December 28, 2013

This morning I wake up in a panic. As fast as I can muster, I scramble out of bed and, despite all logic, turn on some lights. Whether or not this will do any good, it makes me feel better. Isn’t it strange that a blind person still feels better with the lights on?

I’ve awoken from a dream which seems terrifyingly too real. In my dream, I am in bed slowly waking up to a new day. Suddenly a huge black dog jumps on top of me, pinning me down. It is bigger than Allegro, who is 75 lbs, but not substantially so. It is perhaps 100, 110 lbs. I admit to not wanting to look at it much though, so can’t say more about it. Instead, I turn my head toward the right side of the bed and start screaming for Allegro to help me get the dog off me. Allegro is wagging his tail and wanting pets, but seems unphased by the fact that there is a nasty canine growling and bearing its teeth preventing me from getting out of bed. Then I wake up.

By the middle of the day, I’ve put this incident safely out of my mind. I make dinner and then get comfortable to listen to a good book. I have no obligations for work or school not just because this is December and still winter break but also because I’m on medical leave, so I’ve been happily doing as the spirit moves.

My dad has given me a fascinating book for Christmas. It is Cathie McGowen’s novel, The Expected One, about a modern-day descendent of Mary Magdalene. Now, even though Mary Magdalene is from the Christian tradition, she is a feisty, strong, compassionate, fascinating woman particularly from McGowen’s perspective. Incidentally, McGowen portrays Jesus himself, who in the novel is Mary’s husband, as being a human being I might actually want to meet. Besides, it is obvious that a lot of historical research went into the making of this book, along with excellent descriptions of remote villages in France, and modern Jerusalem, and I adore historical fiction. So it is after midnight, and I am contentedly listening to yet another chapter on CD.

Suddenly, a dog appears at my front door, growling menacingly and glaring at me. It looks identical to the dream dog. However, I am *not* dreaming now! I’m even more terrified than I was this morning. I try not to look directly at it. I can almost hear its low-throated snarls, and am too petrified to move.

How on earth did it get in here, I wonder. And then it hits me: I have closed my portals to the otherworld, but unfortunately not before this beast got into my apartment to terrorize me. What kind of dog is it? Who sent it here? What am I going to do?

As my mind races, a picture flashes before my eyes of a scene in the novel The Last Miracle At Little No Horse. In the scene, a black dog personifying the devil leaps onto the main character while she is sleeping and won’t let her move. This devil stuff is one reason I left Christianity. I couldn’t believe in a religion that seemed to glorify suffering with its image of a crucified god while creating a nonhuman entity upon whom to lay the blame of all the evils of human nature. I seriously hope this dog is not the devil. Probably not.

I wonder if this might be Cú Chulainn’s dog totem animal instead? He is, according to my otherworld friends, quite the narcissist as well as their personal rival and they’ve made sure I haven’t run into him. Even so, I doubt even Cú Chulainn or his totem animal would be this vicious for no apparent reason.

I admit defeat at the “who?” question and quickly return to the more pressing need for action. All this speculation isn’t helping the situation whatsoever. The dog is looking more and more malevolent, and if I am honest with myself, banishing this dog is far beyond my capabilities. I start wondering whether I ought to slip out the back sliding glass door and … what exactly… spend the night outside? It’s cold and it’s now around one in the morning.

At this moment I sense some sort of activity occurring to the right of where I’m sitting. I haven’t been paying attention to that part of the living room, as all my focus has been on the snarling dog at my front door. With the exhaustion of having to suddenly remain seriously vigilant, I reluctantly turn my eyes briefly from the dog, hoping it won’t take this opportunity to rush at me. I feel paralyzed with fear, but fortunately my head actually obeys my command to move.

My head turns, and suddenly I am looking up, straight into Oisín’s greenish-blue eyes. I am profoundly relieved to see him here. He’s in fact standing right next to me, his facial expression impossible to read. There are two other féinnidi standing behind him, but it’s too difficult from my vantage point to see them clearly enough to possibly identify who they are. Identifying them is not immediately important, anyway. I’m thinking, by the gods this situation is much, much worse than I thought. Again I wonder how this could have happened.

Now that they are here, however, my fear has significantly, though not completely, subsided. Oisín is sending me a picture indicating that I need to help them by keeping an eye on the dog while they go about banishing it. (I now think the reason has to do with the fact that they could then make certain that any energetic links formed between me and the dog could vanish along with the creature. At the time however, I just do what I am asked, regardless of how much I’d rather look anywhere else.)

