The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

Any thoughts?

Heh. Was expecting more of an occult meaning than a Freudian one.

Its an interesting thought. Doesnt feel quite right, though. The dream felt more mystical than anything.

Well, there's that.

Well, okay! Let's sit down and think.

Sorry if I came off dismissive. A few too many Sam Addams in my system to realize when I'm being a dick.

I started off as the usual ill-informed college neo-Wiccan, having some vague idea of a god and goddess. Well, I say started off, I started off a strident atheist rationalist, but neo-Wicca was my first religious path.

Drifted from that into sheer apathy after college, and then into theistic Satanism, and am slowly moving into working with fictional deities (well, as fictional as deities can be, hnestly real and fictional are sort of arguable when it comes to religion) such as the Great Old Ones of Lovecraft and the Chaos Gods of Warhammer, who respond far more readily than the Horned God and Threefold Goddess ever did.

The bear sure felt like a spirit, and a masculine one at that, but didn't seem connected to any gods I've ever follwed.

Well, I also toyed around with working with Hircine, who has a bear aspect, bdut never got far with him. Hunt gods don't pay much attention to non-hunters, I suppose.

It's summer, warm winds and clover scents, and all the windows on my house are open. Its dark inside, and I see through a window that my mother is doing some sort of work (not sure what; trimming the vines?). Behind, I see a bear looming. Yes, a bear, big and furry.

We've had them sniff around our trash cans before, so not as unlikely a fear as one might think.

I race out with my kukri in hand, yelling at her to get inside. The bear, who turns out to be a man in a bearskin headress and bear fur robes and armor (and/or, details are fuzzy) draws a black sword from under his robes, and I attack.

We wind up at the edge of our property, locking blades.

Aaannnndddd- dream ends.

Some miscellaneous points: the armor/robes and headress remind me of the outfit my character wore in an old computer game, and the sword looked like a machete made by the same company that made my kukri (cooincidence, or deliberate paralel?) I didn't get any real hostile vibes from the bear man, either, no hate or rage. His expression was blank.

Any thoughts?

Just a couple of questions: Do you own a kukri? And how is your relationship with your mother?
 
Because the first thing I thought was of the spirit world as a mirror to this one in that everything is backwards: in (mostly) sexual reproduction structured animals like us, in the charged gender culture that we're in, the us in the spirit world could usually be the opposite polarity gender that we are. Applying the same to the idea of humanity as exclusive of animality...the otherworld self can take the shape of an animal.

In Norse folk mythology, the fylgja would usually take the form of an animal or a woman...prrrobably because of patriarchal conditioning where men are human and woman are some other perhaps mysterious and magical manner of creature (instead of half the world's population of human beings), but if the Bear-Man wasn't actively hostile, perhaps he's your mother's otherworldly spiritual self that for some reason your dream self is intuitively threatened by. Perhaps it could even be your otherworldly self, not innately inimical, but out of your conscious control and therefore threatening to a way of life that you're comfortable with?

Or maybe it's some echo of somebody's past life as a berserker (except, well, part of me thinks that with some numinous experiences, our minds and the way to parse the experiences are the holes to the pegs; they don't always fit, so our mind fills things in with contemporary experience imagery) that might have manifested in a personality clash or event of conflict in waking life, had it not been repressed by confrontation or something.

Or it could be the presence of an ancestral guardian.

I'm also seeing some issues with lack-of-light in the dream; the blackout inside the house, and the black sword could mean different things or similar things, depending on how comfortable you are with darkness.

Good suggestion.

Some research and calling out to spirits and gods, I guess.

Erin go blah!