COSMOGRAPHS
Dreamt 14 April 2011
I. Middle Europe: Glide-Rail, Hotel-Hatch, Girl Rescue, The Academy, Mountain Mapland, Alpenland, the Alpen Lodge
I fly over to Europe with A.S. and land in eastern France, catching a wind-surfing airborne train called the Glide Rail eastward to a placed called the Academy in Helvetica and Raetia – the Alpenland. It swished over some kind of rails without making contact, never backtracked, never went in straight lines or made angles. It moved in spirals, arcs, circuits. A.S., a former girlfriend, resurfaced as a life companion, and joined me on the eastward rail. We overnighted with my youngest sister in a town between France and Switzerland in a strange hotel-cubby attached to the railway station. It was in lieu of a hotel or b-n-b, affordable, and provided fold-out beds, fold-out microwave, wardrobes in the wall, and space enough not to feel suffocated. Its door was human-sized, no crawl-hole door (like the Asian variety), and the bed space was wide and commodious. As I wasn’t weary, I stayed up all night, went off walking in the town and returned around 5-6am, meeting A.K., a Madison friend staying in the same cubby, at 6 a.m. on a stairwell weirdly reminiscent of my Michigan parents’ stairs. He confided in me that our fourth companion had been physically aggressing toward A.S., forcing her to hug and kiss him under the covers. I remembered her fearful near-rape experiences in Russia, and dashed up the stairs to save and comfort her. I braced my shoulder and tucked in my head for a side-body slam against the door off the momentum of a running start. Why I thought this would effectively help anything in the dream, I'm not sure. I charged the hatch door, thinking to bash it down, but found my body moved slow, inched as in slow-motion, lost force and speed, and touched the door with a soft shove by the time my shoulder made contact. More determined than before, I walked backward, reared up, and charged back at the door, shoving my shoulder off a taut hip right before making contact. Again, my taut strength went loose and slack, and my muscles limp. I could barely push on the door. I reared back and charged again, again making soft touch. This time, the door opened on its own, swinging on its hinges, as if someone had pulled back the door and let me in at that moment. I saw A.S. with hands over her face in one corner of the hotel cubby, her knees on the bed, tears covered by her fingers. My sister Sara busied herself with her luggage at the opposite end. Not far from the door itself I saw the aggressor slinking, silent as a shadow, looking at no one thing, eyes empty, body still and poised. He seemed more demon than human. I rushed at him, told him to get out and never come back or I’d squash him like a slug. I bolted over to A.S., giving her my arms, and she drew me down into the bed, crying, relieved, confiding. She told me what had happened, and we kissed and kissed, lips soft and insistent, mollifying the nerves, brushing over our fluttering mouths. This went on a long time, for hours, deep in talk and affections, until we fell asleep. We slept into the following night. At morning and after packing, I saw A.S.'s stalker slinking outside the door, and we walked past him, not speaking a word, swiftly catching an air-rail (Glide Rail, Gleitenbahn) southeastward toward Switzerland. A.S. took a further train to Moscow, leaving me at Colmar or nearby, from where I railed along the Rhine to the heart of Alpenland.
Having to change trains along the Rhine border, I couldn’t fetch all my luggage off in one go, and had to make two trips. But the Air-Rail hummed off before I could embark again, and I wandered worriedly to an Inspector to report to him my case; he advised I take a high-speed omnibus to the air-rail’s next change-over stop near Basel, and weirdly this speed-bus got me there ahead of the train and thus I fetched my overload of gear. I carted my worldly possessions to the Intake and Immatriculation Desks which existed at the bottom of long hallways in the Academy just south of the highest Alps in the heart of Switzerland, which in the dream I named 'Austria', but a map showed it wasn't. In this Switzerland, there was no French, Italian or Rhaeto-Romanisch sections - the whole region was linguistically Alemannic. Why was I so sure it was Switzerland? When I stepped off my transport, I saw the whole map of the land and its boundaries before me, tiny and clear as a satellite photo from space. A midnight, lit by stars, gleamed overhead, and beneath me all was dark except for the glow of the mountain peaks, lakes and a luminous line making up the state boundary of Switzerland. The land rolled out beneath me as a miniature of the real thing, then grew bigger and bigger before it spun on its axis like a top. It wheeled around several times before halting in its usual north-south position. Or perhaps whatever enabled me in the dream to look down on the whole land was itself spinning? When I landed in a forest next to the Academy's doors, the trees towered above me, but the nearby mountains looked my own height, strokable, denser with distance. Far-off mountains appeared vast and huge, the normal size one would expect, but I stooped over their rocky foreland to inspect their deep ravines, as if I were a Giant from another world. The other Swiss around, visitor students included, were my equal in size. Were we all giants? One could walk from the south to north border in a day (or hour?) or two, if only one didn't get trapped in the rocky chasms, or reach out and touch far-off mountain tops as if you were a creator of matter, inspecting their contour and texture. Switzerland wasn’t smaller there than it actually is in our world - everything in the dream spoke of its vastness. But somehow the humans there had grown. They could zoom in and out, touch things upclose, or withdraw small and dwarfed again.
