The moon is dark today, as is the sky. It has been raining all day, so much so that even while it was light, going down the narrow walk between houses to get my laundry, I could have used a flashlight to avoid tripping over that *!*&#$ lip of concrete.

I’ve been in my head all day, writing a little essay on Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument and why it isn’t really a problem for physicalism. This may make absolutely no sense to you, but it is what I’ve been doing all day. Next it’s an edit on an essay on Greek god origin myths and their reference to specific body parts and what said references say about the polis-mind of the people. After that, if there is time before I need to sleep, a novel by Louis Owens called Nightland.

I went in to my office to get the first draft of the Jackson essay down. I’ve been struggling with it all week and found that all the home distractions (dishes to do, laundry, cats to pet, dogs to walk, plants to water and kitchen-floor-ground-in-dirt to eradicate by toothpick) irresistible in the face of Mary the supreme colour scientist. So I gathered my materials, drove downtown and sat in my empty office. It helped, because five hours later I had a draft.

It was really dark there. My office is high in a tower and we have acres of window glass but the world just didn’t light up today.

Part of my reaction to the day is because I know it is dark moon. There is something about that, especially now we are past Halloween, that makes me think of dark dreams I have had in the past, and once that happens the dreams are back, slipping under me like a sheet tumbled in a dryer with mugwort. There’s a sense of the dream as ever-there, even though you know it isn’t, or that’s is so long gone that it no longer signifies; nevertheless, it does linger, like it’s a vague smell, or an occasional prickle, like a tiny dried stem that pokes you in the waist when you turn to move your nose out of odor’s reach.

There was one dream — I was one of two young women. We were apprentices to a witch named Uath de Voor. We were moving up the mountain, back toward the narrow valley where our camp was situated when two young men came along, looking for de Voor. There was something about them: eager and curious, driven by their desire to know, completely oblivious of the worlds of others when those worlds conflicted with what they wanted.  They knew de Voor had warned them away, that she wouldn’t work with them, and they came anyway. We warned them, told them that relationship couldn’t be forced just because they desired it, but it did no good. I was afraid for them, but as it turned out de Voor was just not there. They couldn’t find her. When they got to the camp, the kettle steamed, the lean-tos were all in place, but she was gone. Still I could feel the air swamped with anger at the disrespect that the boys’ behaviour portended and I knew they were in danger while they acted in this way.

And there was another — I was an observer in this dream, watching a young, very beautiful but entirely vapid, woman walk up a spiral walkway. As she reached about 30 feet above the wide expanse of marble floor she came across Strega. Just as she reached the witch, Strega caught her under the thighs and over the edge she went. She was dead on impact. I remember the horror of that, and Strega, she just looked over the edge at the dead young woman and shrugged. Some people must die she seemed to say and the woman should never have gone up the ramp toward her. She was my mentor and I knew she was right, but still I felt the horror and the fear of the young woman’s death.

As dreams go, these two teach much about my inner workings. I dream a lot about power, its relationship to behaviour and the choices it forces. If you think of everything in the dream as a part of self then the woman who dies and the young men are as much a part of me as are Uath and Strega, as are the mountain, the steaming kettle, the hard marble floor. Working with dreams is like working with stories or essays, they are narrative puzzles that take on different meanings depending on various element juxtapositions.

And meanings: Some things must die for other things to be born. The entirely self-referential must die so that one can learn from another. That which is empty, regardless of how comforting or pleasing, must topple before the possibility of learning can proceed on up the path. There are others of course, but these are the ones that seem particularly present for me today.

Darkness seems to me just such a meaning, just such a dream lesson. It is a requirement of growth, not its impediment. And of course power is what both motivates growth and its purpose. Power is the seed that splits and out of which the new dicotyledon emerges and it is the point of the plant’s long fight toward what it desires.

So it is dark today and I feel a kind of humming emptiness. It’s as if that place out of which the dreams come is open to this world of offices and computers, deadlines and chores. It’s like that seed coat has split and out of me there is pushing up through the earth that is my self, something that has been born out what was once here but is now gone. I have no idea what it is, or what it will grow into, but I can sense it like the echo of mugwort’s odor.