively knew her to be a disir, too. If the dreams are considered liable to chronological arrangement it could be that she was merely the older version of the first one; I personally don’t think such beings would age in the same we that we know of such things, but mainly the -feeling- I got was that they were simply two different identities that were attached as ‘family spirits’ to my line. The first one was like a protective spirit, there was actually little in essence to separate her from the valkyries except that the latter owed allegiance to Odin and the disir was concerned with a particular family line. Also, this older-looking one seemed to be concerned with the Fate of the family, and its members.
Anyway, I fished with a pole from the boat and she held the net out to actually retrieve the fish from the water. Considering the weight of some of those suckers I fished out of the lake, she was a lot stronger than she looked!
Roundabout the third fish I caught was noticeably -extremely- heavy compared to the others, even, and I had to struggle to pull it around to the right part of the boat and then out of the water. As soon as I had it in the right spot, though, the disir easily (how embarassing) scooped it up with the net, and not only was there a magnificent fish that I had been fighting against, but with it -somehow- (no real explanation given lol) was a large chunk of ancient looking stone, worked all over with Norse/Celtic style knotwork and chiselled with ancient, worn runes.
The disir finally smiled, and said that it was an excellent catch worth many spans of years, and that a few more like it would see the culmination of a great undertaking.
Suddenly, in a flash, I knew that the fish were souls, being caught up to be born into the family line, and instantly I woke up.
So there, haha. I clearly like storytelling but sometimes brevity just doesn’t do it I guess!