Summer Solstice Vision Quest.

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This most magical of dreams fittingly occurred, on June 21, 1994, the summer solstice, whilst the Moon transited both Sagittarius and my seventh house wherein resides my natal Moon.  Too, the dream occurred during the second or B cycle of dream-besotted sleep that day.

It was truly a potent dream and marked my connection to the very soul of the West Coast.  Too, it was about communing with the very soul of the proud First Nations civilisations which for millennia have thoroughly ensouled this truly magical place.  

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There were two large, Amerindian totemic masks which were each three storeys tall.  They were, however, paintings – oil on canvas.  There were seven different tones of maroon and red being used in the depictions.

All were very alive – vibrant colours, even from high up in the air.  On arriving into this most lucid flying dream, I hovered high up in the air above the site.  The light was at an indeterminate time of day.

It seemed high in the north of Canada such that there was briefly no sunlight, for about an hour, before the Sun would rise again.  It was not cold out.  As I flew, I looked from left to right whilst flying over an old growth of ancient majestic cedars.

I flew here as though I were an eagle, searching from left to right, probing the territory.  I was definitely in search of something of great importance.  In that sense, I was restless until being able to finally discover this elusive treasure.

Eventually, I happened on a large clearing in the middle of which were two large canvases.  Between the canvases the earth was plain; it was not covered in any grasses.

The canvases were some forty feet wide and a good fifty feet apart.  They depicted groupings of Amerindian persons engaged in a sacred ritual.

Whilst in flight, slowly looking on at this way below, I was told by my spirit guides that this was the story of the Esquimalt Amerindians.  With that, both canvases immediately came to life.

I was then hovering in the air but within the fabric of both merged canvases. They depicted the same experience which had been halved.

I suppose that the symbolism of this schism would be the result of the rape that these proud people would suffer at the hands of murderous Europe on the rampage.

With the animation of the canvases, there had been a strong breeze that caused them to come together.  Thus the experience was made no longer halved but whole.  This occurred in the midst of the clearing.

An older Amerindian man immediately caught my attention.  He was quite dark-skinned but it was hard to tell whether he was, in fact, male or female.

Long-haired, he had a strong, proud face with a prominent fierce-looking nose.  The kind of face, his was, that I have always found so drop-dead sexy.  It was a face that was not unlike proud Lakota Sioux, Sitting Bull’s.

The ritual involved the same man being initiated in some way.  To the point of the connection being visceral, I really connected with this man.

I initially saw him from above, from the rear, but then I made it to the front of him where I got a good look at his face.  There were elders present who were more elevated than he was.

From my perspective, I had thought that he had been kneeling.  However, it turned out that they were on a raised platform.

I was now directly hovering overhead of the elders and I saw exactly what they were seeing, in his face, whilst he faced them.  There was no way to get around the fact that this man was in a trance.

This was a terribly intense experience.  Including the drummers who played the most hypnotic of rhythms, there were several others about.

A chorus of women sang, all of which was hypnotic, buoying up the initiate’s spirits whilst he was deep in trance.  The old noble being was questing.

*This dream was so intense that I chose not to go into work.  I simply did not want to be around bigoted jerks.

I took to meditating in the pyramid and really opening up to experiencing this place’s true culture and not the upstart, transplanted European culture.

That very day, I went off roaming, feeling the tug of spirit as inspired by that dream.  I would eventually meet Frederick Hinneault, a Cree Amerindian.

We met at the Club Vancouver bathhouse on West Pender Street.  The connection between us, intimately, was simply out-of-body.

Like the old Amerindian, Frederick Hinneault is a grass dancer.  Frederick Hinneault who was so potent and who would stop me cold in my tracks asking me,

“Are you aware that you use sex spiritually?  I don’t know if it’s something that you simply do without being aware of what you’re doing.  Or you were doing it deliberately because you were with me and you could sense that I would understand.

“But it’s very potent and real.  I will say that it was so surprising to get that experience.  It was quite real… you are a shaman.”

I was quite blown away by the compliment but it really was true too.  END.

There in the semicircle was a feather dancer, in full regalia, he was being initiated.  I was greatly moved by this experience.  The women’s singing was tantamount to the function of the griots, doing their thing, in West Africa.

