The Third Eye

Dream/meditation journal: 8 minute read

6/22/24

I’ve now been visited by three shamans and a hot-pink tiger. My dreams have finally got my attention. For more than a month, I’ve been unable to shake a rare bout of depression. It’s beginning to dawn on me what has occurred. It’s time to get help. Now I face the paradox of approaching the transcendent realms from my starting point in the mist-cloaked valley of neediness. Can such a gap be bridged? This is one function of the drum.

For this important venture I select a half-hour recording from YouTube. Headphones on, I relax into my chair and succumb to the low, monotonous rumble of a stretched-skin drum. Taxiing the runway to the Otherworld at a frequency of approximately four hertz, dopamine and serotonin levels elevate. The gap is bridging. My brain enters a theta wave pattern, freeing my pararational consciousness for flight.

As my jumping-off point I’ve chosen a familiar strand of beach located at the foot of forested bluffs. I am hoping a spirit of the place with whom I’m acquainted will lend her power to this journey. Without thought or effort, I see myself ageless, with long, wavy champagne hair, wearing a white gossamer pantsuit, a jumper with wide legs and wide sleeves and a white sash at the waist. My unshod feet settle into the soft warmth and pale gold sands of the Washington coast. My back to the bluff, I stand on the shore and face the sea. With each breath of salt air, I inhale a joyful calm. The gap has closed.

Raising my arms skyward, I ascend with ease toward the blue vastness. I focus my intention on my flight and immediately encounter a subtle barrier. It feels like sticky clouds, like cobweb or cotton candy stretched thin, with a barely perceptible elasticity. I push through it. As I continue upward, I press into and beyond another, similar membrane. Both seem to represent whatever perceptual borders separate my ordinary reality from the non-ordinary worlds.

As I pass through the second sticky film, the sky darkens. I’m looking up, I realize, into a cobalt heaven streaked with velvety iris-purple and garnished with stars. Still suspended, I direct my gaze downward. I watch the sky lighten again into azure and magenta strands, becoming a pale powder blue. Below, a placid sapphire sea touches the sky, expanding to meet a stretch of pastel beach. I am in awe. I have just noticed, above the horizon, two large white moons in slender crescent.

I am definitely not in Washington now. I quickly become aware that I am not alone. I have no idea what to expect here, but that doesn’t stop me from being startled. In the sky before me floats a massive face. I’m wonderstruck. It could be the face of the sky itself.

Just slightly darker than the horizon, the face’s forget-me-not blue reminds me of the color often seen in depictions of Hindu deities. The face has full blue lips and is ringed by a white nimbus that could be hair – or cumulus clouds. More notable than all that, however, is its enormous magenta third eye. Unlike the depictions of Shiva, this spectacle is oriented on the same plane as the face’s other two, smaller eyes. The Eye’s roseate iris encircles a translucent inner ring of flecked mosaic amber, which in turn surrounds a violet-black pupil. The Eye dominates the face, every now and then lowering and raising its immense blue lid. I feel incredibly small. It’s looking at me.

I’m aware that the colors here are those I’ve encountered in recent dreams, the vibrant shades of Whitebear’s regalia, the tiger’s striking pink hue. Is the face a manifestation of a still higher-level Whitebear? I catch myself. Over-analysis will disrupt the vision. I don’t need to know. The Eye has a calming effect and emits an aura of profound benevolence. This is enough. I feel welcomed.

The Eye blinks again and I receive this as an invitation. I mentally express my desire for guidance, for healing from whatever has trapped me in my recent rut.

I now find myself lying at the waterline, in fetal position on fine sands of mauve and palest blue. The royal blue water appears clear, its color a reflection of the sky, as it rushes under me, shifting the sand beneath me in a way that feels anything but unsettling. I have no fear of being washed out to sea. I am relaxed, completely at peace. The warm water enfolds me like a liquid blanket. I understand that I am to rest here. My breathing synchronizes with the ebb and flow of the sparkling waves, my body rocking softly from their gentle push and pull.

I seem to slip away from that body now, leaving it to be regenerated. I am consciousness without locus, yet with heightened awareness I begin to experience the sight and sound of the handmade drum. It overtakes my vision-space, larger than life. I feel it too, reverberating in my chest, resounding through my heart, the way I feel my own drum living inside me when I’m holding it close for a journey.

