Wings: "Melissa"

Last night I was translated. I was transported into the strongest most dizzying dream yet and the first thing I thought when I woke to hear a crow call at my bedroom window was "Maybe this is how Bottom the Weaver felt after his midsummer night's dream?"

Seriously. As my dream began I found myself inside that warehouse again. There was a searing pain in my shoulders, I could not feel my hands, and I was completely baffled why I felt that way because I was upright. I seemed to be standing so the pain made no sense. (Then again dreams are hardly ever logical on the face of it.) When I tried to move, to shift, I realized that my wrists were bound behind me, against the warehouse wall. I could not understand what held me to the wall as I felt no shackles, no chains, no straps. No restraints.

A hideous evil cackling exploded and echoed throughout the warehouse. When I recoiled from the sound pain ripped again between my shoulders and I heard a thumping or a scraping noise behind me. I willed my hands to work and dug frantically at the wall to grab whatever was behind me. All I could feel were feathers. I took a breath against the pain and twisted to my right, to my left. I saw what held me to the wall. I saw, but I couldn't quite believe it.

Wings. I had wings. They were my restraints. Barely had I realized this when the cackling reached a fever pitch. I picked out two voices, shouting near a greenish glow several yards away, and I tried to identify what I was seeing.

I saw wings silhouetted against the glow. The glow was from a screen of some sort. A rope or a tail twitched on the floor beneath the screen. It sounds crazy but the only way to describe it is to say that the pair of demon-cats had turned "the bitter glass" on its side and "programmed" the labyrinth design from the wall to be the field for a video game they found wildly entertaining.

As near as I could see, their sport was to taunt and torture and obstruct the progress of some character as it made its way to the center of the labyrinth. When my mind shut out the various taunts I began to hear the game character's voice - MY voice! Here I was hanging pinned to the wall, seemingly helpless to stop their taunts, a life-size version of their game.

You know, I am not quite sure how I did it or when I decided to do it, but I did it. With a heave and a howl I ripped myself away from those wings. I felt more outrage than pain - so much more outrage - and I just kept whispering with every painful gulp of air, "People aren't made to be broken. People aren't made to be broken."

The demon-cats were silent at first, stunned, but when I picked a scrap of paper from the floor and plucked a feather from the abandoned wings they stood and began to close in on me. I dipped that feather in my blood and scratched the words I'd been whispering onto that paper. Those demon-cats swiped at me, but I was faster. They howled and hissed and scratched when I dropped my little message onto the mirror and said, "Game over."

Their howls were canceled by the breathtaking sound of rushing wings as the crow landed between us and stood to face them. Somehow I knew I was to climb onto the crow's back. I did and he lifted us out of there into the moonlit sky. We flew forever it seemed. I didn't care at all. The flight was magnificent; the crow's power was formidable. I cannot describe how it felt, after the scene in the warehouse, to be flown through the moonlight. Even as we spiraled up and up and up around the tallest tree in the world toward the crow's nest I felt only wonder. (Imagine that. At my age I felt wonder!)

He watched over me. He tended me once I'd climbed from his back to stand in the nest. I was astonished to see the nest lined with white roses -- white roses from the warehouse! I cannot even think how many times he must have flown back and forth with the roses he needed to do this. Why line his nest so? Why bring me to his nest? Even with those sorry wings I abandoned I was no bird! Who is this crow to me?

The top of the tallest tree in the world swayed in the wind and the crow's nest became my cradle. From under the shelter of his wings I watched the stars swirl above us, higher still. I heard his heart. I fell asleep. He moved his wings and combed his beak through my hair to wake me. He had brought me back to the warehouse. The demon-cats were gone and I smelled the roses at the window. The crow hopped away then back again with a playing card in his beak. He flew to perch on my shoulder. I took the card and he gurgled in my ear before he flew off out the door.

The card doesn't look like any I've ever seen but I love it. My crow - I've begun to consider him mine! - is perched near a woman who is maybe the Faery Queen -- Yes! She is the Faery Queen who fell in love with Bottom! She took him to her bower; the crow took me to his! It is a twisted up version of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream"! But why? Is my crow meant to be the King of the Faeries? The way he cared for me I don't think he's playing a prank, even though in Native American lore crows are pranksters. I will have to study this.

Maybe if I run through the pieces of the puzzle I have so far I'll find a clue of some sort. I see "the bitter glass the demons hold" maintains the reference to Yeats' "The Two Trees." I think the crow refers to "Macbeth." Maybe the symbolism of the crow's nest in the world's tallest tree is meant to connect to the symbolism of the two trees of Yeats' poem and that of the trees at the end of "Macbeth"? But why the dream play? Why? How does that play connect to any of this? I've seen the play and the movie, I even have a-- Yes! I have a copy of it to check! It was my grandpa's. My dad gave it to me. It's about a hundred years old this copy, maybe older.