This was a most potent and shamanic of dreams.  This was more than simply being great music, it was great spirituality; it was a great grounded connectedness both with spirit and with nature.

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Photo: Honouring Our Ancestors

Totem poles at Cathedral Grove, Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

© 2008 Stan Bevan.

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© 2013-2025 Arvin da Brgha.  All Rights Reserved.

Merlin Shapeshifts.

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So here then a most jarring dream had, on Thursday, January 11, 1990.  This truly disturbing dream occurred whilst the Moon transited both my second house and Cancer.  Of the ones lived that day, it was the fourth dream recalled.

This dream was had less than two months after Merlin’s passing of AIDS and to have found him in a dream, rather unexpectedly, the revivification of life, health and boisterousness was stunningly jarring an experience.  Certainly, when last I had seen him he was within either side of 70lbs.  

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I would then be moving on as if going along the main road of The Alley, Sandy Point, St. Kitts.  There were some persons who were coming out of a large house that was much like Lara Wellesley’s.  However, it was white… it was an off-white, whitewashed, large stone house.

Everyone coming out of there was talking and laughing.  They were getting ready to go to a church somewhere.  They were piling into a minivan that was also white.

I had gone past them.  When coming back from Mount Idle, on the east side of the road by the old bank of the ground floor of Eustace Milne’s childhood home, from behind the minivan coming around between it and the bank building was Merlin.

He was wearing his light blue bandana – bought for him by Noëll, when he was in the hospital towards the end of his life.  He wore very ordinary clothing like he always did.  It was Merlin and he was very healthy.

He saw me at the same time that I saw him.

I was stunned.  I stood there catatonic.  I did not know what to do, and I thought,

‘What are you doing here?’

I was so happy to see him.  I hadn’t dreamt of him in so long.  I simply froze in my tracks.  I just couldn’t bring myself to talk… I just did not know what to say.

I wanted to scream my way out of being paralysed.  There was Merlin the embodiment of renewed vitality, I just couldn’t get over the fact.

He saw me and was momentarily surprised but instinctively he neurotically went into action.  Merlin simply began energetically walking and went up these stairs.

I bolted after him after getting over the added shock of his response.  I was surprised to see him in Sandy Point, St. Kitts.  I was so surprised to see him up and about.

I got up onto this landing after having lost sight of him.  When I got there, on my immediate left was a Chinese woman.  She was just on the cusp of her twenties.

She was wearing what Merlin had been wearing except that she had no pants on.  It was now a dress and the colour of the bandana… she no longer wore the bandana.

I felt so betrayed by this development.  Merlin had camouflaged himself, by shapeshifting, to become a woman.  He had shapeshifted becoming another race and another sex.

Merlin knew that I wouldn’t be able to relate to him thus.  Transformed, he wasn’t the Merlin with whom I was excited to interact.

Thus he became female, a counterpart of his totality, to create the distance between him and the Arvin that he had known.  I did not even look at her/him overlong.

The woman who was in charge of everything, organising the church outing, was not unlike Pannonica Kertész.  I said to her, “I came to get Merlin… to get his things, his bandana…”

“Well you can’t.  You can’t see him.  You have to make a deposit and then you wouldn’t be able to see him until giving the ring deposit back.” or something to that effect.

She had replied very matter-of-factly.  It was as though there had been a pact and somebody had reneged or something to that effect.  I found it most upsetting.

I was completely flabbergasted.

*Of course, Merlin chose to shapeshift in this dream because he wanted to have some distance between the raw emotionalism of the attachments associated with his just completed life.  I thought it interesting that though he had never travelled to the Caribbean of my upbringing, one of the earliest dreams of him on becoming an astral planet habitué found him there and of all places in Sandy Point, St. Kitts – a place he much wanted to visit.  END.

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Photo: Chinese model in A-line dress.

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© 2013-2025 Arvin da Brgha.  All Rights Reserved.

You Cheeky Little Imp!

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This dream occurred, on Friday, May 1, 1998, whilst I then lived in Montréal.  The Moon was in Cancer thereby transiting my second house.  It was sheer joy to have encountered Merlin’s playful spirit which was fully engaged as the trickster – the exalted dream shaman.

