#4. The First Dream
Three Crows by Imero Gobbato
I previously wrote about my first conscious entry into Humbravana being through the image ‘The Transformative Force’- the portal that took me into another time and place. But to try and begin to explain the mysterious, multi-dimensional journey Humbravana has become for me, I must also write about another encounter I experienced several years before I had even moved to midcoast Maine and met Imero Gobbato. Only many years later would I see and acknowledge the connection and abstract relationship it foretold.
I was living in a cabin in the woods of Vermont, pregnant with my first son, when I had a vivid dream of a place and people, birds and rock, that was wrapped in an atmosphere so visceral I was compelled to write it down in my journal and later make some drawings. The dream became fixed in my mind as if I had truly lived it, and revealed a path that I began to follow, which wove through my days as intricately as the lives of both my sons, and continues to this day to guide and teach me in immeasurable ways.
Coastal Dwelling by Imero Gobbato
The Dream
The Way In by Rosemary Willson
I am standing in front of a rough, wooden door embedded in the side of a grassy knoll. A young man appears, who I do not recognize, and he gives me a small, smooth stone. I hold it in the palm of my hand and study it, feel it. It is a pentagonal shape, white, semi-translucent and soft to the touch, even though it is hard; it is a rock. In some strange way it feels receptive…I don’t know how else to say it, but I am very drawn to this aspect of it, this openness. I know somehow that the ‘magic’ rock in my hand is a token allowing me access through the door in front of me. So I enter.
Remembering by Rosemary Willson
Inside is an underground burrow lit very dimly by a horizontal row of small, square paned windows set high above in the earthen wall. There are several rough-hewn tables and benches; well used and rich with satin patinas. It is a setting out of Medieval Europe or Tolkien’s Middle Earth. I notice that the young man who handed me the stone is at the table next to where I am seated, and he turns to me with an attractive smile and eyes as dark as midnight. But before I can give him more attention, a petite, elderly woman in gauzy, flowing robes of blues and grays, sits down next to me. Birds seem to emerge out of the folds of her garb, and a white owl swoops up and perches on the windowsill above us. The wizened woman looks at me but does not speak, in fact I cannot remember any words being spoken throughout the whole dream. A bird flutters towards me and alights on my shoulder. I see that it is a mourning dove and I feel great honor by it, as if I had been acknowledged by something or someone. Confirmed.
Mourning Doves by Rosemary Willson
At that point I awoke from the dream, but it did not fade as they so often do. The people, the place, the birds, remained with me, as did the intriguing quality of the small rock I had been given.
Blackrose by Rosemary Willson
Some time later, while walking the path through the woods around my home, my eye caught the luminous glow of a rock form jutting at an angle out of the moss covered earth shadowed beneath the trees. As I came close to it, I felt a sweep of recognition. The pure milky-white translucency and soft, inviting surface was akin to the small stone in my dream. I would encounter this common earthly mineral many more times in the years ahead and study its qualities; especially those of transmitting and receiving energy. It was quartz.
Beyond the vivid sense of reality, I did not realize the significance of the dream until years later, while walking past the area where the old YMCA in Camden, Maine, had just been demolished. There were three crows walking a circle upon the torn earth, it looked almost as if they were doing a dance, and I stopped to watch them. I looked down, and there at my feet, luminous and out-of-place, was a quartz rock with an unusual crystalline formation in the center. I took it to show Imero. He studied it for a while, and said to me, “It has five sides. It’s a pentagon.”
Of course, I still have that rock!
The quartz placed in my hand in that dream was the first piece I was given of a puzzle I am still putting together, which I may never complete, but cannot put aside. I have been on the path I entered that night for many years now. It shifts and undulates through different levels of consciousness; defying one so-called reality that I am bound by and creating another just as real and complex, yet very different, and very compelling. Is it within me, a state of mind perhaps? A way of seeing and being? Or a mystical connection to another time, another world, and another life? It sounds like fantasy, but it isn’t. It is a place where I belong and where I long to be, and it is, most of all, where I keep finding myself - my true self.
House of Dreams by Imero Gobbato Buy this digital print.
“The mystery of goals which are not attainable (and we know it) and yet which are necessary to pursue anyway; such as excellence, goodness, perfection in art, peace among men. Is this to create or project a pattern into other dimensions, which will some day receive us? Is this our self-extension into another world or at least the remote and vague echoes and shadows of it?
-Imero Gobbato