A Dream

I have dreamed this: my companion behind me, I flew to the skies, called upon Persephone and Aphrodite and Zeus, the last name most earnestly upon my lips, identifying Him (like the Stoics and St. Paul on Mars Hill) with the Most High of Heaven. I had been rescued from injury by animal spirits, and conversed with them on repaying the debt. At the shore of some redbrick English suburb, an intuition warned us off just in time, as the King of the Deep sent forth tentacles of ice to ensnare the mortal land-dwellers, each one paralysed and plated with ice as they tried to free the one snared before them (lovers, friends, family, or just complete strangers). With my companion (who never spoke, though I was conscious of her the whole time) I flew again up over the sea, calling to the King Below in defiance, until the ice rose from the sea to bind us together; and then I called loudly upon Apollo for deliverance, until my voice froze in my throat. And then the sun focussed like a laser, and blew the ice away.

It was a strange dream, I'm not sure what to make of it (why would I call upon Greek gods, even if I turned pagan? The gods of my distant fathers were Thor and Odin). (Also, the King of the Deep's ice magic was assisted by frozen ready-meals packets from Iceland, which served as conduits like metal to lightning. I'm not sure if this had any deeper meaning.)

In recent times I have been reading The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. I hope in the next week or two to post my thoughts on them; and after that, maybe follow up by dissecting the subtext of Phillip Pullman's Northern Lights, which was a great book, full of horror at science and materialist reductionism.