My Silver Key...

Journal - Thursday, 5.20.10

One of the very first group-rituals I ever performed was a Dreamlands pathworking, in which Nyarlat-hotep gave to each of us our own Silver Key to the Gate of Dreams. Since that night, my Silver Key has become one of the most used fetishes of my magickal career.

Last night, I took my Silver Key from my altar and wore it to bed. And dreamt for the first time in recent memory. (I don't usually remember any dreaming I do. Sleep is a short blankness in between periods of consciousness for me. My own petit morte, if you will.)

It was a nightmare. Incredibly vivid. Again, it wasn't the typical eldritch horrors I've come to expect, but it still left me feeling quite unsettled.

It started with the discovery that my wife had been cheating on me for a quite a while. When I confronted her about this she sneered, "Well, sometimes I need it in the fucking ass and he can do that for me!" (I don't think my wife has ever actually sneered at anything her entire life.) The rest of the dream was the slow, dawning realization that my wife was nothing like the person I've always thought she was. My wife is a sweet, patient, compassionate, and very loving woman - in the dream she was a raging coke-whore. She was constantly yelling at me and calling me names, or alternately ignoring me completely, throwing tantrums, and more than once she laughed to the point of tears at the pain and anguish she was causing me. I spent most of the dream chasing her around, trying to get her to stop... being that way, but the more I pleaded with her, the worse she got.

I remember, towards the end of the dream, finding her in a flop-house down the block from our apartment building, sucking off a group of guys for some crystal. When I dragged her out of there, she shoved the crystal into my hand. (Just a bunch of loose crystal, no baggie, like trying to hold onto a handful of crushed glass shards.) When we got back to our building, there were a bunch of cops hanging around the entryway for some reason, and I had to sneak by them with the crystal in my hand, terrified the entire time that she was going to tell them and get me arrested.

I also remember that our building was *off*, somehow. It was definitely our apartment building from waking life, but nothing about it was exactly the way it really is. Some things were a bit bigger than they were supposed to be, some a bit smaller; some things weren't pointed in quite the same direction they really are; some doors and windows that were supposed to be there weren't, and there were doors and windows that were only there in the dream, as well. There was nothing I could point to and say "There! That is not supposed to be like that - it's supposed to be like this!" But the whole place, normally so comfortable and familiar, felt slightly strange and alien.

So, again, it wasn't getting eaten by a giant, tentacled alien, or being transported to another plane of existence by a grey-skinned, faceless man with bat-wings, but I would still definitely consider this a mythos-colored dream. I was forced to confront the madness of having the thing most precious to me in this life taken and twisted into a monster before my eyes. I woke up very agitated by the experience, and I've remained slightly nervous and anxious and just generally unsettled all morning because of it.

My wife's kisses somehow just didn't seem as sweet this morning.