I will now present (I’m getting guidance that I need to be a lot less ‘secretive’ about these things and make time to share them more) a kind of dream ‘triptych’ spanning over a year. The first dream was from my initiatory (Elder Futhark) rune working, excerpted from a PM here to Orismen. I cannot at this time reveal the name given to the entity depicted because I was told that for the time being I have to “protect” this name by keeping it a secret, but I will say that very recently it has finally been brought to my attention that the name has some precedence in Germanic myth and legend related to the concept of the Matronae. The second two-in-one-night dream I shared earlier in this very thread, and if it’s convenient I’ll just re-quote it here for completeness’ sake. The third dream, is from this morning. And now: it’s novel time.
"Sorry for the delay, I said I would send this days ago and just now got around to it. This dream happened while I was in the field (not deployed, just an exercise in America) for a week or so, right before guard duty which really helped me remember it. It was during the time in my rune work that I was working with Perthi.The part that I can remember begins in an upper room in a very tall, futuristic building. As a preface I should say that I have periodically for a long time had dreams that take place in a future dystopian (by my standards, think Brave New World instead of 1984) society where people live in incredibly vast, super-technological ‘warrens’ of extreme comfort where they exist vapidly without possibly ever seeing the sun. Extremely comfortable, extremely satisfied, extremely safe, extremely controlled. Extremely fake. In these dreams I’m always a renegade or rebel against this society. Not that I ever try and head a movement of resistance or even so much as find another soul that isn’t blindly devoted to the state of affairs, though I believe I might find them if I search enough - in the dreams I am considered a terrible threat to the society’s stability just by trying to escape the gilded labyrinth and find the sun and trees somewhere outside. Considered a threat to the point of being pursued by kill squads. But enough of weird dream shit, onto the one Odin dream that takes place in this setting.
In that upper room, some kind of luxurious residence in one of many towers that I believe stretched above the country-sized mass of the common mall-warren complex, Odin stood before me to tell me something very important. I knew it was him because long before I got into the occult I was simply fascinated by him in particular from the myths of my ancestors, to the point of dreams and the occasional spontaneous mental image, which I at the time put down to some kind of Jungian collective unconscious phenomenon. Go figure lol. A tall, fairly broad-shouldered man with an air of immaculate kingly authority, Nordic features, one eye removed and the other brighter than a sun and sharper than a blade. Longish white hair and a closely cropped white beard. Lines of wisdom and experience on his face and faint shadows upon the shoulders that almost suggested two ravens.
In this room, at this meeting which in the dream I knew was a dire secret, he was finishing up a conversation in which I was to be entrusted with a great treasure, to preserve until the conclusion of some cataclysmic event. I was under the impression that it was some kind of secret weapon, to clinch victory in the last hour when it was time for a great sacrifice to be made.
I told him I would do whatever needed to be done, and he pressed a button that opened a door behind him to reveal this secret weapon. To my great surprise, it was a girl! She looked young, early twenties, slender and blonde and beautiful. Very young and somehow still innocent, but with outwardly apparent incredible inner strength. I mentioned already that she was physically without flaw, so it’s in a much higher sense that I mean when I say she was utterly -radiant-. It was a kind of golden glow about her that betrayed to me that her blood made her the child of a god.
‘My child,’ Odin said softly and wistfully, and I believed in the dream that he did not plan on seeing her again, at least for a very long time. He then told me that she had literally just been born from him, which didn’t seem odd at all in the dream even though she was young but obviously fully grown.
I realized with shock as Odin continued giving me instructions that I was not to partake in this great battle at Odin’s side with some awe-inspiring secret weapon of the gods. Instead I was to stay out of the great fight and keep her safe. So that she survived. I couldn’t believe it. It fucking sucked to hear, I felt almost betrayed. But this one task seemed to have the utmost importance to him. I felt that if he were -anyone- but Odin, he would have been crying. So I told him on my honour it would be done. This is the end of the dream.
It was after I got back from the field that I was shown (without telling -anyone- of the dream) an online article about some medieval manuscript I’d never heard of that predicted ‘Ragnarok’ on the exact night I had that dream. Now I do not personally believe that the myths we still have handed down predicted any sort of given date in some linear Judeo-Christian timeline but rather a pagan, traditional, -cyclical- course of time with -many- beginnings, middles, and endings - but I do believe the occurence of that rumour/speculation signified a definite sign of -changes- afoot. I think this confirms a hunch I have that maybe, my dharma is to try and bring back some of the vanished golden age, after the end of what we currently know. But then, I’m still working at that K&C with the HGA that you put me on the track of, and I started so recently and have so much yet to learn.
