Alchemy of a Princess

Emily’s mum could scold something fierce when she had a mind to. “Pay attention! Get your head out of that book! Stop dreaming away your life! Go outside!” That last admonishment was the one Emily had been anticipating. “Going!” {Gone.}

Sitting in her favorite tree, Emily pondered the strange kaleidoscope of her life. “Don’t think too much of yourself! That’s ego! Leave everything to God! Do well in school…” and, when Emily brought home stellar marks, “We’re proud of you… but in the right way.” Even then, Emily wondered what in blazes was the right way. Was there a right way? Ever? Weren’t there infinite ways to be?

Each tree had its way. Each creature had its ways and means. Why couldn’t she be content with the way she chose to be? Sliding her back against the trunk of her friend, the silver birch, she let the constant pressure fade away through sunlit leaves, glowing their infinite shades of green against a blue and cloud-fluffed sky.

Who wanted to be a Princess, anyway? Emily was fairly sure they weren’t allowed to climb trees, or to fall asleep among the branches.

Funny how we know we’re dreaming, even as we live out the dream.

Everything was all greyish, a sure sign, if ever there was one, that Emily was dreaming. Real happenings in other planes of existence happened in color, no matter what they taught in school.

In this dreamscape, a group of women gathered to clear their chakra bodies of the old world, preparing to enter the new. It was Emily’s job to lead the ritual, though both her name and her body were different in this place. The women gathered, the transformative energies escalating; it was almost time to begin.

Then, Emily felt herself pulled, essence and presence, into a dream within a dream. “Just like that film, Inception,” she thought, referencing a memory from another timeline. Emily still felt the energies mounting in the first dream… or, no, maybe it was also a dream within a dream. She couldn’t be sure from here. From her central space, all dreams looked the same.

In the trajectory, the one she’d just been snatched into, she sat with her this-life mother, Mum droning on and on through some process or other, releasing patterns and programs with every syllable. “Then, this happened, oh and I saw this, the magicks came in at that time…and then something changed…” Emily sat beside her, nodding and making encouraging noises like “mmhm” and “go on,” until finally the dream-image of her mother said something that mattered. It rang like a bell between the worlds, snapping Emily’s attention into here and now like a boomerang returning to hand. “What was that last thing?” she asked her mother. The dream image of Mum had continued to drone on, reciting a litany of obstacles and realizations as thought it bored even her dreaming self in the telling.

“What was that last?” Emily’s hand moved of its own volition, two fingers shining a laser beam of light into her mother’s belly. As she pushed in, ever-so-gently, the image of her mother dissolved into pink and blue pastels, ribbons of light shimmering into a golden haze. And, from that haze, the words rang, clear and strong. “I have the right to my own life.”

“That’s it!” thought Emily’s dream-within-a-dream self. as she struggled to open her eyes. “That’s what was missing!”

Emily‘s eyes opened inside the women’s gathering, adjusted to the world of its dreamscape, and, looking into their warm welcoming eyes, she began to relate what had just happened. Her friend, Paige, was listening, laughing and agreeing that some of our best work is done in dreams.

The repeating circumstances of Emily’s waking dream showed up like a set of Russian Matryoshka dolls, not nested one within the other, but as increasingly more open, lighter, and more beneficial versions of that same scenario… an architectural feat of engineering! She had built and experienced her mother’s life, her mother’s house, what her young body in this life learned was home… over and over and over again.

Emily recognized the mirror, her nerves shrieking a silent scream of “trapped!” and on waking into the tangled bedclothes of her current life, she recognized her filling sinuses as a histamine response to the inner inflammatory alarm, dampening real truth and desires in favor of survival.

“I have the right to my own life,” she whispered to herself, mindful of bringing that truth across dimensions, though the depth of her body’s imprinted defenses threatened to choke and gag her.

Shaking, she shoved back the covers and stumbled to the other room. “Don’t wake all the way up,” she remembered. You’ll lose the other dream and also its magic. Filling her neti pot with quivering hands, Emily located the herbs that would relieve her clogged sinuses and loosen the tightness in her chest.

