Sophie McLeish @sophieactual@witches.town

@Eve Then we found a solution, and, first, asked what name we could call each nexus by. Having got that we then asked why they were bothering to interact with us, and what their intentions were.

We realise this sounds obvious, but finding the right questions to ask is harder than it seems.

For the rebellious ones, the relationship with humanity and particularly hybrids, is symbiotic, almost gentle.

For the second group, we can't really speak to the relationship with humanity. With hybrids, it's neutral, or guarded.

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@Eve We then began to recognise these interactions as a different tone of voice, although that's hardly accurate.

When dreaming lucidly, while the meatbag is asleep, your dreaming awareness is quite aware of what's what and will bounce you straight back to normal when under threat.

Dreaming awake is a whole different thing, the dreaming awareness is mediated by normal day to day responses and consequently can be dangerously unwitting about catching on to threatening situations.

Dreaming awake interactions occur like a compressed, encrypted datastream. As the interaction is uncompressed and decrypted on the fly, it feels like a conversation.

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@Eve Initially, we didn't and made some really stupid mistakes because of that.

Over time we came to notice a different feel from our interactions.

One group differentiated as, say, an owner dealing with a family dog, a second as someone looking at the scene from a distance, a third as, say, someone dealing with farm livestock.

With the first group there was an undercurrent of being ok to trust, with the second of, oh, you're there again, and with the third, of dealing with an unpredictable wild animal.

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@Eve About the chaotic ones, we can't say much, because when we do so, we always get bitten on the butt.

All we can really say is that the constant chatter in your head, the thing that keeps you mindlessly asleep is their mind.

When Catholicism refers to the ones whose names are legion, when Islam, randomly, refers to the djinn, when other religions refer to demons, it's them.

They have their place in the forever dance between creation and chaos, and they guard their position jealously.

If you feel it's your path, by all means talk with them, we do, but you've been warned, they bite, viciously.

@Eve When you dream, if you have a human soul, you'll encounter sentient nexuses that are part of humanity's karma, the human group soul. That's pretty much all we can say about that.

If you're a hybrid, when you dream, you'll inevitably encounter the rebellious angel nexus that you are a part of and it will do do its damndest to bring the totality of your hybrid awareness back into the fold.

There are a lot of other interesting things out there that both human and hybrid will run in to, then there is chaos.

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@Eve To quickly summarise what we've been given so far, some of the rebellious ones divide off an aspect their souls and make use of the detritus of human meatbags, the remnants left after human souls have enlivened a meatbag and then departed, usually before birth. The meatbag then becomes a hybrid, a human form with a quasi-angel soul.

The purpose, well, we're still finding out about that, but we're one of those hybrids.

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@Eve A few more posts just to round things out. Of all the multiplicity of nexuses that are the rebellious angels, there's a dozen we know of that are somehow concerned with humanity. We interact directly with two of them, the next six are involved with lineages we haven't been able to touch, the ninth is vast and weird and has a complex relationship specifically with Judaism. The other three we can't even get into a discussion about, we're just plain blocked when approaching the subject.

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@Eve The net result of that mediation is dreaming. Or everyday life, which is just a dream everyone agrees on.

Changing a dream just means knowing which threads to bundle together.

Well, getting help from your friends is pretty useful as well.

From here on, things get a bit complicated.

The rebellious ones aren't the only sentient entities with an interest in mankind, however they're likely the friendliest, although not for altruistic reasons.

@Eve So what is dreaming in this context?

Skipping a whole lot of precursor stuff, every sentient entity is a container, wrapping a tiny part of the fabric of the universe.

There's a location on the surface of the container where the threads of the fabric of the universe outside the container press against equivalent threads of the contained fabric.

The sum of the pressure of any particular bundle of threads causes life, and inherently, perception.

This pressure is mediated by the soul which selects which threads to bundle together and interprets the resulting perception.

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@Eve So what does a bunch of big ol' sponges do? They dream.

They wrote the book of dreaming.

Pretty much everything that mankind knows about dreaming was taught by them.