Next I had to check in to the Academy, and I walked down a long carpeted aisle to a row of separate desks, each with special queues for different citizens, and all ending face-to-face with someone to handle Immatriculation and Intake. The place wasn't crowded - I was one of two or three others around. When I got to the desk, a man with a British accent handed me skeleton keys, books, a map, and a ticket to something called the Alpine Tour. Outside, the trees towered over me, the tallest trees I’d ever seen. Their tops were hidden in clouds. About this time I pulled out my mobile phone to ring my parents a continent away; not surprisingly, the phone had an error message in red script straight across the screen. Then to my delight I realised the Academy had issued me a new one, but I don't remember ringing anyone on it. When I arrived at the Alpine Tour, I sat myself down in an amphitheatre made of smoothed stone terraces which made wide east-west semi-circles the whole bredth of the Alps. Stars stared down in silver shafts, making mountain peaks and pools glitter. I walked down the theatre steps to get in closer to the mountains' feet. I leaned over the tall peaks, touched their tops, fingered the grooves of their dales. Either I was a giant, had telescopic vision, or the whole land had been shrunk - but the latter did not at all seem believable. If anything, the vastness of the whole area seemed increased because I could make out how big it really was in once glance. I walked east and north a few paces to a lake, the biggest in the region; its dark waters glinted in the starlight. I reached toward it with my finger, wanting to dip it in the lake. I trailed it in the water, rippling it along the shore. I let my finger trail into the silt, and spotted a deep drop along the length of the shore. A great mountain rose up from the middle of the lake. It filled all the lake’s middle, and its slopes tapered sharply down into the depths, making the lake deepest along the edges. “Don’t you know den Bodensee?” asks a recognisable voice, waggish and sarcastic. I turn to the speaker and see Andrew Bohl, a German speaking friend. He’d made his way to the Academy as well. Allured as I was by the ‘Bottom Sea’, the German designation for Lake Constance, something else stole my attention as soon as I laid eyes on it. It was a timber-framed lodge, rising south of me high as a mountain, built on a mountain plateau and gabled on the tops. I turned around and walked in its door at mountain level, treading on the planked floor which ran in a circle around a mountain forming the lodge’s axis. It was a circular Bierhalle. Along the wall sat Gesellen (hall comrades) in booths, ornately carved, upon benches built into snugs in the wall with seat-backs made of carven stags, dark as darkest wood. When my eyes caught those of the Gesellen, they would lean their upper bodies off their seats, stretching their heads sideways and nodding, then dash their tankards on the wood tables to my health. “Prost!” I nodded, eyeing each one and pleased to the heart. I saw a side door at stair-head, and filed downwards to a lower floor. To my left spanned a huge hurley rink, but to my right another door, thick as a trunk and heavy with hardwood. It stood wide open and I walked through, straight into a living room parlour large enough to hold thirty guests. A painting ten feet wide hung above the divan; foxes, horses and hounds, hides all ruddy in an autumn sunset, ran along the forest eaves, lusting after hart and hind. Long rugs wrapped the redstained floor of wood; most were white & woolen but one was golden-maned with horsehair and fine-matted along its length. A colossal Kachelofen (tile-stove) rose from ground to ceiling on my right, and spanned the bredth of the wall. Cast iron doors of sundry size opened from its center, and its edges fell low into seats, all made of tile, one looming structure. One could sit along the tile benches to keep warm. The hearth section was made of tawny rough-hewn stone, but the tile seats were smooth as marble, hotwarm to touch. A further passage led off the parlour to the kitchen where a woman stood cooking along a long counter. She turned and looked at me where I stood in her kitchen. Seeing another door off the kitchen, I quickly spoke to her, pointing to the door, “Entschuldigen Sie mir bitte, darf ich hier mal durch?” “Excuse me please, may I go through this way?” She answered in German: “Gehen Sie am besten dadurch wieder hinaus. Eigentlich sollten Sie nicht hier sein, wissen Sie.” (“Go back out through it, that would be best. Actually you shouldn’t be here, you know.”) I nod to her apologetically, then dash out through the door, ascending back up to the Bierhalle.
