SUBLUNAR SPACE - lucid

Restless Liburnian Spirits

2020-08-21T21:00:00+02:00

On the Croatian island of Pag, four years ago today was my serpent dream that I often refer to as my "switch" event that broke my materialist mindset. Retrospectively I have to admit it already had started a bit before that, but nevertheless it is safe to say that this day played a central role in my magical coming of age.

In summary it was a nightmare turned lucid, a dream nested within a dream, with a fuzzy threshold to wake reality, out-of-body elements and most importantly it had a meaningful symbolic climax: I was shown a shield emblazoned with a vivid red serpent on fire, staring at me.

This serpent has haunted me for weeks and inspired many in-depth research rabbit holes into at that point rather unknown fields of occult knowledge. I started practicing kundalini yoga, meditation, got eventually hooked on the western esoteric traditions and especially their Helleno-Kemetic sources.

On this same day a year later I found myself standing on the highest mountain of the island of Pag, reciting my first Headless Rite, Greek hymns to Agathosdaimon and invoking the Four Kings and initiating myself from freshman armchair magician to fully operand sorcerer.

Fast forward yet another year, again on Pag, I obsessively hunted down the remains of an altar in honor of the local pagan serpentine goddess Heia, syncretized with the Roman goddess Bona Dea.

My job at a local electronic music festival reoccurred annually, so last year at the same time I was also on Pag. I celebrated my magical anniversary and revisited some of my favorite places, but most importantly I made real-life contact with a woman who used to work at the local archeological museum. I had already emailed her the year before, asking for help in my research on the altar.

I visited her in her garden and she was happy to give me a lot of hints what other interesting places to visit on the island. Unfortunately it was the second last day of my stay so I only managed to visit one of them: a newly discovered ruin of a church on a nearby hill.

After I had left Pag we stayed in touch and things got a bit weird. She turned out to be a spiritually minded, magically interested and quirky witch type lady with shadow people and ghost encounters and I felt comfortable enough to disclose my whole magical journey that was so intimately connected to this island. She seemed genuinely excited about it and had some very interesting things to say about the house I had had my serpent dream at three years before:

Several years ago the owner of the house, who runs a construction company, took a few fine stone ornaments from a wall next to the smaller church here in town. The entire square was an enormous basilica with water well, inside walls and so on. Behind the church a famous reliqary from the 4th century was found and some other precious and rare findings. On the right of the basilica there was a graveyard. Now, there were some wild building interventions around those walls and this guy took away some tombstones!! I remember wanting those stones here in our museum but he secretly took them away in the dark of the night and under protection of our local sheriff mayor so I couldn't do anything but alert the Conservation institute. But they also didn't do anything.

This blew my mind. The construction tycoon had stolen sacred stone ornaments from a graveyard and used them to decorate the house he rented out to tourists and in which I stayed every year. The same house I woke up in when I had my weird dream!

One of the main features of the local archeological museum is the entrance to an underground Roman acqueduct entirely carved in stone by hand and over 1 kilometer long with an average width of 60 centimeters. The lady had another story to share that stuck with me:

I used to close the museum and go into the aqueduct as far as I could. The air begins to get fouler the deeper you go inside. It was always interesting to go forward but getting back was kind of creepy. It alway felt as if a Roman cohort was breathing down my neck!

It inspired me to think that maybe the football-armored zombies from my dream might actually have been Roman soldiers misinterpreted by my subconscious.

Anyway, Pag is surely haunted. I am sad that due to the Corona restrictions my annually recurring job got cancelled for this year. This is the first in seven years I can't be there. It would have been nice to celebrate my magical anniversary and to catch up with my new friend and listen to some more of her stories. Coincidentally (or not) she wrote me this week inviting me and my family to come visit, but unfortunately that collides with our plans for this year.

So visiting an ancient and enchanted olive grove from antiquity and hearing the story about the local priest with stigmata who could bilocate will have to wait until some other day.

I will be back for sure. Maybe next year? Just the gods know.

Nematodal Nightmares

2018-10-28T12:30:00+01:00

I stumbled over a note in my favorite writing tool the other day. It is a report on a dream I had around February or March of this year. It was the second weirdest dream experience I've ever head besides the one that started my path of re-enchantment. What struck me now was that in retrospect it has some elements in it that could almost have been pre-cognitive. I am sticking with 'almost' because they are also quite 'archetypical' nightmarish themes.

