Dream: The Rune Lady

First dream:
3:20 AM: The Rune Lady
I meet a woman, and she and I talk a while, and become friends; she offers to read my runes. Her whole setup is very different than anything I’ve seen before; her runes aren’t like the Nordic ones. I think “rune” is only an approximation of the name – it’s something more like reading my tablets.

She’s telling me about the traditional way they read them, and each reader has to make their own – she has just recently completed hers. They’re large – like 6″ across – and they change in shape as the dream progresses, starting out as octagons or hexagons, and shifting to a rounded shape like a section of a ring, or a bone plate. Curved top and bottom, angled straight lines on the sides. They look like they’re cloth covered, and she has two sets, one is beige, the other more of a russet. The two sets have different uses. Some of them have patterns marked on them, but they are all groupings of straight lines, not distinct letters like the runes.

She is spreading out a blanket, it looks like a quilt – she says something about each of the circles being thirteen inches across. It’s mostly black with greys and jewel colors, large open circles inside of each square. We’re sitting on it, and it’s kind of bunched up; we have to spread it out and sort of wiggle ourselves to make it smooth. We’re sitting in a big four-poster bed; I think it’s mine, but not the same one we have now.

She also has a book; it too looks like it’s made of cloth, but more of a burgundy color with some variation, like a batik. It has little groupings of straight lines like the letter I – she tells me this is her pattern for making the runes. It doesn’t make sense or appear to say anything to me, but it clearly does to her.

She begins to lay the runes out in a pattern in the quilt squares. As she lays down one of them, I get a very clear visual image, almost as if it’s hovering above the rune she’s set down – it’s a small black skull. I tell her that I saw it, and she smiles knowingly, and goes and gets a skull just like it out of her bag. She takes it and holds it up next to a light fixture, and appears to read something from it that pleases her. Then, she lays down more runes. Again, I have a strong image, this time of a knife. I tell her I see a knife, and she gets a little bit of a concerned look, and I explain that it’s like an X-acto knife; one that I would use to open boxes, not a weapon. This appears to ease her mind, and she smiles.

She’s taking notes, and I realize that she’s writing on some scrap of paper. I ask if she wants some paper, or if she wants a pad – it’s almost like a joke, because I can see a whole bunch of pads of paper lying around. I go and pick one up, it’s like one of those Mead wireless notebooks, but it flips from the top, not the side. I open it to the back, and there are notes and stuff in here, but I think it’s not anything that I need; before I rip them out, though, I start reading through them, and some of them are in runes, and some are numbers. There is a set that looks like numbers becoming runes; it’s a series of 1’s, 4’s, and 7’s. I wrote the sequence 1474 in my dream notes, but I don’t know if it’s significant. I remember that there were more numbers than just that.

She says something about reading different things; it’s like she would do a rune reading based on various personal items. She says something about reading my sticker-books; I tell her that I never really got into sticker books, and I don’t have any – I might have a journal, or a dream-log, but not sticker books. She had pointed to a hanging on the wall with a picture of a butterfly when she said it, but I think it was something besides a sticker-book.