Reading is a good thing to get good at. I’m not particularly well educated, and I don’t pretend that I am. But I did eventually find reading material that resonated with my own personal interests. I had something to turn to in my down time. You can’t brain rot every day. You can’t get shit faced, every day. You have to try to make things somewhat better, sometimes. And for me, that was found through reading.
My mom gave me some of her interests. She was very much into horror movies and true crime. I never felt like reading any of her paperback novels, but I did find her copy of Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Because of her, reading was something that I knew I should work towards.
She wasn’t the only one.
My grandpa was a reader too. He had a stroke around when I was born. I don’t know who he was before the injury. I knew him as the quiet mechanic, who was always exercising his left hand and arm. Always stretching and working on his mobility.
He also read scripture every night.
His voice barely audible, going over highlighted sections in his bible.
My grandparents on my mom’s side were a big part of my life, as they only lived a few houses up the street from us. And ma dropped us off up there whenever her and pops needed a sitter/wanted to get sloshed, which happened a lot.
Grandma was very theatric in her fear of God and the end of the world. I believe she lost her firstborn to a tornado, way back in the day. I’m not too interested in reaching out to anyone to fact check that, so we’ll let my dusty memory exist on this page with an asterisk. That meant every storm was a tornado, that every big world event was a sign of the end. It was very exhausting.
I don’t think I was able to appreciate the beauty of South Dakotan rainstorm until I was older than most.
Grandpa’s presence was complimentary but silent.
Grandma drank a handful of times. She’d get drunk with my uncles and aunts. Those binges usually lasted a good four days.
I can’t remember Grandpa ever getting shit faced or acting up. I think the injury had a lot to do with that. Both of my grandpas were cut of a similar clothe. And both were a big part of my life. My dad made sure we visited his dad the summer before gramps passed away. I guess he had a feeling that things were winding down.
Both of my grandpas were the church types. Not nearly as devoted as Grandma though.
My mom’s pops – he was known to have had visions. I think it was partially due to the injury. Grandpa saw a mass exodus of people walking towards the west. Whatever else he may have seen, has been lost.
I haven’t seen him in a long, long time.
I started to dream at eighteen, and the bulk of these dreams would run until around twenty-five. They started slow. Dreams of floods, brief flashes of animals, seen the eye of God eventually.
Joseph Campbell said that if a culture lacks the resources to initiate someone into the next phase of their life, then their psyche or unconscious will attempt to compensate via the spontaneous production of mythological imagery.
It was my cursory knowledge of Jungian psychology, at that time, that made me be mindful of dreams. I wasn’t familiar with the ins-and-outs of this particular branch of psychoanalysis or their specific beliefs, but I knew from Campbell, that I should pay attention.
They said that the unconscious delights in being recognized. This is something that we hear from the lucid dreamers, too. They don’t mythologize it as much, but they say that if you want to lucid dream, you need to start a dream journal. You have to strengthen your ability to recall dreams.
The Jungians believed the same, but it was a bit more superstitious. There was a higher but silent and unseen observer walking alongside us in this life. And if we gave it the attention that it asks, then it’d allow you to see more than you were previously able to see.
Further than that, people and opportunities would show up, unseen helpers, wandering onto your path.
I don’t remember exactly when this dream happened, but it happened early on. Easily in that first year.
I think this is one of the more straightforward dreams that I have illustrated, and the commentary isn’t particularly insightful. But for who I was back then, it meant something.
The dream tells me to pray to the center of these two posts. I believe it was asking me to live in moderation. That was simply something that I wouldn’t be able to do. The years that followed were very much sloppy, drunk, and miserable. And because I couldn’t live in moderation, I was shown a demonic tree.
The imagery, yet again, is not particularly occult or hidden. It’s just the facts. And those facts are simple; a lot of my relatives on both sides of the family died young, died miserable, and died from not living in moderation. There are more sad stories in our family’s history than there is success.
The dream throws an at-the-time curveball at me, by showing gramps, who embodied characteristics that weren’t a part of my life. Gramps was a reader, a mechanic, he was disciplined, he was sober, he was a roofer before the stroke, he had visions, he was aligned with God, he was a fisherman.
Him carrying an eagle staff did and still seems strange, as he wasn’t a traditional type. I guess the importance of the staff still has some weight in our dumb ancient DNA.
It’s with this ceremonial or ritual item, and the qualities that he carried, the ones that I lacked, that he’s able to put a dent into this evil tree.
And the question is always, was what he did enough to change what this tree was – or was what he did futile.
I don’t know, probably never will. We do not live on the same timescales as trees.
Where the next generations go will not be seen by us.
