A Circle of Crones

I dreamed about a group of about twenty women, all middle-aged or elderly, having fun together in a basement. It looked much like Lolly’s basement (and she was an elderly friend of my mother’s when I was a child–they made ceramics together). We held hands and formed a circle, in addition to standing around and talking.

Hmm, that sounds a bit like a witch’s coven or a consciousness-raising meeting or a gathering of wise elders.

It’s not too hard to figure out why I’d dream about something like that. This society doesn’t value women and combines ageism and misogyny on a huge scale. That dream was valuing people who should be valued and would be in a society that isn’t patriarchal.

 

A Triple Goddess Dream

I dreamed that a mortal woman in her fifties, maybe 60s, visited three goddesses (probably Celtic) and at night traveled with one of them, the goddess who had bright red wings. They had probably three such trips. This goddess also owned a book that was red and gold, and the mortal wanted to read the book.

After the first two nocturnal journeys, the goddess with the red wings was sleeping on the wings with the mortal. They slept on a circular gold platform. But the mortal wasn’t asleep; she had the book in front of her and opened it.

Next, they were at the place, in the woods, where they went on these nighttime journeys. They took a path, and the goddess was sleeping beside the mortal, but the mortal was awake and stood facing an upright image on a pole.

They’d seen the image—series of images—on the previous journeys. They were pictures of goddesses, and though they were up on a pole, they were like a big picture book, with pages that you turned to see the various images. The images were maybe two feet tall, and they included what looked like a woman with a cape made of peacock feathers.

The mortal glanced over at the sleeping goddess and started flipping pages and knew what she was doing was forbidden. She flipped to a page and started to trace it, I think, and accidentally tore the delicate paper.

The other two goddesses suddenly appeared, and the first one woke up, and the mortal felt guilty and embarrassed and knew they’d punish her, so she was very nervous.

One of the goddesses was loud and boisterous, joking, all, “Well, what have we here!” She put her arm around the shoulders of another goddess and indicated the book with the torn pages. The mortal began to think that maybe they weren’t angry at her for touching the book and tearing the page.