Once inside the house, I laid low for awhile and then got up to explore.  I do know that Pandora da Braga was on an upper level of the dwelling.

A little boy was outside in a stroller.  Above all else, there was no way of getting around one fact… this was a supremely intelligent child.  White, his hair was sandy-blond.

Naturally, he was regimented into a blue jumpsuit denoting his sex.  His legs were fat and there was, of course, the bulkiness of his being diapered.

The back of this boy’s knees were dimpled, fat and very cherubic a body was his.  His stroller sat on a paved walkway.

Two or three steps from the house’s landing led to the yard.  His back was turned to the yard’s six-foot-high, wooden fence of pale wood that was treated to be weather resistant.

As it had some traces of cyanide in it, the wood had an off-green hue to it.  Seated there, his left profile was closer to the house as I looked outside at him.

Whilst I absently worked at something, he inquisitively looked in at me.  I held up the bottled water that I had been drinking, extending it out the window, as if to offer him a drink.

He was keenly adept at the art of telepathy but feigned ignorance – as well he ought to have, as someone might have had him dismissed for mad.  Goodness knows, it would only take one superstitious adult to then have this young child declared demon-possessed because of his gifts.

Whoever he is, it was quite good to have connected with this august-souled young man.  Cocking me a look, he sized me up letting me know that he knew that I was playing games with him that he was not ignorant of.

I was floored by his candour.  He was a real cheeky devil who soon managed his way out of his stroller’s harness.  Since he was much too young to be walking, knowing that this was the dreamtime, he did the logical thing.

He shapeshifted and suddenly became a cat.  Thus, he magically acquired the stealth and agility which his paucity of human age and physical growth denied him.  I was blown away for not even I would have thought of such a magus move.

Once transformed, he became a large white cat which came up and quietly snuck into the house.  This was the sort of move that could readily have tricked and unhinged a lesser mortal, in this situation, but I was aware that it was him all along.

Turning around, only briefly, I had lost sight of him but caught his drifting tail as he sneaked around a corner.  I was not, indeed, going to be hoodwinked.

Roaring aloud, thrilled by the child’s brilliant display of both wit and magus energy, I went chasing after the cat.  Like the child that it represented, the cat bolted rushing through the house by going downstairs.

Eventually, it settled on a pile of crates.  The crates were off in a far, darkened corner of the basement.  Though a large, multiple-roomed house, the basement was not partitioned.  It was simply a large open space.

In the form of the water heater, heat and air conditioning systems, the usual signs of normalcy were present.  Nothing here could have proven a fire hazard.

Through which the cat could come and go as he pleased, the crates comfortably sat just beneath a tiny basement window.  The window proved, in fact, an air duct which was shared with another of the house’s many rooms.

Clever though he was, I was not fooled by his cheeky little act.  A large white tom, it had a fat rump on it.  A pure snow-white cat it was.  Addressing it as the precocious boy that I knew it to be, I called out to the tom.

I told him to be careful, being so high up on those crates, to not hurt himself.  To my surprise, he cockily shot back, sounding every bit like Merlin when speaking in his duxypuss voice,

“Oh come on, I’m a puss!”

I roared, blown away by the playfulness.  In one sure leap, it leapt through the opening and headed upstairs.  Just like that, he was out of sight.  He had flashed the tail at me just before taking flight.

I was stunned by his wicked playfulness.  This kid had me dismissed as a real pushover.  Not missing a beat, I went running upstairs calling out to Pandora as I did.

I told Pandora to keep her eye on that cat – I did not want it to get away.  When I came up, Pandora asked what cat I was talking about.  There was no cat in the house, she was confident, nor was there one normally.

To my surprise, the little devil had shapeshifted again and returned to his original state by becoming a rather precocious human child.  There he was holding the same bottled water that I had previously offered him.

He sat there, hungrily gulping down the water, all the while looking at me as though he had never laid eyes on me before.  Indeed, quite the cheeky little imp.  The sight of him only made me roar even more.

I couldn’t believe his brilliance.  It was such refreshing magic.

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Photo: White domestic short-haired cat & Buster sporting Lion cut.

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© 2013-2025 Arvin da Brgha.  All Rights Reserved.