And when they make you dream, you do see them as people with wings, if they choose, or blobs of light, or fire breathing dragons, or our favourite pun, the nexus we usually deal with has an aberrant sense of humour, the woman in the red dress.

Now the word dreaming is being used here in a particular way, mainly because English doesn't have a better word.

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@Eve As the arbiters of the boundary between creation and chaos, between heaven and hell, it wasn't an onerous task to wall off a part of the universe as their own world. Then sit there and mull about what to do when God died and the universe came to an end.

Sucks big time when you're immortal and there's no universe left to play with.

But sitting there is pretty much what a big ol' sponge does. When you stop by to say hello to a rebellious angel at home, they don't look like people with wings, in case you wondered, they're pretty much fixed in place like a tree. Only more like a particularly weird sponge than an actual tree.

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@Eve So, having mentioned the rebellious ones, we'd better clarify that, and our view of dreaming.

There's a boundary between creation and chaos.

It's the S shaped line in the middle of the Tao symbol.

It's a vastly sentient, distributed hive mind.

It's what some western religions call the first born angels of God and some eastern religions, with a modicum of inaccuracy, call djinn.

And an eternity ago some aspects of it got hosed with the job and rebelled.

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@Eve Just realised that we assumed you'd made the connection that the major arcana of the Tarot, or Taroc if you prefer, are dreaming gateways to the archetypes of humanity's evolution, and these images were induced by the rebellious angels, the djinn, who have a positive relationship with people, rather than the demons, the qlippoth, the inverse face of Adam Kadmon.

Any of the extant Tarot decks should work as a starting point, how close to the archetype that they cause you to land in dreamspace is more or less up to how quiet you can keep your mind before you jump.

@Eve We also tried to remember a single author dealing with the qabalah in particular, but the playing field is huge and none stood out as being succinct. If that particular area is preternaturally interesting to you, finding a Rabbi with a mind open to outsiders, and there are quite a few, would cut through a lot of the dross.

@Eve Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming.

This is effectively his textbook on the subject. You may have to read the precursor books for context.

There were tree sorcerers, then the vampire lineages of the Tol, then the Plumed Serpent lineage forked and Casteneda was the nexus of the death and rebirth of a lineage of pure dreaming, the abstract flight to freedom.

Maybe all that'll be some fun for you?

@Eve Dan Millman, Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior.

The All American Dream meets Hawaiian Ho'omana, intermingled with a bunch of other worldviews.

There's also a previous book, Way of the Peaceful Warrior, the two overlap inconsistently and we found his style intensely irritating, but loved the concept of unreasonable happiness.

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@Eve Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep.

The science of Bön Buddhism described as only a Tibetan Lama can do it. Guaranteed to be complex, riveting reading until you fall asleep from boredom. Only to wake again and realise it wasn't boredom, it was concept overload.

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@Eve Many, many authors have dealt with this in depth. While they don't express what we are, some of their paradigms are not at odds with ours, so here's three approaches to active dreaming from wildly different directions and in completely different styles, in no particular order.

If you can't easily acquire these books, we may be able to bootleg some e-format versions of them for you.

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@Eve Our approach is predicated on active dreaming, a state of mind that's the naturally occurring result of managing to get the constant internal chatter to shut up.

Everyday life is a constant movement, never paying real attention, fluttering between images. Normal dreams slow the fluttering down a bit. Lucid dreams that everyone experiences once in a while are the whole lot slowing down even further.

What we characterise as active dreaming is real stillness. You don't have to be asleep to get there, it's essentially dreaming while wide awake.

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@Eve Hi Eve. We've spent our entire lifetime deeply enamoured with what we've come to think of as the Chronicles of Awareness.

The core of this love affair is why we refer to ourselves as a plurality. We've spent many years now, trying to write cogently about what it is to be part of a hive mind, but expressing this in an accessible way has been fraught.

However we are getting close. Our big issue is that we want everything we write to be entirely pragmatic, a result or our own experience, framed in the terms of our culture, not regurgitating other peoples' views from some time in the, possibly far distant, past.

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