Dream Directive

As "New-Agey" as I can get, I want to say right now that I've never heard voices. Ever. Sometimes when I was praying my heart out about something, I really WANTED to hear voices, wanted reassurance that God and the Universe were out there, possibly even listening.

As you know if you read my blog, yesterday before I went to sleep, I wrote my Resolutions entry about letting go of the visual journal & just containing myself in, confining myself to, my written journal. That felt like exactly the right thing to do. But last night I had A Dream. The same dream over & over. & over. & over. & again. Then once more. And it was a continuation dream: it would start where the last segment ended and then go forward from that point.

I was 'summoned' to a courtroom, an old-fashioned room of gleaming wood, seats like church pews, and wherein everyone wore crimson robes, funky high starched collars, & powdered Marie Antoinette-like white wigs. These were all women, mind you, every single person in those chambers. A courtroom full of my peers, my friends, my loved ones, along with a sea of faces unknown to me. All the faces were friendly. All the faces were also dead serious. I stood before this ROOM full of people, known and not, in the middle of a circle of tables covered over with pages from my visual journal. I recognized many of the pages; I also saw that many of them were pages I've only imagined doing. How did those materialize?

And then, one by one, each woman came up to the other side of a table and picked up a journal page. She held it with such love, sometimes with tears, most times with sparkles in her eyes and a big grin, and she explained to me what she loved about the page, and what it meant to her, and why it was not going to be ordained that I would quit making visual journals. A dozen women approached me in this manner, and then the 'court' would adjourn. And then my dream would pick up again and the next dozen women would tell me the import of my pages.

Of course after the first 3, I was blubbering and contrite and promising to return to the pages. But the women waved their hands to quiet all of that. They wanted me to HEAR. They wanted me to see the individual potentials for value of a page, not to make my choice out of emotional surges. They wanted me to consider, really think about it.

The second to last part of the dream shocked me. There was TONI (me!) approaching TONI (me!) and picking up page after page with reminders of why they were made, the prompts, the personal history in each one. And I was so gentle with myself (which I never am in reality)! I asked myself [in a voice like a lullaby], 'Are you sure you can do without this?'

And then arrived The Voice. Julia Cameron calls that voice 'her marching orders'. I don't know what to call it. It was a woman's voice. It was very melodical, somehow filled with chords as if maybe 3 voices were merged together into one but still harmozing. It was a mesmerizing voice. And it said to me, with infinite kindness and absolute compelling certainty, "You're not done here yet. Continue, slow down indeed, but continue. You still have great things to discover from these pages."

I'm a little freaked out. I have that thick throat sensation, that tickly prickly nose/eye thing going on, of big tears just behind and ready to burst forth. I'm a serious believer in messages from dreams so what I'm feeling right now is most definitely Spoken To. It's an overwhelmed feeling I don't know what to do with yet.