(no subject)

Standing down on St Paul street today (oh, wait...it's Light street at that point), a rather odd thing happened- I saw an immense black bird fly overhead out of my peripheral vision, it seemed to be only ten or fifteen feet off the ground. When I turned my head to look more directly, there was nothing there. There were lots of pigeons there on the block, but what I saw- or thought I did- was several times larger than any pigeon, and wasn't so much flying as gliding like a large bird of prey hunting. I chalk it up to hallucination/imagination, but I had this nervous/shaky feeling for several minutes after that. Was strange.

Also, for a large chunk of yesterday, and for a while today, the court custody dream was really bothering me. I don't know why. It eventually stopped and is no longer bothering me, but I hate that it was.

In other news, I got some clusters of artificial grapes for my Dionysus altar- they're rather small, miniature bunches, but the table I'm using is pretty small so space is limited and they will work for the moment.

(no subject)

The Orphic description of Apollo...it is quite interesting to me. So different from the commonly-thought-of distant, aloof, restrained and removed picture of him....

Come, O blessed Paian, O slayer of Tityos, O Phoibos, O Lykoreus.
A giver of riches are you and an illustrious dweller in Memphis,
O god to whom one cries "ie".
To you, O Titan and Pythian god belong the lyre and seeds and plows.
Grynean, Sminthian, slayer of Pytho, Delphic diviner,
You are a wild, light-bringing and lovable god, O glorious youth.
You shoot your arrows from afar, you lead the Muses into dance,
And, O holy one, you are Bacchos, Didymeus, and Loxias too.
Lord of Delos, eye that sees all and brings light to mortals,
Golden is your hair and clear your oraculr utterances.
Hear me with kindly heart as I pray for people.
You gaze upon all the etheral vastness,
And upon the rich earth you look throught the twilight.
In the quiet darkness of night lit with stars you see earth's roots below,
And you hold the bounds of the whole world.
Yours, too are the beginning and the end to come.
You make everything bloom, and with your versatile lyre you harmonize the poles,
Now reaching the highest pitch, now the lowest and now again with the Doric mode,
Balancing the poles harmoniously, as you keep the living races distinct.
You have infused harmony into all men's lot,
Giving them equal measure of summer and winter.
The lowest notes you strike in the winter, the highest in summer,
And your mode is Doric for spring's lovely and blooming season.
Wherefore mortals call you lord, and Pan, the two-horned god,
Who sends the whistling winds.
For this too, you have the master seal of the entire cosmos.
O, blessed one, hear the supplicant voice of the initiates and save them.

(no subject)

I had the most bizarre night last night.

I couldn't say how many times I fell asleep and woke up again. I can't remember the last time I tossed and turned so much. The "dream" I had...if you can call it a dream, I don't know if I ever got to sleep deep enough to really be dreaming, so maybe my half-asleep brain was just stringing a bunch of stuff together...who knows?

But anyway, there was this over-arching theme of me reading my email, and each time I clicked an unread subject line, a new segment of dream would come up. And the subject lines were basically the sort of thing I see a million of every day on Hellenic email lists. At the top were a bunch of Apollo and Dionysus-related subject lines....Dionysus, Apollo, Apollo and Dionysus, Zagreus (wow, that name hasn't come up lately in dreams), Delphi, Wine, Apollo with Wings...and then there were other random ones like Lindt Chocolate, coffee, shipping notification from Amazon. There was no spam that I remember though (okay, then, maybe it really was an actual dream!!)

So the only ones that I ever actually clicked on were the Apollo and Dionysus subject lines. And a segment of dream would start that would be like watching a documentary on TV, with a disembodied British voice talking about the history of the subject while images of temples, vases and mosaics flashed by. Occasionally this documentary voice would speak of some of my own experiences as if they were known history. (I guess they're known history to me?)

And then periodically, it would flash back to my email screen and that subject line would be marked as read...and sometimes a subject would get updated, as if I had recieved a new email on the topic (If you use gmail, you know how the threading works...that's how it looked)

So that's not so much the bizarre part.

What's bizarre is that these documentary segments were interrupted by "commercials" talking about the gods and prophetic dreams...and how they're linked...TO LINDT CHOCOLATE! (I can barely type this, I'm laughing so hard!) and especially to Lindt Cherry-Chilli bars. (I just bought one of those last night.)

Interspersed with everything else was segments of dreams of me doing normal every day stuff- getting up, making coffee, going to work, buying a newspaper, but...as this has happened before, during these segments, random words would be replaced by the name "Zagreus": "I'd like one copy of the Baltimore Zagreus, please. And this bottle of Pepsi." "Okay, that will be two dollars and thirty-Zagreus cents." Yeah, like that.

All through this, I kept waking up and falling back barely asleep. At least twice, I woke up singing the song Far Away by Chantal Kreviazuk, which is still stuck in my mind right now. Okay, this is weird, when I have a song stuck in my head, it just seems like I'm hearing it as if it were playing from some external source...except without the external source. Right now, there's an almost physical sensation of hearing the song from a specific spot in my head just above and behind my left ear.

Around 5am, I seriously considered just getting up. But I fell back to sleep. A few times. Oh gawds, what kind of day am I going to have?