Dream: Dharma Gives Me Body Piercings
Note: some recent Friends List readers may not be familiar with this, because I have been posting almost exclusively about fiber arts lately… but this actually started out as my dream journal. I’ve been kind of out of touch with Dreamland lately, mostly because my schedule has been screwy and I have been groggy and tired in the mornings. Now, I’m working to remedy that, and get the dreamwork back on schedule. I try to always cut-line the dream entries, and ID them as such – and some of them may be weird or disturbing, it’s totally ordinary for dreams.
Dream 20051027, midnight:
This dream was quite early in the night, but was exceptionally vivid. I had taken a red tablet before dreaming, trying to see if I can use these to influence dream content; it was more carnage and less carnal than I had expected, but certainly intense and “red.”
I waited too long (afternoon) before writing this down, so a lot of the plot line is muddy. I remember that there was a woman, who reminds me of Dharma from Dharma and Greg, all bubbly enthusiasm, who was very excited about giving me a body piercing. I remember her telling me that the National Association for Women had some control over this one particular kind of piercing that she called a “sheath,” and she was particularly happy that she had gotten approval to give me one.
I don’t remember a painful or disturbing piercing experience. I don’t remember being pierced at all (I have been, before, in real life, and it’s memorable…) There was a kind of blur – not a “fade to black” scene change, just a non-experience, and then after I had ALL these piercings. Dozens. And tattoos. I had piercings in places that don’t even really bear piercings, like my shins and through the tips of my fingers and toes. Many of them were these bizarre ceremonial piercings, long needles, like eight or ten inches, pierced through my body and then jewelry attached to the rods.
I remember at one point looking at my toes, and each one of them has a spike the size of a long but very narrow knitting needle protruding from the tip, pointing upward and out – they are pierced through the pad right near the nail. The lady strums her finger along the needles, and it’s uncomfortable, but not painful. She is just amazingly excited, very happy for me, and seems slightly sad that I’m not as excited as she is about the whole adventure. There’s no sense that I have disappointed her or hurt her feelings, just that she is sad for me because she thinks I should be more happy. I notice that my left hand has an orange, blue, and black tattoo that has some lettering in it, I think the name of a basketball team, or something like “Basketball League” – I ask her if it’s temporary, she tells me it’s a real tattoo, although it looks like a smooth print on top of my skin. I tell her I had the temporary one only as a joke, I really don’t have any interest in having my body marked with a commercial logo. Again, she seems slightly crestfallen, but not angry or anything, just like she wishes I were as happy about the entire thing as she is. There is no sense of being hampered or hobbled by all the weird piercings; I move around just fine, although on a few occasions I do remember bumping them into something. I feel like a porcupine. At one point in the dream, I remember a group of similarly pierced people standing around a fenced area like a corrall, and somebody goes around with a pole, hitting each person on one of the piercing spikes, and they fall over very balletically; it’s like a dance. I realize they’re going to tap me, and when they do it is uncomfortable, but not sharply painful, and I lay over like the rest have done, with choreographed grace.
I don’t remember the rest, but there was more of the dream, plot-wise.
I like that the women’s association acronym is NAW…;) The obvious question is whether or not you’ve had piercings lately or thought of having them, but piercing can also be an initiatory rite for many people. As always, interesting!
An enthusiastic frmale knocking many holes into you, and marking you with ‘ceremonial’ items.
Hhhhmmmmm.
So Alice, do you still have the one that makes you larger and the one that makes you smaller?
😀
Lucky. My dreams are always so freakin’ inane. Boring even. Filing papers, giving speeches, feeding animals. Occasionally, I have the psyche depleting drama of the death of a family member but that’s about it.
I’ve always had high-drama intense grand dreams. Then again, I’ve cultivated them… I’m surprised with your involvement in the lively arts, you don’t have a more epic dream-style.
You’d think so wouldn’t ya? Although, I did have one last night brought on by a mixture of drugs and alchohol. All I remember is someone trying to get at me Nicholson style, as in The Shining. Can’t remember anything else.
Well… maybe you don’t always *want* high-drama dreams, if that’s the kind of drama you’re going to get!
I found that the more I studied and recorded my dreams, the more interesting they got… I’m not sure whether they actually responded to the interest, or whether I’m just *realizing* how complex and weird they’ve always been. There have been times when I’ve recorded five or more long plots in the course of a night, waking after each REM cycle with a head full of story.
The “red pill”? Ques Que se?
:chuckle:
They’re candies. I forget the name, but they come in a little bag, with five different colors. They look like little pills.
I had this idea – so much of what affects our dreaming, is thoughts and intentions. In a lot of dream work, in order to cultivate a specific type of dream, or a dream on a particular subject, you will do things before bed, like read a particular book, write out the intentions in a journal, visualize, that kind of stuff.
So much of magical thinking, is the intent and the ritual. I thought, hmm… dream pills. The action of taking a medicine last thing before bed, and choosing to believe that it’ll affect the dream experience, is the biggest part. So Chris made up two bottles – one with all the bright colors (red, yellow, orange) and another one with the cool blues and greens. One is for exciting dreams, one is for calming dreams. He made up little prescription labels, with weird long chemical names and prescription numbers, so they look like little bottles of pills. I use them to help focus my intention to have a particular kind of dream – kind of sending a semaphore to the subconscious.
I have been not focusing on dreamwork for a while, and have gotten out of the habit; I’m trying to get back into it. So far, I’ve managed to get at least some impact from the different colored pills, although it’s not ever going to be a one-to-one correspondence. I consider it a success if some element shows up, somewhere in the course of the night. Red is fire, and passion, and blood, and sex. Orange is physical excitement – running, adventures. Yellow is more psychological excitement – element of Air, flying, fascinating thoughts, conceptualizing. Blue is water, and serenity, and fluidity; green is earth, and strength and stability.
You two really are the coolest damn people I know. 🙂