I wake up in the night.  I’m hot.  Everything is hot.  My apartment’s cooling system can’t keep up.  Underneath the steps outside my back door, the AC unit is like a furnace, running hot to cool the interior.  Inside, as I lie underneath the ceiling fan with another hot flash, I turn to YouTube.  I try not to, but I do it anyway.  This night, the algorithm gods have something for me to see.  I click on a documentary titled 500 Years Frozen in Time: The Inca Children Mystery.  In it, I learn that a fourteen-year-old girl was buried alive near the summit of the world's tallest active volcano in the Andean mountains as an offering to the Inca sun god.  She was chosen as a sacrifice, taken from her village, fed very well, and drugged over the course of some months.  When it was time, having been heavily sedated, she was taken to the summit, placed in the earth, and buried alive.  For over 500 years, she slept as a seed in the pocket of Mother Earth.  In 1999, a team of archaeologists discovered her, and now she sleeps in a freezer display capsule in a museum in Argentina. She is still hunched over, with the leaves that sedated her still in her cheek.   

They call her La Doncella, the Maiden.  There’s something about this situation, this daughter of spring frozen in slumber, that gnaws at me.  When I turn over and am drifting off to sleep again, I hear her saying, "No" and "No" again.  But her “No” is muffled by the earth and the cloth over her face, and the effort it takes to protest her burial is utterly taxing; better to just sleep.   

I’m reminded that several years ago, I dreamt of a gray colored industrial city where the inhabitants went from home to work and back again, doing only what work required.  Inside this city, I am being drugged and raped, but for some time I don’t know it until I wake up and find myself slumped in an office chair.  At meal times, I sit in a dining hall with other women and girls.  I am given a fine linen napkin to dab my mouth.  Those around me have coarse paper on their laps.  

Dreams tell us things that we can’t quite make out in our waking lives.  They give us another angle on the problem, a riddle to solve, a fantastic vision that may move us in some new way.  When it comes to nightmares, sometimes I miss the fact that I’ve had one, and it’s only when I venture to tell someone offhandedly about it that I suddenly get a sense of its bone-chilling import.  I think of this as the sedation effect.

I’m on a YouTube documentary kick, and about a week after watching The Inca Children Mystery, I look up the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas.  I begin watching the documentary Voice of the Goddess: Marija Gimbutas, which celebrates her life and work, and the 1991 premiere of her book by the same name.  I’m nodding my head in assent, and about halfway through I pause to write down these words, 

“…We happen to live in a time which is the end of an era.  The end of the 5,000 years of what James Joyce has termed “the nightmare” and the end of the 20th century, a century of wars, tortures, and massacres.  As Thomas Berry says, we have to reinvent the human species or perish.  We must reexamine history and start putting back some parts that we have left out, namely, the earth, the body, the feminine, and the unconscious.”    

Marija Gimbutas’s work invites me to think deeply, to dig deeply, to go back and down and to keep going to the dig sites of night dreams, uncovering seed pockets, glimmering objects, and networks that communicate across time and space.  Add to this relief when the connection is made, and the discovery really starts sinking in that I’m not the chief digger overseeing these projects, but instead, I am an object of their work and a part of the crew made up, in this case, of duty personified in the gray city and office chair, of fine linens and rough paper.  

Dreamwork is an ongoing invitation to remake the world on terms that are larger than this one body.  Inside the contrasts within a dream, our ingrained patterns meet the Other.  Suddenly, the landscape is alive to us, and our interior spaces and external presentations, deemed sacrosanct by our way of understanding ourselves in the web of relationships day in and day out, are thrown into question by a stranger in our house, a shaggy dog, a glowing television set, or a flood plain.  

Dreamwork is not limited to the stories woven while we sleep.  Our waking lives are interwoven with our nightlives, and my personal field of dream images is animated by contact across species so that all are enriched.  What I touch, taste, smell, and feel informs the stories that are told through me.  Dreamwork is the imaginal moving hand in hand with the substantive.  It is “polytheistic consciousness wandering all over the place, in the vales and along rivers, in the woods, the sky, and under the earth.” (James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p.33) 

Another night, and this time the weather pattern is changing, with a heat dome yielding to a cold front.  Outside, the lightning is like strobe lights flashing on and off as I come in and out of sleep cycles.  This seems to go on all night.  Because of the disruptions, I wake up with a wealth of images and a night of interwoven dreams.  Repeating images and new configurations mirror, in tone, the storms outside.  Snow and ice?  Check. Poison darts and a gun?  Newish.  Dogs?  Check.  Packs of dogs in flood plains with tiger sharks and heifers?  A new configuration.  Also, there is blood in the water.  The night culminates with a van, engine running, pulled up outside a house, headlights shining on the front door. Just inside the door, there are three or four steps down.  An injured woman sits at the bottom of the steps.  I crouch to assess her situation.   A third woman stands at the door, watching us.  

In the morning, I begin to sift through the pieces.  This will take time, and in my ongoing dreamwork practice, I’ve learned that inside of this time there is both receptivity and activity, all the potency of a seed, and really, all I have to do is be open.  

I savor initial feelings and connections inside myself as I begin to move through the day.  I take particular time with the house and the figures within it.  As I do so, tears come, and it feels like something is being wrung out of me.  In the afternoon, I have an annual doctor's appointment, where a gentle healer tends to the threshold of my body.   

Headlights are the fire in her eyes.  

George Michael and Aretha Franklin sing in my head.  

And there are these words: Ride or die.  

500 Years Frozen in Time: The Inca Children Mystery

Voice of the Goddess: Marija Gimbutas

Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman

I knew you were waiting (for me)