The dog is still there, fierce and terrible, a defiant look in its eyes, as if it were challenging us to go ahead with the impossible. Oisín is no longer in my line of sight, and I’m in panic mode for a second until he puts a reassuring hand on my shoulder. I am so grateful we have more than one way to stay connected, and now, I feel safe.

As I watch, a radiant glow streams past my peripheral vision. I blink. I am definitely looking at some kind of object that looks sword-shaped, but which is entirely made of light. I presume that everyone now has a light sword. I now have two thoughts crowding out any fear of the dog from hanging about in my head. I think, this is the first time I’ve ever seen any of the fianna use swords, rather than simply wear them so they can be easily identified. Secondly, I muse, light sabers may in fact have a very real origin within someone’s experience with the world beyond this one. Star Trek could very well be divinely inspired.

Now Oisín is pointing the sword at the dog. A bright band of white light is rapidly streaming from the tip of the sword, soaring in a wide arc over the twenty feet between the living room sofa and the front door. This light, I realize, has very long range. It is one continuous, concentrated, brilliant beam that traverses the room in less than seconds while never breaking apart. It is almost like a Lazer, but within whatever spectrum of light is visible to me.

Oisín is aiming the light far above the dog’s head which perplexes me, but I’ve come to trust his reasons for doing things. (It is only later that I recall that in fact dogs physically have genuine trouble seeing overhead objects. This is why a guide dog can run a blind person into a tree branch which is high enough to smack the person in the head but also too high for the dog to see. Sadly I’ve had personal experience.)

As I watch, the light beam is abruptly changing direction in mid air, shining rapidly down onto the dog’s head. The dog has not expected this, obviously. The light is streaming onto the dog’s head, and the fur on its head starts to pulse with an evanescent glow. Then the light bursts apart, shattering into millions of showering sparks. Wherever the rain of sparks fall, exploding like myriads of tiny prismed multifaceted intangible crystals, nothing remains. With three on one like this the dog doesn’t even have time to growl. It vanishes almost instantly, and not a trace of it remains.

I think my mouth is hanging open slightly. I am infinitely grateful and also full of awe and a great curiosity as to the physics of this particular kind of light. I am, I admit shamelessly, a physics groupie. I taught myself physics in high school when the teachers weren’t sure how to teach someone who is blind, and then read many physics books for lay people for fun, and passed a course at Stanford in special relativity and conceptual quantum mechanics with one of the highest scores. I know this is no manifest light. Upon hitting an object, many colors, that is wavelengths, contained within the wave of a single white light beam will get absorbed by the atoms in that object, and some colors will be reflected. You see an object as green, for instance, because, in this object, green is the only wavelength, color, of light that the atoms in the object haven’t absorbed. Black objects and black dogs are their color because they don’t have a color to reflect. That is, in a black object or entity every wavelength in a light beam gets absorbed and “stays” in the entity. This is why color appears to be absent.

Spiritually, I have come to learn, humans are like most manifest objects in this respect. That is, when you hear someone tell you that your shadow side, that part of you that is suppressed and disowned, must be brought out and integrated for you to grow, there is a deep truth of physics behind the why of it. Perhaps such a task is less frightening if you know that the shadow is dark because it has absorbed all the colors of the light within you that you fail to or refuse to draw out and express.

With most things and all people, including otherworld people, light is always in the darkness, waiting to shine. Not so for whatever creature the dog actually had been. Whatever its composition was, it was made of no ordinary darkness, either. A dark object always has light within it, stored as energy in its molecules. The darkness in the dog, however, seems to be a kind that abhors the light, and shrinks from the opposite of itself. It seems to be such that it has no capacity to absorb color, but is in the purest, most sinister sense of the word, a void. Now it is the nothing at the heart of its essence, and perhaps not now even that.

I shiver slightly at these thoughts, glad for the comfort of Oisín’s hand, still resting on my shoulder, and the presence of the others. I am so very lucky, I think, to have such wonderful friends, who are willing to walk their journey with me and protect me, even though most likely I am the one who let the dog in by keeping that portal open in my living room for so long. Live and learn, I suppose. I sincerely thank all three of them for rescuing me. Before leaving, Oisín wraps me in still, quiet, golden light, so I’ll feel safe enough to actually get some sleep.

The next day, I invite a manifest friend over and together we sage the apartment thoroughly, walking the perimeter counterclockwise three times. Then with my Tibetan singing bowl, I reclaim my space as mine. I hope now I have properly banished everything and everyone unwelcome. I set the intention that this space is for me, my family, and my friends, in this world and the next, and only for us.