II. The Runenstammtisch, the Four Corners of the Earth, Palm-Carving, and Ystvir the 'Loyalty Rune'
Hard on the heals of the previous dream, I now dreamt I met with German speakers in Wisconsin for converse in that language. My German Conversation Table colleagues had decided to meet outside on picnic benches along a lake. Stammtisch normally takes place in the Paul Bunyan Room across from Stiftskeller in Memorial Union, but this time we met in a somewhat mythical Tenney Park, high on a hill, ranged along a long long table. When I came there, I saw that all the members were carving insignia into one another’s palms, and the markings left were clearly runes, all straight angled and red with drying blood. The blade went round, and each new blade-wielder cut a rune into his neighbour’s palm, depending on which rune the World Chart chose for that person. This Chart, showing the Four Corners and Four Winds of Earth, went round with the blade, and came at last to my partner, a woman named Jo. She turned the chart round and round, it seemed to spin on an unseen axis, and it burst open in the air into a life-size realm, huge enough to walk inside. Soon it was beneath me and I was hovering over another world like a child hovers over a hand-held mirror beneath its chin, pretending the sky is beneath your feet. I let my gaze fall inside this expanding surface, and I hover-floated over the Earth from end to end. As I looked, I spied a great herd of bison grinding their feet into the dirt along the edge of he Pacific Ocean, making ready for a charge in one rumble east over the American Continent. Sky-high dust rose on the Great Plains, and thunder filled the air. Jo explained that the Native Americans had seen this apparition of might charge at them several times in their history, when the Buffalos first came to them from another world, and made a sound like the Thunderbird folding the world inside out with its wings. I looked then east over the Atlantic to the old North of the Occident, and I saw a red dragon flying over the northern tips of Scandinavia, swooping down upon Iceland, Faroes, Denmark, Germany, Scotland. The dragon stopped over Scotland, and the Chart spun round and round, counterclockwise against a clockwise spinning ring of letters, that wheeling opposite another ring of spinning letters, and that opposite another counter-spinning. When all wheels stopped their whirling, the adjacent letters printed a word across the land of Scotland - the word Ystvir - and the Ystvir rune (unknown to me) stood drawn next to its designation. I was very curious about the etymology and authenticity of this word, and doubted the 'random spinning' of the Chart. How do you know this is an authentic historical word? I asked Jo. She told me that Ystvir was the most ancient Germanic word for ‘Loyalty’, that I could look it up myself (I've yet to research its true meaning) and that this was the rune that the Fates had chosen to be carved into my palm and have me own up to. When I saw the blade she wielded, I told her I would not have that bloody knife cut me, but she must find a clean one, unused and razor sharp. “You don’t want it?” she asked. “I don’t want the bloody blade that’s carved all the others’ hands. You must find for me my own blade, an edge to be used upon me and me alone.” I fished in my own bags and (ironically given my former dream) drew out my Swiss Army knife, handing it to Jo. She took it and with it carved the Ystvir rune into my palm. I do not remember the shape of the actual rune, and (thankfully) found nothing carved into my palm when I woke later. Still it is curious; loyalty is not a virtue I've made very central to daily aspects of my life. I've been loyal to my closest friends and core vision since childhood, but that loyalty (or perception thereof) has meant treachery toward those who seem to defy the former. I've not been very loyal to other things that have come my way and which (in due course) seemed to lead me astray from my former convictions. But as it is for many visionaries, with greater integration of life purpose comes greater loyalty. I hoped it was a sign for me, a sign of broader, integrated loyalty to come.
Upon further reflection, I realise that Germanic dragons and Sioux bison carry a resonance of the same thing: the Apocalypse and the return to Eden's wealth. Dragons herald strife and change, and they hoard the wealth of the world that the humans try to win or keep from them. They also try to keep us out of Eden, while yet embodying fertility, as snakes do in most folk traditions. Bison provide and trample down, herd gently in Eden, or thunder over the wrack and ruin of the diseased Plains, ushering hard weathers and a sweeping Thunderbird. After they charge, a renewed earth can be born. If Ystvir means in Norse what I now think it might (were it an actual compound) - 'The Man Standing Outermost' - then it may be that my looking upon the globe from its edges and rims is of deep significance. I'm on the outside looking down and in. I wish to dart in and involve myself, but am still trying to guage where my place is. The fact that the Ystvir rune appeared on the Earth-Chart over the North Atlantic seemed only natural, given the lines of continuity already traced through my life, such as they exist.
