dream

Picnic on the edge of a volcano – a dream

Eve Neuhaus Leave a comment

I’m walking up a high hill with a group of friends, all of us carrying baskets. When the path spirals round to the top, I can see that the hill is a volcano, but it’s an inactive one, its crater a gentle dip soft with grass. More people are coming up the path and joining those already spreading blankets and tablecloths on the ground along the rim of the crater.

It’s my job to feed them all. There is a huge cauldron filled with something warm. I supervise some women friends who are ladling the soup (or stew?) into smaller cauldrons, which we then take around the circle to fill each of the picnickers’ bowls.

The mood is benign, cheerful, almost ebullient, though we’re all aware that it’s a volcano we’re sitting around.

When I wake up, the sky is yellow gray with smoke from the wildfires all over southern Europe, savage wildfires as close as an hour’s drive from our little haven on a hill, Cordes-sur-Ciel. Tom is coughing. We barely glance at the news—it’s too apocalyptic.

The waking world is falling into chaos. It’s fortunate that the fire nearest our place is contained, but the sister of a friend’s family has been evacuated from a much worse fire a four hour drive from here. Climate change is everywhere, we are in our sixth week of relentless heat, the wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine continue, and there are more earthquakes and erupting volcanoes along the Ring of Fire every day. Not to mention the political situation.

Yet Tom and I just returned from a few idyllic days in Amsterdam with family. The skies were blue and temperatures were well below the searing ones we’re enduring here.

We were indeed picnicking on the rim of the volcano.

The geometry of the dream bears further examination. There is the hill, the same one I’ve been climbing in my dreams for as long as I can remember. (I write about the series in another blog Spiral dream: Redemption, written a few years ago). At the top of the hill, there is a round indentation, grassy, but similar in form to the spring at the center of the women in white I saw the vision which I describe in the blog called A Drop of Love, and like the spring, it is surrounded by people. In the vision, the other women and I are meditating while a battle goes on around us. In this dream, both men and women are sitting on the volcano’s rim, and the battle going on around us isn’t evident, though it’s glaring in the waking world.

Symbols of the Feminine abound: the crater, the cauldrons, the bowls. We women are providing nourishment to the community.

If the message of the vision, which I refer to fondly as “my dickhead vision,” is that women need to hold the center during period of chaos by remaining calm and focused on the deeper world, the message of this dream is that we also need to be of service by providing sustenance.

That volcano doesn’t look like it’s about to erupt in my personal dream world, but I’d be a fool to think it’s just a hill.

Get your cauldrons ready, my women friends. There will be work to do.

An elephant in the room: a dream

Eve Neuhaus 6 Comments

November 2, 2024

A yogi lives on a corner near my home. I’ve known he lives there for a long time. You have to cross the baseball diamond to get to his place. The neighborhood is all white bungalows and the streets are dusty. The yogi is an old hippie, an American with long dark hair and a long dark beard. I’ve never been to his place before, but now there’s something I want to share with him.

It’s written on a small piece of very old paper, the kind made of fabric. The paper is soft and folds around my fingers.

The guy—his name is something short—John? Russ?—lives simply. He doesn’t even label the jars he keeps his food and herbs in, he tells me, laughing.

He’s old, but not much older than me, and he is wearing a lungi.

We sit on low round stools, 4 or 6 inches off the dusty floor. At first he doesn’t give me a chance to ask my question. Instead, he talks about the wonders of living there. An elephant lives in the baseball diamond. I know that. Sometimes it comes to him. Then the elephant comes. He had called it.

The elephant walks into the hut, which is now large enough to accommodate it easily. It lies down on a dusty carpet and looks at us. After a time it gets up and leaves.

I give the yogi the paper, which has a verse on it. We talk about what it says.

A white horse runs by on the street, kicking up a cloud of dust. The yogi and I laugh. “I didn’t think it was real when I first saw it around here,” I say. “But now I’ve seen it many times.”

“Yes,” he says. “It’s real.”

More people are in the room so I decide to go to the baseball diamond to use the toilet. There’s a game going on. I don’t want anyone to see me using the toilet, so I return to the yogi’s place.

I sit before him. He puts his hands on my shoulders and back and pulls me up to stand facing him. He tells me to inhale and exhale as slowly and deeply as I can. We breathe together for a while.

More people are coming, including Tom. When the yogi notices how many there are, he looks at me deeply and says, “That’s enough for now.”

I wake up.

(I remember so many details about this dream but not the message, the most important part!)

November 6, 2024, noon

Upon reflection, I think this is a dream about the American election, that archetypal battle that was just won by the elephant. The elephant stays in the baseball diamond. A vision of progress, the donkey, transformed into a white horse, rushes off into the future.

Values are changing. The words written on ancient paper, though they used to be very important, are forgotten by the dreamer, and replaced with the suggestion to focus on the wonders of the world around us. The white horse is real.

All the same, as my friend Robert Sachs said about the dream, “This is no time to piss around.”

Instead, return to the wise ones. Sit at their feet and they will lift you up.

And remember to BREATHE.