Dreaming Awake is my ‘living autobiography’ where I share my travels between worlds via the arts, nature, culture, literature, spirituality & all things Jungian over on Substack.
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The psychedelia of owls
On 'the real psychic facts' & the art of seeing in the dark
The queen of night
The burnished gold of the owl’s eyes smouldered in the darkness, fixing me with a stare so intense, it felt like a hand was reaching inside me and squeezing the soft tissue of my heart with its long bony fingers.
Huddled inside its downy, white cloak, the owl continued to scrutinise my innermost being from down its long, thin nose. I had the strong impression this owl wanted something from me but couldn’t tell what.
Then I forgot.
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Things fall apart
On the nightmarish visions of poet-mystic W.B. Yeats, the apocalypse now & holding space for the unimaginable.
The poet who was a fisherman who was a magician.
No one is at the poet’s grave except for me, my husband and the murder of rooks filling the small churchyard with their excitable static. Part of the revolutionary movement for a free Ireland, William Butler Yeats died in the South of France but chose to be buried here in the foothills of Ben Bulben a stone’s throw from the Sligo coastline - haunt of the fishermen, living and dead, who wandered into so many of his poems.
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The hidden laughter of children
On cruel mothers & summers, climbing trees & getting free
On the hillside cresting the deep trough of the valley, there’s a stand of hoary old oaks dancing, as trees do, the vertical line between earth and sky. Midges, moths and thistle down reel around clumps of nettles and foxgloves. Somewhere overhead the cry of a kite hunting for mice spools through the air.
It’s a perfect Summer’s day, polished to a dazzling diamond shimmer but I’m wet through with the damp of October. Full of grief for everything that’s falling apart where my body can’t hold it…
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All the white horses
On beaches as dreamscapes & borders onto the unknown
Far below the beach flashes a smile, beckoning me towards the curve of gleaming white sand at the base of the cliffs and the liquid sapphire expanse of the ocean beyond. Together with my husband and our two friends, we descend the rickety steps down the chipped slate of the cliff. When we arrive at the beach, it’s empty aside from a couple of gulls skimming the waves. White horses canter gracefully onto the shore before turning to foam. Shifting deposits of quartz-striped pebbles rattle like beads in the pull and drag of the outgoing tide. We settle on the thin margin of sand, Bedouins for the day, camping out beneath the blue canopies of our beach umbrellas…
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The People's Mystic
On the wisdom of Carl Jung & why it still matters
Over the last six months I’ve found myself, mic in hand, squinting in great orbs of halogen light on the stages of community theatres, clubs and performance spaces up and down the U.K. from London and Milton Keynes all the way up to Edinburgh and Aberdeen, addressing sold out events at the invitation of innovative events organisation Seed Talks. Before each talk, I’ve been making a habit of hovering at the edges listening to the collective heartbeat of people taking their seats while watching everyone from teenagers orbiting their mums to people well into old age, balanced between a helping pair of hands, stream into the space…
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In the future we'll all be shamans
On making art urgent & three lessons in magic
Kerry and Helmut live on the edge of a forest in a remote part of southwest Scotland where the sky is so dark that, on a clear night, it rains with stars. On the fringes of the Sitka and its secret, hidden lochs, Kerry and Helmut keep bees, grow their own vegetables, walk their poodles Rosa and Cotton and make art. Helmut is an explorer of sound – the audible, inaudible and the imperceptible frequencies that can only be heard in the imaginal. Kerry makes ecological art in conversation with nature through walking, talking, listening, drawing and performing, alone and with others.
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Earth Laughs in Flowers
On life after death, individuation and the rebirth of spring
In the small Victorian graveyard half-swallowed by woodland on the edge of my town, the dead have been coming back to life, as if in response to a silent alarm ringing deep below ground.
With the return of longer days after the darkness of Winter, weavers and soldiers, artisans and traders, husbands and wives, daughters and sons have been blooming from the wombs of each tomb, their old worn out bones, resurrected as daffodils…
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The Sea Inside
On the power of imagination, big fish & deep truths
When I was young, I imagined fairies lived in the circle of apples trees which stood like a convention of elders at the bottom of my garden. My greatest ambition was to be a flower fairy, like the ones in my illustrated collection of Cicely M Barker books, and grow my own wings. I also imagined that the actual wolf from Red Riding Hood freely roamed in the woods near my house and that - if I wasn’t careful - he would eat me up, too. Meanwhile, I loved writing stories and would lose myself for hours in the creation of my own imaginary worlds…
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Keep Your Eye On The Doughnut
On mystery, multi-dimensional planes and the visionary films of David Lynch
Sometime in the mid 1950’s on a sleepy, tree-lined street in Boise, Idaho, just as dusk was falling and the house lights were coming on, filling the dark with their warm, fuzzy glow, a young boy called David Keith Lynch was out playing with his brother.
