the timboucher experience

In keeping with my weird dreams lately…. this morning I had a dream that all of a my skin was replaced… by none other than my mom.

I’m not totally sure why it happened. I remember my hands feeling strange. I looked at them, flexed them and the skin felt old and worn. They do not in real life.

Then next thing I knew though, my skin had somehow been slit down the back, and I had slipped out of it like it were some kind of one piece body suit. I don’t remember being skinless long at all though, as I was suddenly inserted into a new and unfamiliar skin. I was upset by the whole thing, because I realized once in this new skin that it meant my tattoo was gone forever. (For those who don’t know, the graphic above of the severed hand and keys is from my left forearm. Read the newspaper article that inspired it here, as well as a section of my site on occult & religious tattoos).

Anyway, while I was worried about this, my mother summarily had dressed up some kind of weird mannequin in my skin. The key thing that it lacked was eyes, and there was some kind of weird process she was making me help her go through in order to create artificial eyes for it and insert them.

The dream was so weird and disturbing that when I woke up, the first thing I had to do was check and see if my tattoo was really gone. Which it wasn’t luckily. I was almost sure that it was going to be though.

In any event, the dream struck me as being at least symbolically very similar to something I read in Mircea Eliade’s “Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.” Eliade talkes very extensively about initiatory rites and dreams experienced by shamans throughout world cultures. One of the most common experiences these people have in the dream or spirit world (and sometimes even real life) is ritual dismemberment. They will experience an entity coming to them who does something like pulls out all their entrails. Or, all of their internal organs will be removed and replaced with magic rocks, like quartz - which then become the source of their power. There are even a couple mentions of initiates rubbing their skin off until new second or third skins appear.

Very crazy shit. I’ll have to go back in and read that section of the book for more. Any other leads or interpretations are certainly welcome.

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