World Dream Bank: HEALING THE RING

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Healing the Ring

Dreamed 1984/8/22 by Chris Wayan

Rings are given to some.
Dark, heavy, laden with fire,
bearing a terrible ruby.
They confer dread powers, at a cost:
fanning the bearer's hunger. It's called
Devilsfire. We burn inside with longing
unknown; unknowable perhaps.

You must fight the urge to lash
out, seeking, for you'll burst
into fiery bolts of act;
and each deed gnaws the body
as fire chars wood. But subtly:

At first, pride: your eyes pool with wise.
And those fine wrinkles show maturity.
But the slow fire eats on, imperceptibly,
until all flesh is ash.

So face desire, set limits, use the Ring-
fire against itself! Burn out the wrong
that cunning Forger deep-inset.
Reformed, reforged, the Ring
though weaker, will be clean--
manifesting wishes against the Maker's plan!

I was given a Ring. Burnt and pitted came,
by the great heat of the Ringlord's hand.
I've fought this ring an endless now, with some
success, though I buy it with great pain:
the Ring has blushed from dark iron to gold.
In the struggle, though, I lost the stone.
Hoped I'd tame its blaze to a life-hue
or spirit-clear, but it stayed dire flame,
heat-shattered at last in the fight.

Friends call me Ring-Bearer, for I came
so far. But our bout's not done.
The incantation to ground the Ring's
nature when healed and whole,
the way to Wish it, still eludes; lies
latent in the gold.
A wedding ring with no promise,
no name.

As yet. As yet. But when our battle's done,
letters in the ancient script will shine
in golden fire. And they will not declaim:

One Ring to rule them all,
and in the Darkness bind them.

Gold ring with a huge ruby. Dream sketch by Wayan.

FOUR NOTES, YEARS LATER

"Though I buy it with great pain" echoes the only human being ever to hold Sauron's Ring. Isildur of Gondor, 3000 years before The Lord of the Rings takes place, wrote: "It is precious to me, though I buy it with great pain." Given what the reader knows the Ring did to Gollum's mind, that word precious is chilling. In the dream, I was better warned--I seemed to be eroding the ring's malice faster than it eroded me.
The ring of power's set with a ruby: Gandalf wears Narya, the Ring of Fire, using it to kindle hope and courage. This ring's fire is not so nice.
"When our battle's done" echoes Macbeth's witches: "When the hurly-burly's done, when the battle's lost and won".
Ring-magic: at the time, others saw me as gifted but strange, barely human. Today I see that strangeness--my Ring--as a blend of three rarities:
1. I had recently learned I wasn't one-in-a-hundred gifted, but a one-in-a-million prodigy--explaining, perhaps, why I couldn't defer to bosses--why I followed hunches looking crazy to normal people.
2. I had severe allergies making human food, buildings, travel systems, and social life toxic to me. I was locked out of the normal human world.
3. That year I'd had a flood of predictive dreams, forcing me to revise my materialist worldview. The magic of the Ring embodies the real magic I was having to face: ESP.
The dream-ring fuses these: the intellect I'd long underestimated, the smoldering disease wasting me, and the magical dreams that were leading me out of a suburban dayjob into shamanism, San Francisco, and a life in the arts as my own boss. At the time I wouldn't have used the word shamanism. But soon.

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