I had a dream this morning that I should have written down right away, because it’s mostly lost now. And it was very interesting. I do still have pieces of it though. One character in it was named “Baron of the Cross.” His name was supposed to be a combination of the Voodoo ghedes, Baron Samedi, and the famed Christian mystic, St. John of the Cross. Oddly enough, it turns out that one of Baron Samedi’s other titles is “Baron La Croix” or “Baron of the Cross,” which is not something I’ve ever read before. Pantheon.org says of him:

He is a Guédé of the Americas, bridging the Guédés and Legba. Both are guardians of the crossroads, the place where spirits cross over into our world. If the intercessions desired are with the loa, then Legba is saluted and asked to allow the loa to participate. If the intercessions are with the dead, then Guédé (Ghede) is the intercessor.

Baron Samedi is usually seen wearing top hat, black coat tails, sunglasses, and smoking a cigar.

He’s also supposed to be extremely vulgar and sexually aggressive. I don’t remember anything at all about how he appeared in my dream. It’s odd that my mind would seize on him as a symbol of anything, as I’ve never done much research into Voodoo. Here’s a very good resource though, which says eerily:

Baron may be invoked at any time, and he can appear without being called, so powerful is he.

That wasn’t all that happened in the dream though. There was also some part where I was in a place, which may have been a restaurant or a theatre, and we were looking at a mural of a Japanese man playing the flute. The mural came to life and was a stage performance. The man played a simple tune on the flute. We knew this wasn’t what he wanted to play, so we asked him to play the song he wanted instead. He did, and then he came down among the tables to speak with us. He told us, after some coaxing, about how he had once been possessed by a “fata.” This term I took to mean something similar to Philip K. Dick’s “crossbonding with the homoplasmate” when he has these other voices/personalities in his head. The flute player told us that all he originally wanted was for the voices to stop. But when he grew accustomed to them, he became terrified that they would leave him (again, a reference to PKD), because he said, “When you fata dies, you die also.”

Looking up fata, it seems to have been an old Latin term for “fairy” or for one of the goddesses of “fate.” This makes sense, and is also pretty standard for the sort of wordplay that my sleeping brain put together spontaneously. But anyway, one of the more freaky connections which could be pulled out of all the above though is the fact that in the Voodoo religion, you may become possessed by the ancestral or other spirits, such as Baron Samedi. The Baron, as one of the major figures of death would also be intimately connected to the notion of fate.

Does this mean I’ve been possessed by death, or that I’m about to die? I rather doubt that. But even more mysterious than all this is what I found when I looked at my journal entries on this site from exactly one year ago today. I reported on a dream I’d had earlier that day:

I think that I somehow assumed to the role of a Grim Reaper. Not necessarily THE Grim Reaper though. And when this role was cast onto me by this person, I remember everything kind of taking on this different light and feeling weird and stuff.

The first thing I had to do was go to a place called the Black Gate. We were in some kind of small town. I didn’t know where the Black Gate was, so I had to walk around and find it. I was told not to “tarry” or it would complicate my quest. Anyway, I walked around this town, and found an old spooky graveyard. At one of it’s corners, I found what I knew to be the Black Gate.

Another of Baron Samedi’s names is Baron Cimitiere (cemetary). Notice that in this dream, I was literally possessed by the death archetype. I even had a boat that I rode around in picking up souls.

Then, eventually we got back to some land. We still had all these souls with us though, and for some reason that meant that I had to pick up and bear the boat, with all its weight on my back. The boat was now full and extremely heavy. But I struggled on. I walked through this strange city, passing a cemetery on a hill to my left. On the hill sat two upright throned sarcophagi. They were red and white, and glowed orange, and they were obviously royal, and magical. I knew immediately that I was supposed to have picked them up in my boat from the start. But it was now too full, and there was no room for the King and Queen. And so I had to walk on, leaving them there, and abiding by the choices I had made of which souls to pick up earlier in the trip.

I’d also later on made a rough sketch of the “King & Queen” sarcophagi in the cemetery on the hill. The idea presented itself that their location was in New Orleans (I’ve never been).

In any event, I’m rather puzzled by the notion that I would have two dreams, exactly a year apart, which mesh so well together. Also, now that I think about it, I’ve had some other really weird violent dreams lately about death and killing. Normally, this isn’t a topic I frequent. One occurred about a week ago, and I left the following comment about it on a friend’s site:

i actually had this fucked up ass dream last night that i was in some kind of weird army hit squad and we had to kill these civilians, and i remember that i shot a woman and her baby in the back of the head. fucking brutal. but then at the end, we were firing at these people who were our real targets, but they just wouldnt die, and then they turned into the cast members from the state/reno 911. and we hired them to put on a stand-up performance. but up until that point, the dream was like deadly serious.

I wonder just what it is that I’m psychologically trying to kill. I feel like it has to do with old patterns which are of no use to me, and which need to be completely transformed before I can move forward with both my life and my work. It’s also an interesting connection that the dream referenced St. John of the Cross. I know little more about him than the fact that he was a Christian ascetic monk who wrote a mystical tract, called The Dark Night of the Soul. I think it’s actually a guide to spiritual transformation. Perhaps this is the same darkness that all these figures of death are coming from to visit me. I guess I ought to go and check his work out. Here’s a good item on this:

The dark night is a profoundly good thing. It is an ongoing spiritual process in which we are liberated from attachments and compulsions and empowered to live and love more freely. Sometimes this letting go of old ways is painful, occasionally even devastating. But this is not why the night is called ‘dark.’ The darkness of the night implies nothing sinister, only that the liberation takes place in hidden ways, beneath out knowledge and understanding. It happens mysteriously, in secret, and beyond our conscious control. For that reason it can be disturbing or even scary, but in the end it always works to our benefit.

Anybody who has any other good references for me any of the areas touched on throughout the course of this post, they would be most welcome. This is obviously some kind of weird deep psychological thing, and the more angles I can approach it from, the better.