EARLY 2006

I'm in a forest, a very dark one. The trees are tall and thin and black as pitch. Their bark looks like the skin of an old Indian man (such a man with black barklike skin recurs in my dreams).

In this forest, I meet a deer, except he's a really tall man--but he's also a deer. I can't explain it!

His eyes are spirals, big shining spirals, and then they 're eyes again...

The deer man is dancing, powerfully, gracefully. Dancing, just dancing...

He wears a cape which lets him disappear. He says "My cape is made of dream. I can disappear into a thought."

He tries to tell me something about fear, too, about not being afraid.

When I wake up I nickname him the dancing magician.

A WEEK OR SO LATER

I'm walking down a street near my home. As I approach the zoo, I look at my hands, and suddenly I say to myself "I did it, I'm awake, I looked at my hands!" (A year ago I read The Art of Dreaming by Castaneda.) I'm thrilled... But then a voice in me says "Now find the scout." (In The Art of Dreaming a thing called "the scout" finds him in a dream, flashes orange and takes him somewhere).

So I look for someone who seems out of place. The first person I meet is a fat man walking towards me. Only as he approaches, he begins to break down. He just melted, as if he'd been made of dough and was now too wet to stay in one shape. He's not the scout!

Then I see someone I went to school with. I walk up to him. "Are you the scout?" I say. There's a flash of orange. Then I say "Take me there!" There's a rush, and I black out, and I wake up in my own bed, my own flat.

I get up, walk around, go to the bathroom... Only I stumble through to a house I knew as a child... I'm still dreaming!

And I wake again, in my bedroom. I know I'm awake for real this time. I get up and start telling my flatmate about my weird dream... and then I suddenly realise we're speaking English together and she doesn't speak English, so I must STILL be dreaming!

Now this goes on for a while--each time the flat gets realer, each time I find it hard to recall who I am and what I'm doing here...

Until there's a point where there are two of me.

Then I hear a terrifying voice laughing at me. It's a voice I've had in nightmares since I was a child. I force myself not to turn around and look... why bother? The voice proves it's another dream.

At last, I'm almost free. I'm awake, I must be for sure. So I get up and head for the kitchen, to have dinner with my flatmates. Only, there's also a young woman sitting there who I've never seen before--yet I know her. She's young, and she's crying, but my flatmates ignore her. Not sure what to do, so I sit and eat.

But midway through dinner I suddenly laugh and say "You're shadows!" My two flatmates glare at me murderously... and then their faces crack! I float/rise up out of my dream, because this time I'm the one laughing.

Then I really did wake up--only I wasn't quite sure.It was uncanny--it took me ages to trust that I was finally "back" because the dream had been so compelling.

A FEW MONTHS LATER

Traveling in Germany, I found a book called "Schamanismus." When I open it, the first thing I see is a dark figure with antlers and spiral eyes—the cave painting I know as "Le Sorcier", from the Tres Freres cave in France.

But in German, the caption reads "Der tanzende Zauberer", the Dancing Wizard!

Three questions:

1. How might I re-establish contact with this guide/aspect/archetype?

2. And how do I ask them to help me remember what I'm meant to be doing?

3. And most importantly, how do I ensure I don't go mad?

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