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I am my mother’s savage daughter
The one who runs barefoot
Cursing sharp stones
I am my mother’s savage daughter
I will not cut my hair
I will not lower my voice

My mother’s child is a savage
She looks for her omens in the colors of stones
In the faces of cats, in the falling of feathers
In the dancing of fire
In the curve of old bones

Karen Kahan / Wyndreth Berginsdottir

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Here is last night’s dreaming it was in some parts accompanied by this song during the dreaming. There is a sense of something broadly shamanic incoming. I was reminded of Snowdon’s Glaslyn and Oeschinensee in the Berner Oberland.

The dream opens in a brightly lit indoor setting. It is like a pharmacy / clinic. Two young nurses, one female and one male, are struggling to calm down and contain a large older man with unruly blonde hair. He is panicking about his test results and upcoming injections. He will not listen to them. The woman turns to me and asks me to explain. I am of a similar age to the man. She explains to him that I am a trained scientist. I start to explain to him and slowly he calms. I show him a test tube in which the red blood cells from his blood have been sedimented out to the bottom. This means that for now he has not been infected which is why he needs to be vaccinated, something the nurse will gladly do for him. He is surprised that his blood liquid is light yellow murky over the small layer of sedimented red blood cells.

The scene changes and I am climbing a mountain track with a leather coracle on my back. I round the bend and go over the last lip into the corrie / cwm where there is a mountain lake of sublime beauty. It has been scoured out by glaciers of days gone by. I place the coracle and oar down on the rocky shore and marvel at the azure blue. I am home. I am back at the source of the river. I marvel at the rocky slopes plunging into the icy waters. I hear an all-encompassing silence. I will in time row out onto the lake because I have an appointment there.

The scene changes and I am in something of an ersatz physics laboratory. An experiment using lasers in being prepared for the school children. The technicians are struggling to get the experiment to work. They call for help and Ian M tips up and together we start to align the outdated clunky optics on a heavy metal rail. They are confident because of our laser expertise the experiment will work.

The scene changes and I am back lakeside. A magnificent mist has come in cloaking the lake and making the atmosphere heightened and mystical. At any time one might imagine the lady of the lake rising with Excalibur in her hand. The mist enshrouds and welcomes. I get into the coracle and row slowly out into the centre of the lake and the centre of the mist. I have a meeting and I have something to retrieve, to find again. I stroke my beard with my left hand. I am enlivened and energised. My palms are tingling with “electricity”. I have come for something and am reminded of the role of all the lakes in this life and beyond.

I am now outside a funeral parlour. There is a mass funeral taking place. Where members of two families are being sent off together following a huge violent brawl at a wedding. The two sides have been at war for generations. Yet they have decided to join together to remember their dead. Coffin after coffin is walked from the hearses into the crematorium. A newspaper photographer is there and goes to take a picture. I stop him and seize his camera. Such a thing would inflame and ignite.

Back out on the lake the mist clears and I can see far in the crisp pristine mountain air. I look down into the hyper-transparent water of the lake and several metres down I can see the rocky bottom with a few arctic fish like char. I remove my heavy fur jacket / long coat. It is bearskin. I am wearing a shirt fastened at the top with a shoelace like fastening. I stand in the coracle and am ready to plunge into the icy depths.

The scene changes to the carriage of a bus which is brightly lit and modern. The bus is only partially full. I am at the back of the bus and there are a few young people there. They are taking the piss out of me because I am not sitting down even though they are seats. I am holding on to a tube train style ceiling handle. They are all chatting and playing on their electronic devices.

The bus is coming to a stop. I have fallen asleep standing up much to the surprise of everyone except me. The bus has morphed into an airplane and we are taxying to the terminal. The doors open and because I am standing I am the first one to leave the plane.

The dreaming ends and as I awake I make a mental note to search my dream archive for dreams with lakes in and in writing I am reminded of the morning when I threw my katana souvenir into a lake in Hertfordshire.