I had this really long elaborate dream last night. I was gonna go into it detail, but I don’t know, it’s really long and probably boring to other people. It involved someone I know dieing and turning into a small black bird (more of a severed bird wing actually), and then everybody felt bad for me, but it was like I was finally free. But then doesn’t mean I wasn’t still sad. I don’t know. The details are hard to get across, cause it sounds like nonsense when you put it into words. And then there was this old woman who took me, to basically, what I can identify as the same place as Tim Burton’s movie the Nightmare Before Christmas took place in. It was like Halloweenland or something. I don’t know how to describe it. There, death was a good thing, and all the weird monsters and stuff that people are usually afraid of were just normal. They weren’t bad. Anyway, right, and there was a part where I was at dinner with this old woman, and some other people, and then there was some part where we were supposed to reenact this ritual. Which I think we may have done earlier or something. Where everyone is dressed as these sort of monsters, eating dinner in this old-fashioned dining room with a chandelier. And then like they combined to form this big scary but silly monster thing, in like all these sections. But our reenactment of it was not at all as good or as powerful as the original one, and we just had like sheets over us, and were all smeared with paint and stuff. It was pretty weird.

Then I was thinking this dream over in the train, and it reminded me of something I was reading in that Shamanism book by Mircea Eliade (which I never finished), where the people interviewed say that their shamanism was in a state of decadence, or gradual decrease in power. And this isn’t what my dream was “about,” but the poorly reenacted ritual just served as a pictorial example of what they meant in my head.

What else, oh right… I was also thinking on the train of this little story, which I love to reference because its incredible. And I was thinking about ritual vs. story, and how stories (or so goes my theory) help to circulate and redistribute energy in the mind. And then I elaborated that idea into that a ritual then was a story that you were acting out, with the intention of circulating or redistributing energy in the world. Something like that. Makes sense though, I think.