Anyways, if you are like me and find it boring and meaningless to listen to other people's dream reports, stop right here. If you are into stories of semi-lucid dreams with sleep paralysis and where the borders to the awake state dissolve in an uncanny way, read on.

I am sitting at a kitchen table in some place, looking at my phone. It looks like an old 90s phone with greenish LCD display, but it has smartphone features. I realize that whatever I look at on the phone disappears. The letters of text disappear one by one. Suddenly I receive a text message with a threat. I don't recall what it said. I am checking the phone's task manager that shows me all open apps. There is an unknown task I cannot remove.

On the kitchen table in front of me I suddenly see disgusting worms appear whose skin is so transparent that you can see the red blood inside of them. I kill one of them with my hand. I kill several of them, anxious and disgusted.

I receive a text message telling me how many worms I have killed and the question why not dare try to get rid of all of them? Checking the task manager again I notice that the annoyingly persistent app is called "NematOne".

I am in a larger room with my family. My cat starts behaving weirdly and is very aggressive. The room feels strange as if something evil is present. My wife T. also behaves strangely and her voice is different than usual. I ask her if she feels like she is getting possessed or losing control. She looks at me, nodding and saying "yes".

I want to do the headless rite but I realize I forgot all the words. Instead I imagine having the "voice of god" and I put all my energy into this intention and start yelling "Dybbuk Tse!" (Hebrew exorcism "!דִבּוּק צא" for "Evil spirit go out!") with a roaring and echoing voice and it seems to have an effect. I continue doing it with more and more effort and the evil presence seems to retreat.

I ask T. if it helped but she says she doesn't think so, "because of the black matter at the ceiling". I look up and there is a lump of what looks like a nest made of black spiderwebs on the ceiling, oozing a black substance.

I freak out and my dream becomes lucid and I instantly notice that this place does not look at all like our apartment and that we should leave A.S.A.P! There's one of the creepy worms on the floor. It scares me and suddenly it turns into a mouse that runs off. Did I do this? The cat immediately chases after the mouse.

The room turned into an unusually long hallway which we are walking through. There are a lot of doors on both sides and we are heading towards the exit all the way at the end of it. Hearing a strange buzzing sound from behind I turn around and see a black mantis or locust like insect jumping and flying towards me. It lands on the floor right next to me and I call the cat to take care of it. The creature takes another leap into the direction to which we are trying to walk, trying to outrun us but the cat is after it.

I enter a room through one of the doors on the right side of the hallway and it's the bathroom in the house I grew up in. My daughter E. is standing in the shower and her skin is rainbow colored and she has a really evil look on her face. It completely freaks me out and I think this dream is too weird and I want to wake up.

I open my eyes, but I am completely paralyzed and I feel that something pulls me back into the dream. I panic and try harder to wake up. I open my eyes again, I can even see the light coming through the window curtains in our bedroom and I can feel my head resting on the pillow, but I have the sensation of being very forcefully pulled down from behind towards the mattress. Completely unable to resist it I drop back into the dream.

I am in the hallway again. I tell T. that we need to get out of here but that I am unable to wake up. I try to open my eyes again, but the pull is still there.

T. is there in the hallway with our daughter who now looks normal, but the feeling of evil in the room is still present. T. asks me "what is her birthday?". I reply "what? why?". She says "if you remember her birthday, it means you are not dreaming". I try to remember her birthday. Numbers get all juggled up in my head and I can't grasp any date in my mind. It seems to slip away. I manage to concentrate very hard. Slowly and with a lot of effort digits appear and fall into place. I got it!

I open my eyes and I can still feel the pull, but I am forcing myself to move, to roll over, to really wake up. It seems to work. Still feeling unusually numb I am finally awake, my daughter's birthday clearly in my mind.

I dared to use the term 'precognitive' in my introduction because of the feeling of being in a semi-familiar place that is not home and an evil presence that haunts it. Exactly like the story of our recent move to a new home that was haunted by a "poltergeist". Also the presence of the worms reminded me of a recent ongoing issue that our daughter was suffering from a parasitic nematode infection for a few weeks which always gave me the creeps thinking about it.

