The Centre for Dream Research and Imaginal Studies

The Writing of The Woman Who Could See In All Directions At The Same Time

In The Woman Who Could See In All Directions At The Same Time I have allowed dreams and images to speak for themselves, interacting with the art and words, and with nature, without the intrusion of analysis. In this way, respecting the images themselves as “spirits” or partial souls. I was enlivened by this co-relation of inner and outer. Not only was I in the presence of an emerging story, I was co-habiting with it.

Beyond this was the animated soul of the world that permeates our physical self and the mysterious marking of time, and the shapes and sounds of creation edging towards matter.

The woman smells of earth, of slugs. Damp and heavy with musk, her odour raises the hairs on the back of my neck as if I have picked up the scent of an animal. I am assailed by the smell of a tangle of roots and decaying pine needles. A small animal scurries by outside the cabin. I can hear the scritch scratch as it walks past the porch.

Transformation takes place when we are pinned down by our quaking humanity. Then the light bearers come in, the creative spirits, the dreams, the guides, the Ancestral voices. The Numinous. When we hit the full force of our humanity the gates are opened to us.

The map to this land is Mystery, is a trickster, is a bent-over woman, a broken man. It is the wounded Earth. It is psychic space dismembered and re-membered. It is my land.

The inland of our dreams is a map imbued with death and re-birth images. The maps to here are embedded in bone and of the same ancestry as Earth itself, and as intrinsically connected. It is in the re-membering that we are truly home.

The characters in my story include bear, coyote,trees, water, mountain, lake, land, rain, the seasons that I interacted with, the inner and outer landscape, and the dreams that led me away from this world and into the world of my Ancestors.

My illness and isolation re-invented me. I was called into a relationship to wilderness that was a rightful mirror to my ailing soul. My experience of the clear-cut was a direct measure of my life and mirrored the desecration of my own Feminine and the Feminine soul of the world. I felt I was risking everything I knew to follow this inward calling as it drew me along a path to retrieve my wholeness.

A bear that appears beside me as I walk in the bush one day, seems to move through my personal life, initially with some kind of intent and comes into my consciousness later as a teacher. After the bear is killed I am led on a vision quest into the wilds, little knowing what is in store for me. I sense though, it could mean my life.

There is an ancient calling that is written in our DNA and finds its way into the modern world in our dreams and reveries, our art, writing and stories. We will survive in our stories. When we write them down we will know who we are.