Moderator’s Note to Readers: Amanda shared a dream with me on Wednesday morning, and I suggested that she develop it into today’s post — if she felt confident doing that, and here you have it. Please do not interpret this dream. You may add your own experiences, your own thoughts and ideas about yourself, but please do not interpret her dream in the blog comments. We will put all public attempts to interpret the dream into the Moderation Netherworld; i.e., they will be deleted. Thanks for your cooperation. — Eric Francis
By Amanda Painter
Every once in a while, I wake up from a dream and realize I have dreamed my astrology — generally a translation of how transiting planets are contacting my natal chart. This happened in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. When I sat down to write the dream in my journal, the first thing out of my pen was that the Mars-Nessus conjunction in Aquarius is trine my natal Nessus in Gemini, in my 12th house.
Nessus — and in fact, all of the centaur planets — are all about shadow material and baggage and healing. As such, they seem to have a special resonance with the 12 house: the house of dreams, blind spots that are difficult to pinpoint, and the self’s undoing. It occurred to me that in this week’s discussion of Nessus and the challenges of sorting though familial patterns of emotional or sexual abuse and collective patterns of the same (since Nessus is in Aquarius), a personal illustration might fit.
In the early part of this dream I had, I have tried to be kind and compassionate to a man I know, who has a crush on me — but he misinterprets, or simply wants and expects more. Something snaps in this normally harmless man, and he flies into a psychotic rage. He pursues me with the clear intent of causing me sexual violence, some sort of rape or forceful possession.
There are some transition scenes, but the core of the dream finds me in the house where I grew up, and where my mother and younger brother currently live (my father died more than three years ago). This man who is after me is trying to get in, but I have not been able to shut the front door quickly enough and tight enough that it will lock.
I am screaming at him (as I have been throughout the dream) to go away, screaming no, but he is wedged into the doorjamb in this only-possible-in-a-dream way, even though the door is almost closed. There are moments when I can see his face through the crack; other times I am just pushing with my shoulder into it; pushing and screaming. At one point he manages to slip his hand through the letter slot (the door does not have one in real life) and reach up to touch my arm. It makes me feel queasy, and I keep struggling. It feels like a matter of life and death. In the dream, I suppose, it is.