I Have a Dream

By special guest contributor MichaElf Allson

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The night I dreamt a dream that altered my mind forever, was a night like any other.

The young’uns were in bed and I had spent the morning at an accountant in the city, processing the contents of a brown shoebox full of my year’s worth of receipts.

Nothing odd, whatsoever. But as the years roll on, I consider it to be one of the weirdest days of my life.

I will describe most of the dream but not in its entirety.

I found myself on a dark strip of road in the bush at night. There were dim yellow lights of homes in the near distance. My daughter Freyja was standing besides me and she was holding an open shoebox with a small hare cuddled up inside on a piece of warm fabric. Its eyes were huge and black. Shining in the darkness. We both looked at it fondly and Freyja replaced the lid of the box as we walked along the path through the bush. As we were walking and talking, my parents drove past us in their sedan. Both of them saw us and acknowledged our presence but kept on driving into the night. I yelled out to them, wondering why they would have left us out here with hours of walking between us and the next township.

We finally came across a tidy brick home that was occupied by a couple in their early seventies. They were very welcoming and very soon we were all enjoying a warm conversation in addition to a light meal and some much needed drink.

Freyja opened the shoe box again to proudly show the couple her pet. The hare was in the process of changing into some kind of sea creature with stumpy tendrils or tentacles perhaps, it was squirming around in the shoebox with the same moist cow eyes staring silently back at us. Before we could utter our surprise, a small opening appeared on its underside and a stream of clear liquid pissed out of the creature, splashing onto the polished white tiles of the old couple’s kitchen floor.

The room then became filled with brightness and a washing machine appeared in full swing vibrating on a spin cycle in the middle of the room. Was it the same room?

On top of the buzzing machine was a light grey bird-like animal. It had the appearance of an owl or a hawk and I noticed that its head was turning from left to right in a kind of happy rhythm. Out of the sides of its head sprang two long feathery horns, like a kind of Muppet monster, and it was shrugging its fuzzy shoulders in a very contented fashion. The animal was vibrating at an incredibly rapid rate, and as it did so, emitted waves of what I could only describe to you as love towards me. More love than I thought I could bear. I remember almost weeping with joy and fear, as the power that this thing possessed obviously was well out of my range of experience and I could do nothing to slow the vibrations running through my heart and soul.

As I concentrated on its face, I could make out three black dots where two eyes and a mouth should have been. The dots were hollow and solid, like black plastic beads. Behind the dots, swirling in the creatures bristling grey fur was an endless streaming of beautiful women’s faces in ecstatic expression. These faces were representative of all ethnicities and they all appeared to be on the brink of orgasmic climax.

It was at this point that I asked the creature its name (standard practice I suppose).

It replied in an English speaking women’s voice with a recognizable Australian tone. Its voice was the loudest sound I had ever heard, or could ever imagine hearing.

She calmly answered my question as I asked it. Her reply completing itself simultaneously in the space of time I spent finishing my shocked enquiry. She said “My name is Chardakiel, and I’ve known you forever!”

She then held out her left hand to me. It was a petite white hand with beautiful tapered fingers. She was reaching out to me with all her love, all at once. I fell away in terror and found myself wide awake in bed with my heart about to leap out of my chest. I was drenched in sweat and very confused indeed.

I had always been in the habit of writing down as many dreams as I could. They always made for good reading at a later date, and this dream was no exception. I began at once to document everything I could recall. I was soon to discover that this dream was totally different to every dream I’d experienced before.

The next morning I made a phone call to my Beastianity band mate Richard Horner. He was a most knowledgeable chap (he still is), and I knew that he had a couple of dictionaries in his possession that listed demonic entities in alphabetical order. He told me that according to his books, the Enochian demon Chardakiel was known to be the ‘Guardian of the South Winds’ and was also described in another dictionary as ‘The spirit of Libra’.

