Faery Dreams - on trance work while dealing with mental illness

Night comes draping around me like a familiar blanket, one that often life has withheld from me during my periods of deep depression. Then, sleep was merely an escape, a total black out from consciousness, a temporary freedom from the hell of my own body and it's errant and self deprecating reality. It was like crawling into bed was falling into a noose that I hoped would never let off of it's grip.

But finally, with the help of my psychiatrist and some good old fashioned caffeine, and video game therapy which allows me to displace some of my gender dysphoria (until a time to deal with it when I mentally have enough strength to process and filter it properly), I seem to have found the alchemical compound that transfigures the nightmare of  the human world into a bearable case of ennui and so sleep comes as a sweet lover kissing my eyelids rather than as a despairing mother drowning their child in the hopes of sparing him the terribleness of it all.

It's taken a few months but with the chemical cocktail now in my system  as well as my latent fears  subsiding for the time being, I can look at my bed and no longer sees a coffin. Instead Hypnos reaches out too me, whispering to me of lands beyond the sandman's dunes.  Images began to take hold and for once they do not appear as the the terror filled miasma my mind often experiences during sleep, which decimates conscious fears into subconscious brambles, forever tripping me as I fall into slumber only to find myself surrounded by the imaginings of my own doubt.

Now I fall like a feather and for the first time in a long time I'm having dreams that echo my vision work, that seem to go hand in hand with my waking spiritual experiences. Instead of the jungle of randomness that my dreams usually consist of, I found myself wondering through a realm of story, one in which the edges seemed soft as a feather yet they still cut like knife. It reeked of faerie, reminiscent of something in a Gustav Klimt painting. All of the architecture appeared fraught with the luxuries of gothic architecture and the decadence of  the Renaissance. Through the main halls within a cathedral I walked, wearing a swirling print top of red and black and a skirt  of a fine lace with a belt of blue bells. Continuously I was pushed and shoved about my women wearing Puritan cuts of white and they shoved me towards a man carrying a book which he stored in a ornate wooden box on a stand. When he left I rummaged through it convinced he was hiding something from me. 

But soon he returned and began ordering the women about to make ready as he took the book from my hands. Soon I began to feel contractions and suddenly my belly pushed out an infant lined in silver afterbirth. Overjoyed I took the babe in my arms but the women began to scold me. It wasn't over yet. Three more babes followed nearly falling out of me like stones. And without further elaboration I woke up. 

Initially I brushed it off as nothing more than a dream but as the day went on I found myself haunted by the image of the man with the book, wondering what it was all about. They was a livid quality to this dream that was uncanny in its articulation of detail.

Strange as it may seem I happen to have much of my vision work come to me in the shower. I don't know if it's the liminal property of water that induces such states or the fact I tend to run it as hot as it  is humanly possible to endure without getting burns that triggers the trance but either way, my spirit often just jumps out of me without warning while I'm bathing.

And just so, it happened yesterday. I closed my eyes to find myself standing in a lonely meadow with overcast skies and before me stood a cloaked man. He remained speechless for several minutes until I called out to him and he tossed aside his cloak revealing that he held between his hands the same illuminated book I saw in my dream as he let it fall open between his fingers. It began to blow away into pieces, flailing about into the wind, breaking down into nothing more than crumbling ash. He himself bowed his head as though in gratitude. When he lifted it again, his hood fell back from his face, showing a circlet above his brow which began to sparkle and shine. 

He whispered a thanks and then began to disintegrate  into sand, falling like granules in an hourglass. Fiercely the wind tossed his remains about the meadow and I realized yet again that I was not alone. Four entities emerged from the vignette edges of the scene as though they had just materialized from the artist's hand. Four figures, four infants. The dream continued into my waking hours. 

It's difficult to describe what came next, but slowly their separate identities began to coalesce around them, as they they were taking form and weaving personality even while I watched. But what was clear by the end of the trance was this: they were the disambiguations of a king obsessed with the world in wrote and an enby witch who is distilling all of the harmful toxic things we teach ourselves about what it is to BE out of their blood. It was as though this fae king,with his tome filled with edicts, slowly crumbled into what the universe knows as true change, and from the ashes and my own bleeding heart arose these four spectres beyond my wildest imagining.  

Kou - fae of the earth, boyish yet femme around the edges, bares his sword and hammer in honor and protection of Gaea

Filis - blind harpist whose long draping skirts and bare chest tickled by waist length hair  whirls around him as he sings to the wind and conjures spells out of its notes.

Sejic - genderless (pronouns they), wears the flames about them like a shawl and veil. Eternally conjuring the sacred fires. 

Vyrnig - Water nymph whose body extends as long tentacles which love to pry open the earth's legs in endless copulation. Hair is the unending flow of the river. 

Yeah, I'm not quite sure how that happened exactly, but while dreaming I seem to have birthed in the astral half fae kids who are the highest hopes of a withering fairy king who hopes to return himself to chaos (the true primordial souup) and me, the ever dysphoric, ever shifting, unstable witch of the fucked up earthen plane.

I know it sounds crazy - in fact, I'm not that far above from declaring it's probably just the wishful thinking of a new-age blunderhole who just wants to feel  special. But I have taken this time to talk about my depression and this strange and unusual journey work to discuss something that doesn't receive a lot of coverage in mainstream witch circles : dealing with mental illness while walking the path of Witch. When I am more than likely experiencing night terrors from adjusting to  a new medicine - does that make it anymore exempt from my valid spiritual experiences than say, a child's simple nightmare? When the depression hits and it seems to lead me to the netherworld places while entering the trance state, have my experiences suddenly become invalid because of how my mental state tinges that sort of spiritual journeying? When, in the everyday world, people would just call me paranoid or overreacting, would such reactions be acceptable in the context of your magical life? 

Well, the fact of the matter is, most people think we are already crazy and that it's all "in our head" anyway (whatever the hell that means, perception is literally ALWAYS in your head). But I think we would be discounting the whole wealth of experiences and wisdom that comes from lessons learned while crossing the hedge and simultaneously combating out own mental demons. If Inanna chooses to take me on a ride to the underworld as I find myself mentally on the dark side of the moon - then perhaps that is exactly what this witch boi needs and the journey is no less important just because I'm not emotionally "right." I think there are a lot of attitudes in the writings on magick that are out there that imply to not engage in magical procedures unless you are "fine," "in the right state of mind," or out of the dumps, as though it's dangerous to be a witch if you're anything less than a neurotypical average Georgina. Well, fuck that. Conjure your wards, weave your protection spells, but baby, if you wait till you're "all right" you might be waiting till your dead. If the great primordial bath is chaos herself, then we the mentally skewed gotta a reservation at the Hotel Shook. 

But this is how I am - me, the enby, AD/HD, mood disordered witch - and these fae kids are just as wild, varied, and irreconcilable as I know I am. They literally were born out of the ashes of the old hegemony - the fae king and his edicts fell apart to form them. They no longer form monarchies and dualities of king's and queens. They are working to make something far more wicked - astral creation writhing into dreams and streams.  Don't let anyone tell you that because you're differently abled or neuro atypical that your craft is less than others - that fucking mothergoddess witch we see everywhere doesn't exist. There is no witch that is just a hag, or just a rutting stag of man. We are  chaos made flesh and the void fills us all  - but maybe we, the left of center, have one foot in each world, and our home truly is everywhere and nowhere. And if that isn't the way of the Witch, then I don't know what is.

*paintings by Gustav Klimt in order of appearance: Judith and the Head of Holofernes, Danae, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, Judith II