“Behold, Lucius, I am come. Thy weeping and prayer hath moved me.” - The Metamorphoses
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| (Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash) |
About this post: My direction in life changed in 2007 when I had the dream I came to call the Spirit Dream. The dream was the driving force behind my off-site blog, The Mystic Review (which launched in 2010) and the spiritual memoir I’ve been struggling with for almost a decade. My direction changed again this summer when a connect-with-the-spirit-of-your-book meditation helped me see the memoir project and my connection with spirit in a whole new way. This post includes the original intro to my memoir, the recent guidance I received, and some reflections on how all of this connects to ancient mysteries, the goddess and my new direction.
Original Intro
In 2007, at the lowest point in my life, I had a dream I could not explain. Unlike the murky, sepia-colored dreams I was used to, this dream was sharp and bright and saturated with color.
A spectrum of blue unlike anything I’d ever seen. Vivid reds. Shining white light. A beautiful woman with seawater-blue eyes, radiating love.
Filled with sparkling gemstones and mysterious symbols, the dream told the story of a journey to and from an amazing location.
And it told that story coherently.
The plot was detailed but clear. Events mirrored each other in a near perfect symmetry. Characters appeared and reappeared. Separate themes played out, like storylines in a movie. And when the dream drew to a close, each loose thread came together in an emotional conclusion.
I knew the dream was special. I was sure it had a message. Deciphering it felt like an imperative. This was the beginning of a journey that would carry me in and out of Spiritualism, through witchcraft, halfway across the world on pilgrimage to Israel and onto the doorstep of Carl Gustav Jung.
It was then that a striking synchronicity and a new round of dreams finally made sense of that first big dream. But while all of this was helpful to me, the thing that was at the heart of it was the woman in blue, the woman who guided me.
And not just in the dream.
Other Woman in Blue Experiences
I had other experiences I associated with the woman in blue. Some came through dreams and visions. Others took the form of synchronicities, research insights or inspired ideas.
Over the years, I conceptualized her in different ways. I thought of her as an angel or an archetype or some random spirit. But, the identity that always felt right to me was that of a goddess, or (in more modern language) a goddess archetype.
I liked the goddess idea because she felt so real I couldn’t think of her as a concept or construct.
So I tried to identify her with a particular goddess. I did research. I reflected. I paid attention to my dreams. I gave her different names at different times in my life. Then I would think that maybe I’d got it wrong and move on, but I’m not sure anymore that any of those identities were. Maybe they were right for that place in time.
Maybe she was always the goddess I needed her to be.
And if that’s the case, it makes sense that now as I’m getting older those associations would change.
But this is a new thing way of thinking. Earlier this summer, I was still associating her with Inanna.
And that is what got me here
What Happened
There are a lot of events, both spiritual and otherwise, that came into play but the most recent occurred earlier this month at the Hay House Writers’ Bootcamp.
I had signed up for the boot camp because I needed help with what I was calling a neurodivergent spiritual memoir—but the manuscript, as it existed then, was all over the place and I knew it. I’d written about my dreams, my visions, my spiritual experience, my creativity, my AuDHD, my experience with the goddess, my trauma history, my communication difficulties, my everything.
I learned enough in the first day of the workshop to realize that this was absolutely wrong. By day three, I was feeling completely discouraged—and that was when Colette Baron Reid showed up to lead us in a connect-with-the-spirit-of-your book meditation.
The point of the meditation was to find out what the spirit of our book really wanted.
This appealed to me.
About the Meditation
A lot of guided meditations don’t work for me because I have a condition called aphantasia which makes it impossible for me to deliberately visualize things (though I can and do have occasional spontaneous visions).
I feel left out in meditations where the facilitator assumes everyone has the same kind of brain. Colette is an old school spiritual teacher, however, and she knows that not everyone is visual. So she asked us to connect with the spirit of our book and then look at a dot on a paper until we saw something.
This works even if you’re aphantasic, because of something called the Troxler Effect.
The Troxler Effect kicks in when you fix your gaze on a single element for a sustained period. Slowly everything surrounding that element begins to fade. Gradually, it is replaced by images or patterns that aren’t really there. These images are thought to be based on the background of your focal point—but how and why this happens is debated. The most important thing is that it occurs.
I believe that synchronicity and pattern recognition and the subtle influences of spirit can play a part. Or that they did, at any rate, in my experience.
Because I saw something.
A faint, very simple eight-pointed star, a lot like the one in the ancient Akkadian bas-relief below.
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| Ancient Akkadian cylinder seal depicting Inanna and lion, c.2334–2154 BCE (Public domain image from Wikipedia) |
An Ancient Star
The eight-pointed star is a symbol for the goddess Inanna. It represents the planet Venus which is associated with Aphrodite, Inanna, Isis, Ishtar and a host of other goddesses.
In the Sumerian language the cuneiform sign for Inanna ð’€ also has eight points. Based on the Sumerian word dingir, meaning heaven or sky, ð’€ is used to represent divinity as a whole.
In reading Sumerian, ð’€ is a signifier. It’s presence before a name tells you that you’re reading about a god or goddess instead of an ordinary person. This was necessary in ancient Sumer because a lot of people were named after deities.
So the star reminded me of Inanna, specifically, and of divinity in general.
It reminded me that there was an actual spirit of my book. And it occurred to me, that instead of listening to the gurus of publishing, I should be listening to her.
I was suddenly inspired to tell my story as best I could. I began to have insights about the project and there was one insight that spoke lourder than all the rest:
What the spirit of my book really wants is to be heard.
I wondered if that spirit would ever be heard over the static on Amazon. I thought about how long it would take to get the book into print. I thought about all the reasons I was holding onto the dream of publishing it in ebook.
I decided to post the project online.
What I Did
I starting by posting the memoir, as I'd written it, in my Substack newsletter (Writing After Dark) but I quickly realized it it was too much content. So I started The Mystic Review newsletter and off-loaded all my metaphysical content to that publication.
But serializing two books (my fae-vampire romance and the memoir) in one publication was still too much. Finally, after a lot of back and forth, I decided to move the memoir to The Mystic Review newsletter.
But there was a problem. I knew that most people who followed The Mystic Review wouldn’t be hugely interested in neurodivergence and my ordinary life experience. In other words—moving the memoir to the metaphysical newsletter meant that I’d have to take out a lot of content.
And the more about it, the more I became convinced that this was what the spirit of my book had wanted all along.
Going Forward
My plan for this project is to keep only that personal experience that helps illuminate the topic.
Writing and publishing via the will give me a place to tell my story, to recontextualize my experience and share my research. In many ways, this is a brand new journey, a lot like the one I started with this Mystic Review in 2010.
I’m excited to welcome anyone who wants to undertake the journey with me. I will be sharing updates, research and excerpts here.
You can read the full memoir as it posts and subscribe for free at mysticreview.substack.com.
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