Dream Weaving the Death of Persona & the Birth of Soul

I dream big. And I don’t mean with my ambition (I am a bit ashamed to confess), but when my eyes are closed, between dusk and dawn. Most nights, in the void between our daily death and rebirth, I do not die into nothingness. I visit an otherworld that shape-shifts frequently, has no walls, no gravity, and no horizons. It is a place of little logic and immense meaning. My dreams are enormous. 

And I listen to them, weave them into my conscious awareness, and learn from them as I rise back into my familiar reality. Sometimes for a day, sometimes for months. Some haunt me or teach me for years. Some fade in a blink. But when I really respect a dream, I respond to it by acting in accordance with its guidance in my life choices. I have altered the color of pen that I use. I have reached out to people when I feel called. I have leaned into relationships, leaned away from them, and said Yes and No to experiences according to the intelligence of my dreams.

To be honest, though, it is rare. And responding often takes me a long time, if I ever do.

Last night I went to bed and had an uncommon experience that, as a vivid dreamer, I am not particularly fond of. I did not go “unconscious” before I slipped beyond the veil. I was aware in it. Most nights, if I have trouble sleeping, I can move myself into the appropriate realm by gently commanding my mind to “fall” to sleep. (I created this practice by simply deducing that there must be a reason that we use this common idiom).

I mentally whisper, “Fall”, and gradually, I feel my overactive mind relax until it hits the soft veil between wakefulness and sleep. It may jump back to alertness with contact, but it eventually gets there, and ‘falls’ into the otherworld. I usually cannot remember what I see on the descent. My conscious mind goes into a dark timelessness, and later, I am alive again in a place that I can’t name or locate.

But sometimes, I am still awake in the veil and I begin to see the dreamspace before I fall completely. I may see my father’s living face, suddenly be gazing into the eyes of someone I love, smell a familiar smell, or just briefly apprehend some inexplicable item.

When I was a child I would always see the same thing in the veil: a crown falling. Falling off of what and to where? I don’t know, but I would feel my body fall with it.

Last night in my lucid veil descent, I was still partially awake, but was suddenly living the experience of eating the flesh off of my own hand.

I could taste the iron-rich blood in my mouth. I could feel a (somehow familiar) stomach-sinking faintness of mind from the grating sensation of tooth against bone. I felt myself begin to dissolve into the oblivion of a level of pain and dismemberment that we subconsciously dread in the comfort of our in-tact bodies. I was both predator and prey, of my most precious appendage.

I recognize in hindsight that this gruesome dream-morsel was informed by a bolt of awareness I had at the grocery store two days ago. I was being helped to bag my items by a man who was missing his right hand. I did not feel pity. I felt admiration and appreciation. But I also suddenly recognized how important my hands are to me. I had this thought as I left the store: I would rather go blind than lose my hands.

And I felt the affirmed truth of this as I sat with the insight on my drive home.

One of my intuitive healers, who has never met or even seen me before, but I deeply respect and fully trust in her skill, was providing me with a distanced energy reading over the phone last month. As she examined my energetic field (please suspend disbelief if this is hard to accept, and bear with me), she described me to myself:

“You come through as very tactile. You want to feel everything. If you were a cat with a bowl of milk, you would want to get into the bowl with the milk and roll around in it.” 

That made me giggle, and when I reflected on my true nature - to slowly feel through the texture of all of my experiences with deep emotion and keen perceptivity -  I recognized that it was true. 

This morning, after eating my own hand at bedtime, I woke in a dream again, too. I was a hunter, hunting dogs (some strong, some fierce, some friendly) with a shotgun at the gate of a castle fortress. My first waking thought was, “Dogs wouldn’t run from a hunter.” I realized that they were running towards my gun. Still in contact with the dreamspace, I quickly reoriented them to scatter and flee from my aim before the dream faded and my bedroom came back into form. I then spontaneously cried for an hour with deep feelings of betrayal, sorrow, and heartbreak that wanted to flow through me. 