It was the end of another ordinary day in small-town post-war America. And it might have stayed that way, had it not been for the naked woman, who appeared from out of the shadows, bleeding at the mouth and stumbling towards the confused boy, while looking straight through him….
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What Blooms & Sings
On darkness, dreams & our unknown ‘other’
Little by little the light is rubbed out erasing the shaggy flank of the hillside and the muddy centuries-old path until, soon, we are knee-deep in darkness. Across the valley, only the spine of the moor is distinct against the fleece of low cloud where the night is slowly spilling through a tear in the lining.
From the slippery step of a style, I stare into the creases of the darkness. Somewhere stuffed inside is the hidden pearl of a full moon and the evanescent glitter of a Winter meteor shower. But there’s no chance of seeing either through the dense, dark padding of cloud. I can barely see the puddles that gleam on our path and can only imagine what’s buried further out…
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Plant a Flower at Your Graves
On pain, the shadow and honouring our ‘dead’
Blood is gushing from the woman on the bed. It jets and spurts from between her legs with an unstoppable force, reducing her body to a fragile red outline of almost nothing. Through the miasma, the woman appears to levitate above a pink stain clouding the bed, while a halo glows like a full moon at the crown of her head, as if somewhere between these two flimsy facsimiles, she is a witness to her own death.
I stand in the clinical, white gallery, which feels not unlike a mortuary, looking at this self-portrait by British artist Tracey Emin wondering if her pale apparition is weighing up whether the pain was worth it or not?…
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The Dream Life of Forests
On enchantment, extraction & doors to the invisible
Drawing on both ancient wisdom and science, Carl Jung viewed humanity as part of an invisible matrix that holds all things together in which we are not separate from nature, we are nature. In fairy tale and myth, the forest in particular is a place of magic and enchantment. Here in this dense, dark web of trees, the familiar gives way to the strange and the daylight realm of the solid dissolves into the mists of the ephemeral and numinous.
We wander the forest’s dark paths, temporarily plunged into a rhizomatic world of shadows and roots teeming with all that is invisible and hidden. The rustle of feathers, the swish of tails and the mycelial sprawl of what grows below ground invite us into an imaginal realm beyond the grasp of consciousness alone. In meeting with the wildness of the forest, we are called back to the instinctual nature of our own wildness. We may be eaten alive or learn to survive….
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When Doves Bite
On the vice of being too nice & the virtues of snakes
Lately, a pair of collared doves have been appearing in my back yard. They plumply waddle across the stone flags, scratching at seeds, before fanning open their wings and flapping into the branches of the rowan on the other side of the alley as if they were as weightless as the pale feathers swirling to the ground in their wake.
Then one night as I was sleeping, the doves flew clean out of the rowan and into my dreams. One by one they plopped, coming to roost beneath the eaves of a barn - a whole flock, too many to count, improbably squishing their ample bodies into the dark, cramped space, amid a frantic rustle of feathers and loud, peeved cries. But instead of tucking beaks into breasts and going to sleep, the doves became increasingly agitated until the next thing I knew, dove was attacking dove, tearing at each other’s throats and turning the barn red with blood…
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Kill the Monster, Sow the Seeds
The hero/ine’s journey for an age of collapse
Back in the early nineties before the ‘war on terror’, before the financial crash, before reports of wildfires became everyday news, before the forced displacement of hundreds upon millions, before the systemic rollback of basic human rights. Before we woke up one morning and wondered where have all the butterflies gone?
Back when Gen X (that’s me) were whipping ourselves into a trance to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and KRS-One’s Sound of Da Police, raging ecstatically against a machine whose death dealing tentacles still seemed far away enough in the future that - if you were privileged and western and white (also me) – it was still possible to believe their threat could be averted if you were smart enough and took the right coloured pills.
Back when Tony Blair and Bill Clinton arrived on the scene to captain a shiny new era of can-do centre-left positivism, the black American science fiction writer Octavia Butler was looking out of her Los Angeles window and noticing a few things…