Also, I’m convinced I’ve seen that girl from the dream before, in another one a couple of years before. In it she was older, maybe late twenties/early thirties, but with the same features and golden aura that I later associated with a certain type of gods/godesses. She just strolled into a normal-ass dream, everything else paused, I became aware that it was a dream, we exchanged pleasantries. I became very animated and enamoured and felt like we had a long-standing and very intimate connection, she ended by saying we’d meet again and strolled out. Before she left I asked her name, and she said _____. Then she left, everything else snapped back into motion in the dream, and I lost lucidity. This was before I was involved in the occult, but it left a strong enough impression that I remembered it vividly. In the end I took the Jungian stance that it was a manifestation of my anima and represented the magickal qualities taken on in my mind of the ‘ideal woman’ to my mind.
Fast forward to tonight, when before typing this up for you I peruse my translation of the Voluspa, and find the part about after Ragnarok. I read again about Odin learning the knowledge of his own downfall in the cataclysmic battle, and about his siring a very special son for the express purpose of taking vengeance on his behalf. Vali, who matures in a single day and vows not to rest until he had avenged Odin and the gods on Baldr’s slayer. Vali, of whom a possible feminine derivation could damn well be _____ for all the fuck I know. Just food for thought. I don’t take the setting of the dream too literally, just some dreams I’d had for a long time betraying my distrust of the march of ‘progress’, that Odin conveniently used to convey the theme of my relation to his particular current and the changes we’re all living through.
I should also relate the very strong feeling I got that this dream was -not- about holding on blindly to the old (something I’m very capable of stubbornly attempting, btw). To me the key to this dream was that this girl was something -new-, that was -from- the old! Odin was sacrificing himself, because he wanted this -new- girl to carry on his legacy! This still bears some thinking over from me, but I would absolutely love to hear anything that might come to your mind on the theme as a whole, or the dream in general."
And now the middle section of the triptych, the recounting form before of disir and familial connexions:
"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 thought, 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 dis, 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 dis 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 dis 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 dis, and held it over myself parallel to my body, slipping into a deep trance that I knew would last for a very long time, consciousness beginning to fade into these beautiful Wagnerian melodies… (I guess the source of this dream has a sense of humour)
The dream that immediately followed found me with 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 dis, 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 way 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 dis 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 dis 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 dis 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.
Which brings us to the most recent dream in this timely triptych. I should note that the night before (last night), I was reading an early Anglo-Saxon law code (Wihtred’s, I think? also a tract about trial by ordeal), so reading those that are probably a page and a half combined may help throw to light anything I forget to explain here. Here it is:
I stood on the sandy shore of a lake, with evergreen trees bounding all other sides of it save the approach in front of me. I didn’t recognize it in the dream, but it was actually a lake I had fished with my father countless times in my boyhood, and in fact (with a mind to the last fishing dream depicted) the last time I engaged in a real fishing trip had been on that lake with my father and grandfather. When I had that last fishing dream recounted, though, that grandfather had recently died.
With me was a slightly older, bearded and long-haired man dressed like a early mediaeval karl, and before us was an authoritative Germanic ‘kingly figure’ surrounded by his band of loyal warrior retainers. I knew that this was a sort of judgment of the man accompanying me, and I was his “witness”, somehow equally culpable with him for whatever he was on trial for: if he were judged guilty, so would I be. In the dream, I could not remember what he was on trial for, I only had a simple choice: stand by this stranger, or consign him to his fate. Apparently, the dream’s occurrence signified that I had already chosen to stand by this person without knowing what the verdict would be.
The king waited in the shallow water, and called us forward to meet him. We approached, constantly under the watchful eyes of his huskarlar. He asked me if I bound myself to stand by this man and join him in whatever judgment was meted out to him. I affirmed this, and then the king called to the strange man to follow him further into the water. I was left to wait in the shallows, with the huskarls.
The king and the judged talked quietly out of earshot, waist deep in the water of the lake. Then, the king laughed loudly, clapped the man on the shoulder, and the two of them returned. Apparently, we stood in good stead from the judgment.
As soon as we all emerged onto the dry sand, smoke and the glare of fires intruded from the trees all around. I was suddenly, overwhelmingly conscious of the surrounding presence of the collapsing modern world, its buildings, institutions, pollutions, and inhabitants causing massive upheaval in the wake of their destruction. My lucid awareness returned to me with this knowledge of the whole - no longer was my awareness limited to the artificially-imposed sphere of the lake and the trees.
My jeep waited in muddy tracks nearby. The man who had been judged, an anthropomorphism (?) of my genetic and idealistic links to the past, was re-absorbed into my dream body. And the king? The king was Odin, just another mask in Grimnir’s vast repertoire.
As the trees and towers toppled and the waters boiled, we piled into my jeep while the huskarls took positions with bows ready. Odin then began speaking very quickly to me, and they were terse, unsentimental depictions of what he expected to happen, along with detailed contingency plans to protect and safeguard certain things for the good of “the Tree” - Yggdrasill, of course. To keep the World Tree alive through all the cataclysm, so that when the time is right, there can eventually be regrowth.
There was more. Some I don’t remember. Some I don’t need to share just now. But maybe that will mean something, to someone.
Have I mentioned that I’m wholly bonkers?