I do not yet understand the connection with the dogs and the tears, if there is one. But I proceeded to move into my day with a tactile presence to it. I realized, after entering and departing the otherworld of sleep in a dreamstate, that the flow of metaphor, symbols, insights, and guidance we experience as conscious human beings is actually seamless.

We are always swimming in it. Or drinking from it. Or rolling around in it and making a happy mess, like a cat in a bowl full of milk. Always.

I went to cold plunge, and returned home to notice that it was trash day. I rushed inside to take out the garbage, emptying the fridge quickly. I relieved the fruit drawer of old tangerines from Thanksgiving (yes, very old tangerines! But in my defense, they rot slowly and pleasantly compared to most foods). As I pulled them out, I suddenly remembered my mother on Christmas day, reminding me to put ripe tangerines in the fruit basket. I then recalled yesterday morning’s dream of her: a future-set nightmare in which I discovered that this Christmas was the last I got to spend with her. (I wept yesterday morning too).

My heart sank with this connection to my great love for her, and I felt the eviscerating pain that would be her death, and will be one day. A loss of such exquisite terror and disorientation, that I already know to live it will be the confusingly familiar and incomprehensible anguish of fascia being pulled from my finger bones. I will lose a part of myself forever.

We can hardly bear many things that on some level of our being, we know we must, and will bear. We cannot apprehend what comes after something so brutal-feeling as death. We cannot apprehend exactly what happens in between our experiences of physical waking life. We try to come up with comforting stories, but still, we dread. We run. We anesthetize. We try to protect ourselves from it.

I then took the trash out and noticed that a monstrous, hardy bush, with bright fuchsia flowers and terrorizing thorns just as large, that takes up prime real estate in the front flowerbed of my home had finally died in the winter cold. Its flowers have been alive and bright pink for as long as I have lived here. It dominates the other plants in the planter. It overshadowed the roses since I moved in, starving them of sunlight as they were strangled by the vines. I thought of myself and my identity.

I thought of myself because I have recently died. Consciously, and decidedly, I applied the guidance of a dream I had 7 months ago, and laid my identity to rest, slowly, with great difficulty and discomfort. She, my Persona, was excellent at survival. She very bright, very hardy, very strong, very dominant in my psyche’s garden. I thought I was her, after all.

My soul was the smothered rose bush, patiently trying to grow in my body, with little space to succeed. And the vines were the hungry shadow parts of me that protected my identity, unapologetically devouring any perceived threat to her security and dominion.

The dream, to attempt to take living life forms of imagery and pulverize them down into palatable, encapsulated ingredients, was this:

I ascend an elevator, I lose my friends, and I exit on a high floor to find myself in a parallel world, standing on a bridge, watching a young woman pass by in a parade. I am standing in a crowd, showering her with rose petals in adoration as she moves slowly and proudly down the center street of the town. She is wearing a crown. She is 18 years old. She is beautiful and everyone loves her. I love her too. Everyone is cheering and petals are falling like confetti from emphatic hands, waving in praise and applause. 

I knew when I woke from this dream and digested it, that she was me. She was a symbol for Persona: the part of me that wanted to be adored, to please people, and felt she needed to adhere to a particular sort of beauty and behavior to be loved by as many as possible. She was the great big dominating part of me that dissociated from grief and anger and pain to make other people comfortable, including herself. This was safety for me. This was how I avoided what felt like death: loss of familiar relationships, and exile from my familiar tribe. 

I understood what this dream revealed and warned against. I was clutching onto an identity that was hollow, unsustainable, and no longer serving me. My soul wanted more for me. More depth, more intimacy, more feeling. I comprehended the message, but felt I wasn’t quite ready. 

