I am looking for someone. Now we are walking up a kind of passage (outside) or walkway past some venders who are standing behind a long counter with their wares. Food? Some craft items or combination of food and crafts. But there is something about their appearance that catches my attention. Three of them standing side by side. They are, all three, short, with smallish heads (small even relative to their size). The one on the left seems to be wearing a mask (like a native mask) that makes her face look triangular with almond-shaped, slanted eyes and wiry or grasslike hair, and the one on the right seems to have two kinds of hair, like tufts and a small masklike face, all darkish-skinned. . .We make fun of them (not so they can over-hear), saying they must have Italian in them or some such bigoted slight. . . As we continue we / I start looking closer at the artwork that is on display, now it seems this artwork has been influenced by alternate realities and ways of seeing, possibly influenced by the mushroom (but that is just a guess), some of the objects / work have to do with water and then there is one larger one higher up with a simple continuous line, sort of amorphous, depicting an area of water in outline and then a fringe that is more or less horizontal and I realize it is delineating the very brink of a waterfall.
These spirit-vendors are drawing my attention, not to the waterfall, but to the hairline edge, right where the water is neither flowing straight, nor falling. It is the exact point where it hovers between one kind of energy and another. I think the spirits are using this dream and this image, to teach me something about a very special watery threshold. The thought I had in the dream, that their artwork might have been influenced by the mushroom, was just my lazy attempt to explain its other-worldliness, to tame and downplay the liminality and mystery of it. On a whim I googled the symbolism of waterfall and the first image that came up was a photo of a wild waterfall with a curiously shaped boulder right on the edge where the water dropped off. As I looked at this rock it began to resemble the head of a dragon and the words came to me: The brink of the waterfall is where the dragon rests its head.
I have often wondered if we have pushed nature too far, if her great rejuvenating spirit has been mortally wounded. A dream like this is a big dream with a universal message but it is also personal. I, personally, can use some recharging, but it appears the dragon can too. Dragon is the animating genius of the land. Mythically speaking, he / she comes from a time so long ago, that the elements had not yet differentiated. Dragon's nature is at one with all the elements but beyond that distinction, he /she is compatible with chaos, whence she originated. And chaos is a fair description of what awaits us the instant we slip over the brink of where the dragon rests its head. Come to think of it, this image might serve as a shamanic alternative to the Doomsday Clock. Dragon rests its head, waiting for something to happen to which it will react. If we find ourselves on the edge and come to our senses, the edge becomes a threshold and the human race gets to transition to a new age. We continue. If we don't come to our senses and continue to shuffle along myopically without taking our power, chaos is our fate. Dragon rampages.
[1] Refer to Gordon Wasson's Soma, Divine Mushroom of Immortality.
[2] Full title: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbot. Written pseudonymously by "A Square", the book used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to comment on the hierarchy of Victorian culture.
(Article changed on February 26, 2019 at 19:08)
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