I'm reading Sandra Miesel's book, DREAMRIDER, (a new edition is out now, retitled SHAMAN).

By day, mousy Ria works as a historical researcher in a sleepy Midwestern college. But her night work gets wilder and wilder, as Ria dreams further and further off her particular branch of the Tree of Time. Is she mad? Or increasingly... sane? Her experiences form a classic shamanic initiation, and soon even madness seems irrelevant.

Ria lives in a subtly different America. It's a safety-obsessed world, an oppressive psychiatocracy where everyone conforms out of fear they'll be judged crazy or a potential terrorist. Yet her world grew from legitimate environmental and health concerns that most of us support. Dark humor, and the joke's on us.

But as I read on, the parallels between Ria's inner voyage and my own life get uncomfortably personal...

• A recurrent dream haunted Ria as a child: riding a dreamhorse up cloudpeaks toward the Other World. I WAS such a horse in MY recurring dreams--like I Am Three!
• Ria's childhood nightmares made her fear she was mad, till she learns the hard way that she was picking up broadcasts from a violent crazy person--exactly as I learned, at 17, in The Murders.
• Shamans on other spacetime branches teach her in dreams: one human, one a huge gengineered otter. So I've been taught by humans and animal people, in Learning Scales, The Black Current, and a thousand others.
• Creepy, sexually predatory psychiatric cops grill her; as a child I was sent to a creepy sexually predatory shrink and feared I'd get locked up. How creepy? Ayres died in prison for abusing his clients. My early years of psychiatric abuse still echo, in dreams like Our Best Song andTitania.
• Ria was abducted by a crazy psychic who could see society's cruelty, but ignored her own toward Ria... I was abused two years by a girlfriend who was brilliant, sensitive, psychic--but a batterer. Sharpshot, Dad Smashes Copcar, Feminist Gunnery Class.
• Ria mistrusts femme types and thinks a ballerina she knows reported her to the psych-cops... I mistrust my ballerina housemate Jamie, in Mahakala, Mozart, and the Black Bird, and treat my own femme side warily, gingerly... like Ariane's Honeymoon just last night!
• Ria's a celibate single as I am, and partly for the same reason--how do you share your life when your society calls it insane? Though sex is less problematic for her than power issues, and taking her power finally frees sex for her. Hmmm. Is there a lesson here, are my priorities reversed? Freedom first, love later?

I've gone through this once before, about another issue. I was a child prodigy in a sleepy suburban town, and the only models I had for how geniuses should develop were all science fictional: Heinlein's tales of psychic adepts (Lost Heritage and Magic, Inc.), geniuses (Gulf and Waldo) and child prodigies (Podkayne of Mars and Have Spacesuit--Will Travel); the Mule in Asimov's Foundation and Empire; Stapledon's Odd John, and Sturgeon's Maturity and More then Human. The kids in Marc Clifton's story Star Bright, Wilmar Shiras' In Hiding, and Howard Fast's The First Men. Like all such models, they were two-edged; while helping to build a sense of my difference, of my identity, they also carried a risk they'd distort it.

And then, too, I felt inferior. No, more than that, fake. I felt like a fat black girl with a skinny blonde Barbie doll--I felt defective while their exaggerated models felt real. I couldn't fully live up to science fiction's fantasies and stereotypes of my... race.

Species?

2001 NOTE

I wrote this in 1986 of course, so all my examples of parallels with my life were from earlier years. Since then, fifteen more years of shamanic teaching-dreams have just confirmed for me that spiritual initiation can indeed occur without a material teacher, and that parallel worlds, shamanic powers, and spiritual callings are as real as cars.

And I still think Miesel's book, marketed as science fiction, is a pretty reliable description of the sort of challenges and complications and rewards that a modern initiate faces. That's not surprising, since, like Ria, Miesel really is a historical researcher, and did her homework thoroughly. DREAMRIDER, retitled SHAMAN in later editions, is a clearer guide to shamanism and dreamwork than many nonfiction texts, and I recommend it as such.

For if your society has declared people like you invisible and nonexistent, fiction may be the only truth available.

UNICORN TAG is a set of dreams of hoofed animal teachers who dragged me (kicking and screaming!) past simple dreamwork into shamanism. 1: The Deer Party 2: Ariane's Honeymoon 3: Everest Marathon 4: Who'll Be My Love? 5: Dreamrider 6: Half Shaman, Half Statesman 7: 8 To A Horn 8: Black Magic 9: Misfits On Mars

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