Now this is interesting. This is very interesting. It doesn't explain anything - yet - but it is interesting. In the cast of characters of Shakespeare's dream play there is a Duke Theseus. Since the image of myself as a sort of Medusa appeared in the last dream I've been brushing up on Greek mythology. If I remember correctly Theseus, with the help of Ariadne, made his way into the labyrinth to kill the Minotaur. The labyrinth again. The 'fingerprint of a god.' The key to the warehouse. Labyrinth .... warehouse... they must connect somehow.

Wait. I just remembered something else associated with the labyrinth. Daedalus designed the labyrinth and showed Ariadne how Theseus could escape. After that escape the King (Minos) imprisoned Daedalus and his son Icarus in the labyrinth. The only way for them to escape was to make wings for themselves and fly away. Warehouse ... labyrinth ... wings?How am I to understand all of this? What does it have to do with me?

I'm glad I like puzzles. Need to work on my drawing though.

Brokenness: "Melissa"

That was my attempt to draw the image I saw in a dream early this morning. The face in the mirror was an awful, bitter version of me somehow set in stone. I admit I have my bad days, but that visage goes beyond even the worst of them, I think.

When the dream began I stood outside the warehouse I saw in the other dreams. I'd been approaching it and wondering why there was a huge fingerprint painted on the stone wall. I remember thinking it could be a fingerprint from one of those Greek gods, but who? (Now I prefer to think a goddess left her mark there.) When I stood in front of the design I saw it was a labyrinth - pretty cool, but why paint it on a warehouse? I couldn't see any clues so I wandered around the building.

I found a door which did not help because it was locked. I wasn't sure I should try to go in at all, let alone force my way. Then I remembered the horse and my promise so of course I had to try. When I looked closer I realized the keyhole was not a real keyhole. It was a thumbnail version of the labyrinth design on the wall. I felt a bit silly thinking this - like my thumbprint is anything special! - but I decided to just try to use it as the key to open the door. I was surprised and yet I wasn't when I heard the lock release.

All I saw when I walked into the warehouse was the mirror with the granite-faced image. The looking glass was supported by two demon cats who looked like gray demon versions of the cat from those other dreams. I stood there for a bit wondering what that image of my face was meant to convey to me when the demon cats began growling and hissing, swiping at something above the mirror.

I heard a throaty call and looked up to see the crow perched quite comfortably on top of the mirror, a slip of paper clamped in his beak. He bobbed his head at me and danced from foot to foot. He made me smile so I held up my hand to see if he'd give me the paper. He did. Someone had written "People aren't made to be broken" on a scrap of soiled stationery. "Okay," I said, and he flew off toward the door and perched on the handle of an oar propped against the wall.

Once I picked up the oar he flew out the door and circled back to make sure I followed. I had no idea what a crow could want me to do with a single oar -- whack something out of the sky? What? I was thoroughly confused. He led me to the river, the one with the glass bridge, and flew round and round above my head crying, crying, crying. So, feeling really silly again, I started to stir the river and chant, "Double, double toil and trouble" from "Macbeth"!

That is all I remember.

Those provocative fragments stuck with me as I showered, but when I stood at the sink waiting for the steam to clear I heard two songs and the pieces of the puzzle began to make sense. My mp3 player was set to 'shuffle' - that is the only way I could have heard in succession Loreena McKennitt singing William Butler Yeats' poem "The Two Trees" and the group Audioslave singing "Revelations."

Yeats wrote of the bitter glass, the dim glass "the demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass," the glass which turns all things "to barrenness" if we gaze in it too long. I still feel the chill that crept over me to think some buried part of me had found a voice and was warning me. I was oddly comforted to hear the portion of Audioslave's "Revelations" about being broken because it reminded me of the message the crow gave me: "People aren't meant to be broken." I have the feeling now the crow wanted me to see, too, that people aren't meant to believe what the "bitter glass" tells them, those clawing, hungry, bitter things. How did the crow hear my buried voice? Who is he? Why does he care?

Now I sit here and stir my tea while I sift through the images again. I remember, too, that carousel horse -- Oh whoa! Yeats opens and closes the poem from that dream, "The Circus Animals' Desertion," with images of brokenness! He opens describing himself, "at last being but a broken man"; at the close of the poem he writes that his masterful images began out of, in part, "a broken can." (I like the topsy-turvy nature of opening the poem with "at last" and closing it with "began.")

Oh no. I remember now, too, seeing some of the circus animals "broken" when I was a little girl. I never handled that well at all. I had forgotten that. It would make my dad so angry when I would yell at them to stop!

So now I am remembering. And now it seems that my dreams are putting me together with a Nobel prize-winning "broken" Irish poet, and circus animals, and a crow who gives me messages. This crow also seems to think that stirring up a river and quoting "Macbeth" are the right clues for me.

But why? And how does the labyrinth-thumbprint-key part fit into all of this? How does this help the horse?