And I was right. I really wasn’t. It took 4 more months for the foreshadowing and guidance of this dream to set in on my waking life like winter. In October, I began to experience a true ego death. I lost a meaningful relationship. One that meant so much to my soul that I suddenly could not bear to live with myself as the woman who had destroyed it. I began to truly desire to change, and change radically.

I made a vow to God that I was ready to die through change. I began to lose interest in everything Persona clung to for dear life. I felt the flesh ripping from my ribs and the implications of the death it demanded from me in my lifestyle and choices. It was painful and scary.

But I heeded the dream, and whispered to my confused and overactive consciousness: “Fall… Fall..”, until I slipped headlong into the Mystery between life as I had known it, and the life that wanted to be; the life of my full-bloom Soul. 

It felt like a nightmare most days. It was full of grief and fear. I felt myself losing touch with the people I loved. I felt despair. I lost faith. I wailed into the abyss. I believed in moments that the bad dream was real.

But in time, I became lucid, and I started to work with it. I started tracking the meaning behind everything I saw, and the way it all tied together; the patterns it was revealing to me when I zoomed out, and the treasures it was offering to me when I plunged myself into the darkness of merging with emotions. I became thread, fabric, and divine weaver, flowing skillfully between each perspective.

The commitments, rituals, and revelations of this process were intricate and vast. I will be telling the stories of them in many ways in the months to come, and probably for the rest of my life. But what I will say of them today is that I met my soul in the process, and I welcomed her to live through me without impediment. I lovingly laid to rest everything that could not make space for her to thrive. I gave Persona a death of honor, grieving deeply in my love for her, and acknowledging the love of her in the people who knew her through me. I thanked her for the many ways she served me and served the world. I identified the aspects of her that truly were soul, and discarded the parts that were self-compromising, false, and parasitic, like confetti into the sky of her parade.

I helped the flowers of my being understand that we were safe without such long, sharp thorns. Like a rose. There are thorns to preserve the body of the plant. But you don’t feel them simply by getting near the flower. You can lean in and immerse your face into the petals without getting hurt. This is the flora of a queen, rather than an untouchable princess; all bright-pink, imposing, and viciously armored. 

All of this came through me as I walked back to my house after dragging my trash can to the curb. By 10am on a Tuesday morning, I recognized that I am not as terrified of loss and death as I once was, because I gave it to myself and said Yes to it. I am not so terrified of the mystery between worlds because I jumped into it like a bowl of milk and I swam. And I found out what was on the other side. My soul.

My soul wants to touch more than she wants to rely on her sight and everything it identifies as “real”. My soul sees beauty and realities without human eyeball vision. My soul reaches people with her hands, and her heart, rather than her outsourced ideas of impressiveness through figurative gowns, masks, entertaining tricks, and fanfare.

And don’t get me wrong. My soul still loves to slip on a lavish costume. I will still wear make-up. I still love a good festival and look forward to the next time I get to enjoy one. I just no longer believe that these things define me, or that my showing up to them is a measure of my worth. Or that my worth could ever be measured through other people’s eyes.

I realize now, with the birth of my rosebud soul into her body, that the pleasures and proclivities that Persona deemed vital are just sparkling facets of the multidimensional totality that is the flower of my essence. I am driven for the first time, to live an unapologetically soulful life. 

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So, what will I do with this dream of hand cannibalism, as I caress the fabric of my life and recognize it as another thread of guidance for my waking experiences? 

I will sit down here and type this to you, at 10:30am on a Tuesday. I will begin to use my hands for the reason I cherish them most; my ability to write. 

I will thrust the arms of my tactile nature into life itself. I will feel fully. I will bring back whatever I unearth from the blindness of my mysteries, and I will extend it to the mouth of your consciousness for you to eat until I feel your tongue on my palms. That you might be nourished, and digest it into your own intelligent soulspace, so the world never goes hungry.

I will feed you the flesh off the hands of my soul, in a ritual sacrifice to the gods of Magic, so that we can begin to illuminate the space between this world and the ones that we have named “sleep” and “death”.