Dream: Can I Borrow a Coal and a Censer?

Dream 20020804, 8 AM:

Can I Borrow a Coal and a Censer?

I’m at a bed and breakfast with Chris. For some reason, I slept outside – I remember finding a sheltered place under a building’s eaves and laying out a bedroll, and I also remember an extra-long Thunderbird, light blue, in a parking lot. When I come back in in the morning, I have cleaning tools, a broom and a mop, and I have cleaned up some sort of mess on the porch. I know that they would usually clean up after guests, but the mess was my fault and I cleaned it up.

As I come inside, I can smell food, and it makes me hungry. I realize that they make breakfast until 10 AM, and so I collect Chris and head out in search of the food.

Later, but seeminly connected to the same dream, I go outside, in the back of the building, and Robert Black Eagle is here. He has a big table altar full of all kinds of stuff, and I want to join him in whatever work it is that he’s doing. I take up a place across the altar from where he is, and he and I talk. I want to burn some particular kind of incense, and I ask him if I can borrow a coal and a censer. He moves some things around (the table is *very* full of stuff) and I am looking at the things he’s got on the table. There are all kinds of jars and bottles, bowls, and bags. He touches a little cloth bag full of something lumpy, and says, “Yes, we still have a few of the round coals,” but then he moves on and fiddles with other things. I ask him again if I can borrow a coal and a censer, thinking that he may have misheard me; he points to a brown stoneware bowl (it almost looks more like it’s carved of rosy-brown soapstone) which has a piece of charred wood in it. It looks almost like driftwood; it is rounded and oddly-shaped, doesn’t appear to have been split off of a tree at any point. I take a coal from something else on the altar that is burning, and try to light it, but it doesn’t seem to want to light. It also seems to transform a couple of times during the process, although I don’t notice the change in the dream – after the lump of wood, it turns into something like a cross between a hops flower and a pine cone, which seems to glow around the edges of its scales, and then it transforms to a chunk of sod, with the tips of the grass glowing. I know that some of the little jars on the tables are mine, and have the herbs that I want to use on the coal. I pick up a couple of bottles, sniff them, and take pinches of powder out of them and put it in the palm of my hand. I want some sandalwood, and I pick up a bottle that says sandalwood, but when I take a pinch out of the top, it seems to be clove; I look at the bottle from the side, and can see that it is layered with several different powders. One of them appears to be sea sand, I can see that most of it is sandalwood, and there are others I can’t identify through the glass, browns and some nearly black, like charcoal. The label on the side says something like “Sandalwood: For Urgent Situations.” The bottle is shaped like one of the old Coca-Cola glasses, with more space at the top, but then a narrow lip and a cork. I start to shake it up, so that the powders will be blended. It seems like it takes on a motion of its own, like a little dust devil inside the bottle. I open it and sprinkle some onto the coal, which is only glowing a little, and some smoke comes up off it, but it seems like there is so much sand in the blend that it puts out part of the glow of the coal. Robert says something about sod being already half charcoal.