“We’re okay,” she hummed to her respiratory system. No harm here present. And, we’ve got this tiger by the tail! Grinning, she returned to bed. A montage of life circumstances flashed through Emily’s drowsing vision. Repetition after repetition they came, as if summoned. A bit of a difference here or there, the vast expansions as she’d awakened. And yet, this last, this room in which she meditated, calming breath and body, soothing her frazzled nerves to sleep, wasn’t this part of it?

“I’m done with this dream,” Emily whispered, trying the idea on to test her body’s reactivity. “Time for something new. Time to remember. If I can create this, Source and I can create anything!” Only the faintest flash of fear shimmered through her nerves. “Better,” thought she, calming herself to sleep.

Emily looked around her. Three-story brownstone house with a hole through the middle. “Where am I now?” The house reminded her of something, a place she’d known long ago… full of randomly placed furnishings, some with dust coverings, some not … obviously some kind of renovation…Some of the furniture she recognized, and, to her great surprise, she heard her own voice telling someone she didn’t want most of it. Only the little cherry table, the one that was smashed when she was little. The restoration people had made a mistake. They used the wrong stain, so her favorite little table had cherry legs and a maple top on one side, like Humpty-Dumpty put back together with different pieces. The table had been sad ever since. It had come from such a happy tree, so pleased to be of service. Why had she said she wanted it? “What am I doing here?” her voice echoed through the cavernous interior of the now-empty building.

And then, the dream changed, as all learned lessons do. Emily and her Mum were seated in front of the old black and white television set that used to sit in the parlor. Princess Elizabeth’s 21st birthday speech was playing. Her dedication to the family motto, “I serve,” grabbed Emily’s attention. Emily’s mother was crying, sitting up straight, at attention, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief as though each tear were somehow a badge of honor.

“…I declare before you all, that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service…” ~ then Princess Elizabeth Windsor, {now Queen Elizabeth II}

Funny, how we always know we’re dreaming, and what dreams are stored in our DNA.

The vow of a Princess! My mother’s archetype! Emily’s mother had a talented but strict piano teacher. She suffered no egos. Emily had often heard the story of her mother learning to play Debussy’s Death of a Princess from memory, in case she hadn’t quite gotten the point. No entitlement tolerated. Respect is earned. Lose the ‘royal’ image and learn to give from the heart!

Raised on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s book, The Little Princess, Emily’s childhood was steeped in the principle of noblesse oblige, though she had never recognized or named it. “A Princess is not entitled,” said her mother, over and over, pounding into her the story of the starving Princess in rags who, having received the gift of ten hot cross buns, gave nine of them to a little beggar girl. “She is hungrier than I,” thought the character, Sarah Crewe. And, for this act of generosity, the beggar girl’s mother called her “Princess,” though Sarah’s appearance belied the name.

But this time, Emily looked through a new lens at the waking dream. She saw, with clarity, how she had given nine-tenths of her light, her power, away to others who were hungrier or in more need than she. What was wrong with that? Wasn’t that what love did? Emily saw, for the first time, the tangled timelines feeding her confusion. The schism between service to other and service to self had long ago been resolved… or so she’d thought. But her body and her many timelines knew better.

Service to Source, is service of and through the heart of the Great Mother. It makes no separation between one and the other.

Emily flashed on the dream within a dream within a dream…three levels. Three is what it takes to manifest, or to un-manifest, any form of reality. She placed two glowing fingers at her own navel center, just as she had done for the image of her mother. As she did so, dissolution happened within her body. She knew and remembered, letting the light full in, at last. Its intensity snapped the genetically imprinted cord, unconditionally.

When Emily opened her eyes once more into the waking dream, her body glowed with gladness. The image of an angel, or perhaps her light body, floated in her inner vision. A new covenant thrummed through her body of awareness.

I am free to make my own choices, no longer bound by any archetypal construct, to support my creations with love, and nurture what comes naturally.

So mote it be.