Best Dream of 2018

I had my best dream of 2018 last night, best because it was vivid. I was at a party, and by that I mean a pleasant social gathering with good and gentle folk, and I was seated beside a large and talkative, crafty woman with many ideas and much wit, who was talking to me about things I no longer remember upon waking. It is often the case, that I dream of being talked to, even at great length, and when I awake, can remember naught but the faintest outline, or possibly a single phrase. I do recall one of her friends bringing me a good drink (non-alcoholic, quite naturally, as I no longer indulge in intoxicants), and then she turned to me and with some charming witticism, induced me to rise and fetch her a drink. She said she liked a soda called "The Bossman," which I recognized as a sweet citrus carbonated soda.

Upon waking, probably due to allergies, this being ragweed season, I thought she might be my boss, for one, a natural enough assumption, or else a thought-form based upon the detritus floating through my mind, and possibly an amalgam combining my boss with a charming personality I watched on YouTube not long ago, a young, black woman talking about her religion, Wicca, in mild, gentle and reasonable language. I liked her and thought she was smart.

I don't recall anything of deep or profound meaning in the dream, but I did enjoy a rather nice conversation with an interesting entity in my dream, even if I remember little more than a dozen words of what was said! (And of those words, some permutation of "fetch me a drink" was the gist!)

I do think one of the most potent attractions in the practice of Wicca and other minority religions is quite simple and based in psychology. The mere fact that a religion does not have many millions of pushy advocates on its behalf is the attraction. That it can be practiced in solitary is quite useful. That it is adaptable and open to a certain degree of experimentation and improvisation is almost unique. Christianity and Islam have both become rather stodgy by comparison, full of rules and group-think and group-activities. The room for personal revelation and personal relationships to the Divine seems limited and dismal in those religions, which surrender spiritual power from the individual to the shaman. Where power and politics get involved, spirituality flees. Also there is the fact that, being new, Wicca has not accumulated, yet, such a large number of terrible scandals, and may it never do so, but I fear, in time, it too will succumb to human frailty, as humans do what humans sometimes do, which is to fail. Yes, everyone and everything suffers a setback once in a while, that is the nature of things.

I am more an admirer of Wicca than a practitioner. The ambivalence I feel for Nature is the main reason. Wicca is really tied to Nature, to the observance of days on a calendar and a rather sentimental and emotional regard for things living and dead. The great outdoors and to a lesser extent, environmentalism, both political and personal, are both key to understanding and participating in the faith. I have never cared a fig for the phase of the Moon and doubt I could start now. To me, the Moon and indeed the planets are abstract notions. I admire them rather vaguely and am aware they are there, and like to learn about them, but don't really see them as influencing me that much. After all, they are material. If the Moon could influence me, then how much more so could the floor beneath my feet, and perhaps I should study the phases of the floor, and learn what angle it lies at, and the composition thereof. No, I dwell in the realm of thoughts and really always have and never liked camping or spending too much time in the rough. I hated going camping in Scouts. I like all of the conveniences of civilization and the wondrous artificial comfort zones we have created with our science. Science is the magic of the material plane we dwell in, whereas magic is of the spirit.

Of course, another big attraction to Wicca for many women is simply that there are many female Wiccans, and the relatively smaller number (I imagine) of male Wiccans tend to be feminists or at least open to the notion of equality between the sexes. I do not know what qualifies a man to be termed a feminist in the eyes of a female feminist; perhaps no man could qualify. It is true that some feminists really are down on men, but this is probably because of the misbehavior of so many men, the brutish louts, who behave with reckless criminality and abuse and outrage the gentle sex. There must be some reason that all the wars have been waged by mostly men, and mostly men inhabit the prisons of the world and do the violent crimes of the world. That reason has to do with testosterone and the negative aspects to it that are reinforced by culture and upbringing. I am not sure what the solutions may be, but the best, it seems to me, is to evolve a sexless mortal, with neither gender, for what need have we of gender, if a laboratory offers a better option. But that is far into the future, when I have already checked out, I think.