Dream: Solstice Party Crafts

Dream 20031213, 7:40 AM:

I’m at some kind of gathering at someone’s house. M. is here, as are several other people I know from long ago at B&B. M. and others are working on various projects, some seem to be getting a dinner ready, while others are doing crafts. I watch for a while, sitting on a tall barstool a little bit out of the way from everyone else. I look down at a long-haired black cat who is nursing several very old kittens (nearly full-grown themselves) and I think to myself that pagans are more likely to have fertile animals, because it means something different to them. Her round pink teats show through her fur.

I decide that I need to do something to be more helpful, and I walk up and ask one of the people working on crafts if there’s anything I can do. She has me get a box of hat wire and take it to another person, and then a guy shows me how I can help with a project they’re doing for the kids. It involves taking these little pieces of paper that look like very thin plywood, and pasting pieces of white paper to them, then drawing lines on the white paper with a scribe so that people can write wishes or some such on them. The pieces of brown plywood paper are some kind of notarial form on one side, which is what we’re covering over. It’s imprinted in red ink. I work on this for a while, completing several of the blank pieces. We talk as we work. One of the guys, I think it may be B. L., asks how I’ve been. I explain that I’ve been well, and tell him that I’ve been circling with Wren’s Nest, and that I just did Dedication, which made me happy to do. I remark that I really enjoy being in a BritTrad group, but I think a lot of it is J’s personality – he says that she is indeed very neat. I say that I think there’s something about her, though, that’s a particularly British sensibility – I look around the house, and say that the covenstead is kind of like this place – light, airy, lots of white, very clean. Lovely. As I’m walking from one part of the room to another, I see J. sitting at a table, obviously hard at work on some paper that she’s writing on. I touch her shoulder, not to get her attention so much as to acknowledge her presence, and she looks up, smiles, and goes back to whatever she’s working on.

Then, we’re sitting around a living room space, talking and drinking. A young lady sitting to my right asks me if I’d get her beer; it’s further to her right, but there are chairs and such in the way, so there’s no easy way to reach it. She identifies it by name; it has some longish German sounding name like Lillenfelder, but it’s in a Round Elm bottle. I get up, walk entirely around the group of furniture, and when I get to the table where it sits, one of the guys hands me a tall round can. I look at it, and think that it’s the wrong one; I read the label for a moment, then pick up the large brown bottle beside it, which is the right one. I walk back around, and hand it to the lady. I say that I wish there were an easier way to do this kind of thing; when I’m in a dream, I often can just reach out my hand and snap my fingers, and whatever I’m reaching for pops into my palm with a smack. A couple of the people question this, and I explain the smack sensation, demonstrate the snap-and-reach motion, which of course does nothing. I go on, telling them that realizing I have Special Dream Powers often makes me realize that I’m dreaming. One of the ladies smiles, as if she’s done a lot of lucid dreaming, and says, “And then the adventure begins!” I reply, “Yeah, if I can just remember which adventure I want to go on… my problem when I’m dreaming is that I forget what I was planning to do.”

I wake up immediately from this conversation. I was of course acutely aware of how ironic the discussion about Special Dream Powers was.