This is part of the Mystical Journey series. If you’re new to the journey, you can begin here.
We crawl out of the cube, reemerging in the forest of columns to brush off our pants as we stand, and you roll a kink from your shoulders.
Where to next, I wonder?
Something crunches underfoot as I move closer to inspect a small box affixed to one of the columns, but the box’s tiny clasp holds firm, and I don’t want to break it. What did I step on? A fallen newsprint leaf, veins traced in crayon, and there are more of them–littered across the floor, gently skittering in a breeze coming from who knows where.
My eyes follow the leaves as they tumble lazily around the feet of the columns, and it’s then that I notice a path, a subtle widening of the space between the columns, leading…somewhere. I beckon to you, pointing ahead, and we fall in step, leaves announcing every footfall.
The columns give way to a hallway, the floors, walls and ceilings all carpeted in hot-pink shag. I have to run my fingers through it–how could you not?–the tangled-up plushness parting as we make our way to the next room.
The space widens once more, this time, the ceiling draped in hammocks of gauzy fabric, diffusing a rainbow of rippling lights, and I feel like I’m gazing up at the surface of the sea.
Every conceivable surface, save a throughway on the floor, is covered in a handmade coral reef: sponges made of stuffed fabric poofs; bedazzled sea urchins and pipe-cleaner fronds; branching corals of rolled up, crumpled paper, painted in brilliant neon hues. Glitter everywhere.
I watch you duck behind a curtain of tissue-paper seaweed, drawn in by a soft, blinking orb of light, and I turn to explore the rest of the reef. There in the back, half-concealed behind a curving wall encrusted with coral, is some sort of nook. This is where I’m meant to go; I can feel a magnetic hum in my belly.
Drawing close, I see a sequined rope of black-and-white. Wait, it’s a tail! And it leads, curving around an effusion of yarn-spun anemones, into the mysterious nook. A cautiousness washes over me, and I peer around the wall, not ready to step fully inside.
Curiouser and curiouser, for there, lying asleep on a low bench, surrounded in softly waving fronds of metallic ribbon, is me. Weird enough as it is, but I have to blink, trying to clear the trick of the eye, because my other body is softer, less animal and ever so slightly see through.
The snake, then, it moves, and I freeze as it glides alongside my foot, S-winding toward See-Through Me, coiling around an upright wooden staff like one half of a DNA duo.
Ah ha, but the snake, the staff, this special little nook for sleeping? Here lies the realm of Asclepius. Is he visiting Other Me in dreams, offering the wisdom of healing?
The soft glow in the nook seems to condense above my head–my Other Head–and as this pinprick of light begins to expand, it opens the fabric of spacetime right along with it, and–how to describe such a thing?–it’s like the gods held a flame to a page of reality, a widening circle as it burns, revealing the Beyond and Behind.
Other me rises, standing before the circle, now large enough to step through, and I strain to peer around my Other Shoulder, catching a mere glimpse of moonlight reflected on still water before a low, marble temple. But where…? And then I am gone, the torn seam in time resown, knitted so tightly I’d never have known it was there.
I sit on the bench, marveling at what’s just unfolded, when there you are, dipping around the wall of anemones, an envelope in your hand, the bright, golden key glinting as you turned it over.
You sit beside me–you’d waited so we could open the envelope together–and I read aloud:
Well done. Your curiosity has been an able guide, leading you here, to the Dreamscape.
This is where you unlock hidden doors and long-lost passageways to your inmost Self. Where you learn who you truly are, not merely who you wish to be. This land contains many gifts, including that of psychic knowing, but you must relearn the ancient language of this realm should you wish to reclaim these treasures.
This is the second key of Jungian Magic.
That gleaming portal through spacetime, the moonlit temple beyond. Why have I overlooked these nightly travels as if they were merely a mishmash replay of daytime details?
Messages from the unconscious, from the gods themselves, containing the secrets of life itself. Certainly not something to be ignored.
Vow to relearn the language of dreams–to unlock their arcane powers with this, the second key of Jungian Magic.
