Hekate, Dreams, and Nightmares: Healing In The Dark

Keeping Her Keys: At The Crossroads of Modern Life and the Deeper World

"When I’m asked about beginning a relationship with Hekate, my response is always to look to your dreams. Trust me, she’s been trying to get your attention your entire life. Dreams can offer illumination into your own darkness; from aspects you need to heal to long-abandoned desires. They can also be about the external world, providing insight into relationships, situations, and others. Dreams are communications from the unconscious. Their symbols can evoke strong emotions. When we enter the darkness of sleep, we go into Hekate’s world. As we wander in the dreamscape, our physical selves vanish into something more. We walk among archetypes, tread in the web of the universe, and stretch beyond our mortal limitations. It is a sad state of affairs that our culture devalues the importance of dreams." - from Entering Hekate's Cave: The Journey Through Darkness to Wholeness

"Hekate has long been implicated in dream interpretations. Both the magical view that considers dreams to be foretelling and the nineteenth-century mechanistic view that attributes them to waste products of physiological sensations (garbage) show Hekate's influence. When she becomes equated with Nyx (night), as in Spenser and at times in Shakespeare, then dreams become her province and our interpretative ideas reflect her perspectives.

"We may continue this tradition, although in a different manner. Yes, the dream is made of scraps that belong to the Goddess who makes sacred the waste of life, so that it all counts, it all matters. Offering the dreams to "the mysteries of Hekate and the night" (King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1) means giving back the regurgitations that "come up" in dreams without attempts to save them morally or to find their dayworld use. The junk of the soul is primordially saved by Hekate's blessing, and even our trashing ourselves can be led back to her. The messy life is a way of entering her domain and become a "child of Hekate." Our part is only to recognize that their is myth in the mess so as to dispose of the day residues at the proper place, that is, to place them at Hekate's crossroads. Ritually, the garbage was placed at night at a crossroads, so that each dream may lead off in at least three directions besides the one we have come from. Hekate, was has traditionally been represented with three heads, keeps us looking and listening in many ways at once." - James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld.

Hillman's excellent treatise on dreams argues that we should resist the temptation to make our dreams serve our ego. His strong case for allowing the dream to stay mystical is compelling. We have been programmed to think that dreams are either random neural firings, "garbage," or to try to reduce them into specific interpretations. Dreams do not care that we do such foolish things. They exist with or without our attempts to rationalize them. I urge you to allow your dreams to be what they are for it is in their pure form where the true medicine abides.

Dreams speak the symbolic language of the spirit world. They are archetypal and nonrational. Rarely literal, dreams are the way our unconscious speaks to us. The dreamer within is a star-traveler who has great wisdom to share, if we only listen.

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