Now I thought to myself…’I haven’t studied anything remotely Enochian since I was a child’, but then I thought…‘Australia is really about as South as it gets’ and even Richard knew that I had been born under the sign of the scales. I continued to “go hmmm”…

I went about my day off as usual, but found it difficult to organize my dream into the back of my mind with any efficacy. I received a telephone call in the late morning from the principal of Freyja’s primary school. She reported that Freyja had injured her shoulder playing silly buggers in the school grounds, and requested that I come and pick her up.

When I arrived at the school sick bay I found Freyja lying on a stretcher bed in the company of her little friend Danielle (Danielle?). She was a little upset and in a great deal of pain. We found out via an X-Ray that Freyja has broken her clavicle or ‘collar bone’.

The shrugging shoulders of the grey and vibrating hawk entity flooded back into my memory as I equated my daughters name with the symbol of the hawk in the knowing that the two were inseparable.

This was just the beginning of the journey that my children and I were to embark on. I remember speaking of this dream to many friends. Some had tears after hearing it.

The years played out in big and dangerous ways. I found myself in the process of planning a brutal homicide close to home. There were scores of sad junkies blasting away in the streets around our inner city home. The insulin syringes would crunch under my boots as I walked Freyja and Otto to their schools each morning. I experienced numerous break-ins to my home. Chasing stray teenagers out of my house in the middle of the day as they were sprung rifling through our kitchen drawers. And without going into too much detail it got much, much worse.

I escaped the city, never to return. I brought with me the kids and the dogs, and returned to my childhood home up North. We settled in a tiny beachside settlement called Blackhead Beach Village. Our daggy little wooden beach house was nestled in a thick rainforest atop a high rocky headland. To walk to the ‘back beach’, we would start down a single lane road that was only partially tarred. The road was covered by a thick canopy of shade trees and at night would silently remind me of the place where ‘the dream’ began.

We met some amazing folk in Blackhead. Wise women taught Freyja and Otto about the animals that lived in the surrounding bush.

There were Possums, Gliders, and Goannas that stretched as long as my two ton truck. There were also families of hares living there. We now dwelled within a community that knew us and respected us and would look out for Freyja and Otto at all times. The spirit of place extended it’s peace and it’s freedom to us. There were no fences dividing properties, no letter boxes and plenty of kindly couples in their 70’s (or so I guessed). No more danger, no more needles for us.

Four years passed before I met my Melinda. We found ourselves at a pact meeting for many of Australia’s underground magic groups held in a bush camp on the outskirts of Sydney. Sweyn and Kara Plowright of the Rune Net were the organizers every year I attended. It was always a very special event, and I thank my man Mark Morte for introducing me into it so many years ago. Melinda attended due to her deep knowledge of the Runes, and hoped to meet someone there who could share her magical life. When she first put her hands on my naked chest it was like receiving a shock from a defibrillator attached to a power station that had been attached to two more power stations. To me it was an unmistakable sign that I’d found a girl who truly knew about magic and that my painful wait was over.

I asked Melinda to be my bride six months down the track and Lokily for me she said “yes”.

Our first ‘date’ was on ‘Imbolg’, or The Feast of St Brigit and we though it would be a grand idea to go out dressed as the elderly. I had my grandfather’s deerstalker hat, a walking cane and a crappy old tweed jacket with fawn elbow pads. The ensemble was topped off with a pair of horn rimmed spectacles. As we discussed our ideas to surprise our friends with our ingenious disguises, we researched the feast of Imbolg only to discover that it was the ancient custom to wear old clothes for the entire day and beg for alms. Melinda donned a huge woolen cardigan that came down to her mid-calf and it was made of a mohair blend. It was light grey in colour and was shaggy and furry and reminded me again of my beautiful and terrible female guardian. We were smitten and married to each other in a beautiful private ceremony on a quiet grassy headland near the ‘back beach’ in Blackhead Beach Village not long after that.

The love I receive from Melinda is comparable to that of the spirit in my dream. The same can be said of the love and patience that my Freyja bestows on me.

I can also say that the love and support that I have received from practically all of the women in my forty odd years of living is unconditionally astonishing.

My dream continues to unfold in beautiful ways throughout my life and may it continue to do so…