Lupus Alae


Spiritflights, fledgling and ancient

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I have Seen, and didn't know

A fantastic post by Damh the Bard the other day got me thinking about dreams, and about signs and how often we miss them. How often have we each been given extraordinary gifts of insight or foresight, the path laid in front of our feet, and inadvertently the gift, the path, has been ignored? Ignored...or postponed, deliberately brushed aside, minimized in significance by minds taught to reject that which cannot be logically set out in rational lines and steps and words...

For me, it was always dreams. I've had (occasional) precognitive dreams and extraordinarily vivid dreams overall for as long as I can remember. I recall telling my mother one morning when I was six or seven about a nightmare I'd had that someone we knew was very sick. It had upset me greatly and I couldn't shake it off. She got a call about two hours later saying that this individual I'd dreamt of was in the hospital.

I learned that day not to share my dreams, lest my own family think I was a freak or somehow evil. I minimized the significance of anything I did dream, shoving it aside and trying to place everything wholly in the realm of sleeping imagination.

I've always had two recurring dreams. One is identical to itself every single time, a nightmare. I may blog it in the future. The other dream is not the same every time; I suppose it's best classified as a lifelong series of dreams. In these, I stand on a hill overlooking stunning fields with a river gently winding through them, and there is a grove of trees just behind me. It's a beautiful area, and though the seasons are sometimes different, the land is always striking, radiant.

There has always been one other person present, who stands to my right and gazes out over the fields with me: an old man named Nionn.

As a child, I confessed my fears and my deep questions and curiosities to him, and he always listened patiently. He rarely said more than a few words, but I always left these dreams with a feeling of peace. As I got older, he steadily encouraged me to look to Nature to re-center myself, to never lose sight of all that's precious right before my eyes and all around all of us. This was occurring even before I had consciously embraced the Druid path (which I didn't even know existed until my teens; I'm in my late 20s now). It has always felt very much like a mentor-student relationship, with a sort of friendship interwoven in more recent years; even in dreams, I feel as though I have learned much from him.

I never really gave these dreams substance in my waking thoughts. I felt as though others would think me mentally unsound if I told anyone about how very real they felt; how "other" they seemed from typical dreams I've had, how much I'd come to look forward to them in their seemingly sporadic but always somehow apt timing. I daresay some part of my spirit leans on them, or is better able to grow and stand on its own through them. But I kept all of this to myself, even though deep down I knew I was doing them a disservice by trying to write them off and disregard them as mere sleeping stories conjured by an active mind.

Several days ago, I was reading something about Ogham and I saw "Nionn/Nuin" instead of merely "Nuin(n)"...as you can imagine, this startled me quite a bit, and I hurriedly typed a few Google searches.

Somehow, my brain had not put together before this point that Ross Nichols, founder of OBOD, went by Nuinn. Nuinn...Nionn...could it be?

Couldn't it be?

A picture revealed particular similarities between the Nionn of my dreams and Nuinn.

I feel as though I deserve a smack upside the head (even if my pacifism frowns upon it!). Why do I -- why do we all -- so stubbornly refuse to take even the most obvious signs and embrace them, run with them? Why do we brush aside truly amazing and special happenings in order to be sure we're not written off as somehow 'different' in a way people might not understand?

I am different. Perhaps you are too.

If you receive signs, follow them! Someone thinks you're special; some force is gently guiding you toward whatever your path might most brightly hold...the universe holds so much more than we know, so much more than the society we immerse ourselves in daily would have us believe.

And yet, all we have to do IS believe. Believe, and listen, and have the courage to set our feet on the bright path before us.

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