A figure begins to materialize – the person beating the drum. I recognize her as a Siberian shaman with whom I was once acquainted. I knew her as an old woman, but she, too, seems ageless here, her long black hair and almond eyes both shining. Her presence intensifies, looming tall in her reindeer-hide mantle as she drums. With this appearance of the Fourth Shaman, I understand that my awareness has re-entered the Dance. This is the dance from a vision of many years ago, the dance to shift probabilities. The Eternal Dance, which continues whether I am aware of it or not.

I find myself dancing as before in the reindeer mask with its antlers and little slit-like eyes. Observing the fire, I am drawn into its dusky, ethereal smoke, but I resist. I know that the smoke of the fire will take me “home,” back to my ordinary reality. I can’t return yet. I recall the other body I’ve left at the blue shoreline.

Willing myself back onto the pastel sands, I again sense the crystal waves lapping under and over me. From their rolling crests flash glittering rainbows of refracted light. The setting sun spreads a peachy watercolor glow into the magenta-streaked lapis firmament. I am flooded with inner peace, a rapturous, unquestioned self-acceptance. I find myself enveloped now in an orb, a conscious, vibrating egg of loving turquoise light. I feel that if I open my eyes the light will be blinding, but when I do, I see only that the face of the sky is no longer visible. The Eye alone remains. It blinks.

Addressing it, I form a question, almost too simple, I feel, for such an exalted locale. “I think I left some of my soul at the Pond Property. What should I do?”

I’m referring to the property my husband and I failed to acquire just over a month ago, a place where, for the first time in my life, I had felt instantly at home.

“We have given you succor here. The actions to take in your world are known to you,” the Eye conveys without speaking.

This appears to be all I’m getting, because with no change in the drumbeat, I am abruptly back standing on the Washington coast in my gossamer jumper. In a bright flash, I see the image of a frog, my childhood spirit animal and a dominant presence on the lost property. Then the frog is gone.

I sense the local people now. I observe a solitary figure, a dancer in elaborate regalia that includes a massive carved mask embellished with strips of boiled cedar cloth. I don’t know how the wearer endures its weight.

“Thank you,” I tell the local spirit, addressing her by name. I have received the blessing of this place.

The Dance continues, but I must take my leave. A raven cuts the sky overhead, a normal sight here where towering conifers meet the sea. But the bird soon grows larger, engulfing me into her wings. For a split second I am swirling in iridescent blackness.

Before I can question these events, I find myself in the dim light of the Lily and Pentangle, my local pub in the imaginal realm. I’m evidently in the process of descending to my ordinary reality. While I don’t notice the membranous world-barriers on the way down, I judge this by the clear stages of transition, and from the fact that I have help from Raven, who is known to travel between the worlds.

Pale sunlight streams through the Lily and Pentangle’s storefront window. In the background, glasses clink amid the hushed buzz of muffled voices. With the bar counter behind me, I’m seated at a pub table across from Coyote in his Raven-Man form. In his usual black jogging attire, he is slender and humanish, with a Roman nose and a mop of obsidian curls. His presence in the pub always seems to indicate a kind of debriefing, whether we exchange words or not. As I try not to get derailed by my guide’s vague resemblance to Howard Stern (it always throws me off a little, and I suspect the Trickster finds this entertaining), I’m beginning to sense my focus shifting back to ordinary reality. I’m reluctant to leave, but I understand that this vision is over, with or without the drum recall.

When I’m drumming for myself I never sound a recall. I recognize the journey’s end. But now I resist this intuition, thinking, “I’ll just sit here in the Lily until the recall.”

It’s no use. My concentration is lost. I know my time here is over. My drink will have to be of the ordinary variety.

I open my eyes and turn over my phone. With roughly three minutes to go in the half-hour session, I press “pause” and silently thank the Otherworld for sending me back prior to the full-volume Fred Meyer ad. Before pouring that Scotch, I step off the deck and over to the fire pit, where I burn the Pond Property listing documents, releasing their energy into bitter smoke.

To be continued. . . .

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Photo by Jack B

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