The Serpent Seal

2017-05-01T18:00:00+02:00

Last August I went on a business trip together with my friend and colleague J. and in the first evening we were invited to a dinner buffet by our customer where we enjoyed great seafood and white wine.

Back at the studio apartment where we stayed J. went straight to bed but I felt slightly tipsy from the wine and spent another hour playing around with my portable audio synthesizer before going to bed. My small room had just a queen size bed, a small table and a closet and there was this weird little door next to the table that led to a dark and empty but quite large storage space behind the wall. Somehow it made me a bit anxious and I put the table in front of the door and went to sleep.

I had an amazingly vivid dream in the morning. I was chased by a group of Zombies in full American football armour and I was with a friend trying to figure out what to do. There was a barbecue grill and we decided to throw lance sized meat skewers at the attackers. Suddenly my friend transformed into a zombie too and started throwing skewers at me. The football zombies learned from him and also attacked me with the skewers I had thrown at them. At this point my dream became lucid and I was able to stop the time in a Matrix like effect and the skewers stopped in front of me in mid-air.

The scenery changed to a dark solemn room made of stone, kind of like in a medieval castle and in a dramatic light and soundscape I was presented a large iron shield with an emblem on it that was alive and moved. It was a large red serpent ablaze in flames, rising up in a double S shape staring at me with bright red eyes. The only feeling I had at this moment was that this was of incredibly great importance.

(sketch i drew right after waking up)

Suddenly I was in my hometown on the street and I could see the football zombies again, still far away but heading towards me. There were also three yound midget girls in dresses with creepy faces that came towards me. I freaked out when I realized I no longer had control over this dream and I wanted to wake up.

I jumped up in bed, happy that it had just been a bad dream and while details from it were already rapidly fading from my memory I saw the serpent shield before my inner eye, clear and bright. I got up from bed and stumbled out into the hallway heading towards the bathroom. I walked by J.'s door that was open a crack and I could catch a glimpse of her foot sticking out of her bed. I opened the door to the bathroom and went inside. I locked the door and when I turned back around towards the toilet it was gone.

Instead there was a staircase leading downwards. I was shocked and slowly aproached the stairs that went in a right angle spiralling down in a square like manner. I slowly walked down the steps and it was quite dark. I waited until my eyes adapted to the twilight and I saw a large hallway of some kind of abandoned floor in the building. There were a lot of spiderwebs and everything covered under thick layers of dust and rubble. I saw a stray cat or rat rushing by. Then I noticed a strange movement in the shadow and saw what looked like reflection of light in a pair of dark eyes. I freaked out and realized that nothing of this made any sense and that I was still stuck in a dream. I really wanted to wake up.

I opened my eyes and I was still lying in bed. But I couldn't move. I was completely paralyzed. Panic. I could see myself lie in bed unable to move.

But I was still down there on this creepy staircase in the dark and the eyes were gone. Shit. Panic. I ran upstairs back to the light into the bathroom. I jumped through the hallway into my bedroom.

I woke up so quickly I almost fell out of bed. My heart was racing. Am I awake? I was able to move normally. I sat on the edge of my bed trying to make any sense of what had just happened and I was very thirsty. I got up and went out into the hallway heading towards the bathroom. I walked by J.'s door that was open a crack and I could catch a glimpse of her foot sticking out of her bed. Oh my god I thought. Total déjà-vu. I opened the door to the bathroom and everything seemed normal. I sat down on the toilet and drank a lot of water from the tap and when I closed ny eyes I could see the shield with the fiery serpent seal.

Sceptical sidenote:

there was wine involved and the strange small door and the liminal space behind probably influenced my dream. Our apartment was across two floors with steep stairs leading from the kitchen and livingroom up to another floor with bath and bedrooms. Also I think I remember I saw a dead lizard or snake on the side of the road the day before. That doesn't explain why the serpent in my dream was burning though and why it was so out of context of the rest of my dream. But it was a dream, so I guess anything is possible. But the sleep paralysis and dream in a dream with out of body sensation couln't have been just from the wine. Otherwise I definetly would want to buy some bottles of that.