My most vivid recent dream, I find myself participating in a large gathering of people in an island setting.  It feels very politically charged, racially charged (because I am a foreigner clearly, yet somehow being welcomed into the local indigenous community) and the various players in that transition project themselves onto me and what I represent to them.

Finally, the day of ceremony begins.  I am in a huge hall that seems like a throne for a kingdom.  The ceilings are 50 feet high, the room a hundred yards long seemingly and 25 yards across.  The walls were strewn with windows so that no lights were needed inside during the day and they both curved up to meet at a center line down the middle of the roof so that there was no flat place above the inner structure.  The wall at the front of the hall (and the back far behind me) was essentially shaped like a leaf – flat at the bottom and pointed at the top.

Before this wall I stood with the Chief and his court waiting for a ceremony to begin.  What was this ceremony about, anyway?  Was I being married into the tribe?  Was I having a spiritual bar-mitzvah?  Was I going to be strapped to a fire-ant hole and left to deal with the pain in a coming of age ceremony like I’d seen in movies?

My attention seemed more concerned with the court than the chief.  I could still feel their disdain, and their acceptance because I had the love and trust of the chief.

Everything was coming to a climax.  I didn’t know what this ceremony was and somehow neither did they.  Everyone just seemed to be looking around and waiting for something to happen.

Finally a signal snapped everyone into attention and I was presented by the chief, standing side by side towards this leaf shaped wall.  Then, he bid me to step forward alone.  As I did so, at that moment a black robed old woman appeared from the crowd pushing past the court and king determinedly.  Her cronely form was not weak, and her black eyes pierced my heart, her presence enveloping me as she took my arm and led me outside of the temple hall to the beach and walked me long enough for everything else to disappear.

The dream shifted and upon this beach, the wise crone and I came across an animal lying in our path.  “This is my mongoose,” she said.  “Mongoose” I repeated, smiling – hoping that I wasn’t disrespecting her in that way.  The animal I saw was a fox, with a black hide, black face with white marks, and a white belly and chest.   The forelegs were black and the hind of each leg white as were the paws.

The crone picked up her mongoose and set it upon her shoulders, carrying it towards me.  Only then did I notice that magic was starting to happen.  The back legs of the mongoose had a distinct shape flanking the rear haunches.  The back of each thigh was almost metallic and shaped like a serrated clamp not unlike the shape of a bottle cap, but twice the size and inverted as though they were clamps to grasp onto something of that shape.

The fox looked at me calmly, with no will to escape her master holding her legs and body draped over shoulders.  Only her head was propped up and tense as though wishing it had a rock to lay its weight on.

“See her legs,” the crone said matter of factly.  “My mongoose can be set upon the legs of an eagle.”  And true to form when a wise heart meets vision, will and energy – an eagle did appear, the mongoose looking up as it flew over the crone’s head and it leaped into the air and clamped its rear haunches onto its legs.

It looked like an eagles’ mating ritual where they fly mirroring each other by the legs.  The crone and I flew over them watching, now as one being.  From our perspective, mongoose was above the eagle who was flying upside down.  The mongoose was growing wings of her own, pushing out against the resistance of the wind beating all sides of her.   As the mongoose’s wings grew and grew, she took the form of a black raven as large as the eagle – both with 9 foot wingspans or so.

As the now fully emerged raven felt propulsion of her own in the wind, the clamps in her legs were the ones to feel pressure now, lifting the eagle higher in the air with her force until the clamps themselves gave way.  The raven flew right.  The eagle now upright flew left, and I awoke from dream vision.