Dreams as Inspiration
How a dream about falling down a rabbit hole, as I held the Virgin Mary's hand, inspired me to write about a wildfire
A special note: Coincidentally, I wrote this post a few days before the wildfires in Southern California broke-out. I lived in So Cal for over thirty years and still have family there. My heart goes out to everyone in harm’s way. Stay safe.
This post is part of the The Meta Journal Workshop.
meta (adj.): showing or suggesting an explicit awareness of itself or oneself as a member of its category : cleverly self-referential (Merrium-Webster Dictionary)
No, not that meta! In this collection of posts, find inspiration in your old diaries, journals, photographs, yearbooks, and other mementos of the past to find inspiration for your writing, art, and other creative pursuits.
Inside these posts, you will find quotes from my personal diaries (dating back to when I was twelve!), personal essays, and prompts that will encourage you to look at your own life, not other people’s, for inspiration. Read on!
From My Diary
In an old diary entry dated, January 29, 2013, I wrote:
Last night as I was falling asleep, I had a dream.
I was holding the Virgin Mary’s hand. She was dressed in white and blue robes, and I was wearing a blue, short, dress, belted at the waist.
She took my hand and led me to the edge of a dark hole. Then we leapt.
“Down the rabbit hole we go.”, she whispered. And we slowly descended, upright the entire time, with my dress and her robes billowing out like umbrellas, our feet dangling beneath us.
We never got to the bottom, we just fell and fell.
A few times, I tried to force myself to see where we were heading but I couldn’t see anything.
After writing this description of the dream, I wrote: I want to write.
It was strange to see this entry. It was written when I was 44 years old, the mother of a young daughter. At the time my creative outlet was visual arts-mostly watercolors. I wrote blog posts but didn’t think of myself as a writer. My most earnest wish was to achieve success as an artist. And yet, my response to a deeply archetypal dream was “I want to write.” It is as if my future self slipped into my journal pages and scribbled those words, foretelling my future.
The dream itself delights me. I love the imagery of the Virgin Mary and I holding hands as we descended into the rabbit hole together, our clothes like parachutes, slowing our fall. The funny thing is I no longer practice a religion that venerates Mary.
Of course, that’s fun part of the archetypal dream, isn’t it? Taking universal stories, traditions, symbols, and myths and finding deep personal messages in them. All that imagery stored in our heads, hearts, and DNA, just waiting for us to pluck one to help us on our creative journey.
When I read about my dream, all these years later, I let it wiggle down below the surface of my mind, tuck itself into the folds of my brain matter, and the essay below is what it became. What started out as a story about a wildfire, ended in the sharp pain of watching my parents age. I cried when I finished it.
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