Ystvir, in my sleephazy memory of waking life, could stand in for an actual rune of similar name: Yngvi. Let's follow that track a moment. Yngvarr is a Swedish Viking name, and the historical Yngvarr was a world-traveller. It's in some way built off the well-known god-name, Yngvi, which is ALSO the name of a rune - the rune for the -NG- sound - and is named for the Germanic god *Ingwaz (Norse Yngvi ). Ingwaz is a god of physical fruitfulness and prosperity. But naught to do with loyalty. Yngvarr ( 'Guardian of Yngvi') on the other hand.... ? Perhaps Yngvarr is meant to pun with Ystvir. But I've only guesses. The gods named most loyal/trustworthy are Tiwaz (Týr) and Thunar (Thórr).
Taking a more lexically literal approach, I note that Yst in Norse-Icelandic means 'outermost', and -vir is man or warrior or protector. 'Outermost man'? 'Far-out dude'? Then there is ysta, to curdle milk, make cheese.(!) Dream etymologies rarely pan out....
III. The Paranormal Party
In a third dream sequence, all these fat Danish men gorged on herring, rye bread, butter, sausage, pastry and tortes, and walked around me ten feet high. They drank strong ale and ate strong food all night. Some were thin and sinewy, with long sinewy strength and reach. Many others had bellies so large they had to stick to the couches because they could barely move, napping after every feed. I was tired myself, hadn’t slept much the night before, and slept most of the living day after the party on the couch next to some snoring Danes. The following night, the party continued, and Swedes were invited in as well, filling the second night with Gothland spells and witchery. The dream was all comic light and fun lusty Danes, and suddenly the mood shifts, and shadows wing across the room. Light and darkness shift back and forth. Lights in the rooms start switching on and off, off and on, and sudden darkness or light overtook us. I ran then to check my e-mail, and received a note from S.S. with the heading: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY ALERT. “Note: Paranomral activity will be far higher than usual from Thursday through Saturday night. Partiers beware.” And the party was wyrded out. The lightbulbs seemed to burn out one by one, even as people fell into sleeping stupors one after another. The next morning, I woke at work to find that it was my client's house in which all the partying had taken place. She was bewildered as to why the living room light didn’t work and asked me why not. “What can you expect after partying all night the way you did?” I throw at her teasingly.
Dreamt 15 April 2011
IV. The Four Poles and and the North Pole Dog
In this fourth cosmographic dream, I picked up a handheld map of the Earth. As I looked, the image grew more photographic than symbolic. The longer I stared, the bigger the map grew, until I was hover-floating over it, the real thing itself, straining my eyes to see all its edges, which wrapped under themselves like a fold of paper. Its outer boundaries formed a walkable Rim, a curving precipice one could lean over and peek under to catch the underside of the Ovalglobe. Between all its rims swirled a great ocean with no landmasses to be seen so far I could tell. As my vision widened, so did the Earth itself. I swooped in closer to Four Poles – North, South, East, West. The globe was stretched between four ends, and the wind whirled and gyred from each one. A long Ice Bridge connected all four poles. I set my feet down on the east-rim of this Earth and began walking upward (northward) on the Ice Bridge until I got within eye-sight of the North Pole. I came at it from a point that would have been south of the Bering Sea, and there I stopped short. At the edge of my vision I saw leaping toward me a rollicking Siberian Husky. He came in big trundling bounds, almost seeming to roll as he hurtled over his feet. I stood on a point at the edge of the Northern Ice, looking north, looking straight at him. To my left (West) eddied open ocean. When the dog was halfway between me and the Pole, I saw that it was Kodiak, the dog I had grown up with and so mirrored in mood and habit. He legged the final leg and bowled me over in a big forepaw leap off his hind legs, launched by a fervor of recognition and joy, landing with his armpits square on my chest and his paws at my ears. I reeled backward with his happy weight on me, torqueing my body to one side before we hit ground and rolled and rolled in a dog-man bundle over the expanse of ice.
