DREAM SHIFTER, THE TRANSFORMED DRAGON, AND ME ~ Francesca Thoman
On an otherwise ordinary Saturday morning, I called my friend Elizabeth, partly to say hello, and partly to complain about the mockingbird that sang so incessantly outside my window. I know many people delight in mockingbirds, but I have long considered them to be the commercials of the bird world: their songs and tones are pitched so that they MUST be listened to, and they sing all the time.
So I was complaining to Elizabeth, snarling and growling. She asked, “Well, what does the mockingbird mean to you?”
“Frustration and shame,” I said.
“What’s behind that?”
I looked inside myself and was quite surprised at the answer. “Annihilation,” I replied with astonishment.
“Well, can you see it? Does it have a shape?”
I looked again and saw it was a blind beast, an ugly, groping thing with no head and no eyes, alone in a cave. It was alone, totally alone, because everything it touched, it destroyed. As I described it to her, I felt real sympathy for it.
She echoed my feeling. “Oh, poor beast! Can you get close to it, can you talk to it?”
I put myself immediately into its cave, perched on the wall at some distance from it. I felt its despair and loneliness. She told me to ask what it wanted. “Green light, like grass,” it replied.
Elizabeth suggested, “Well, let’s see, we can have some green moss grow on the rocks in the cave, and this can be a special moss, with light coming from it.”
I felt the beast’s uncertainty. Here, finally, someone was speaking to it, helping it, and it didn’t want the green moss that was being offered. I told her it wanted something different.
“Well, how about the light from a green crystal?”
The beast of annihilation and I both thought this was a good idea and so I held a green crystal in my hands. The light shot out into the yellow dimness of the cave, and where it touched the beast, a beautiful pattern like snake scales appeared, in colors of red, gold, and blue. With great excitement, I told Elizabeth what was happening.
Encouraging me and giving me suggestions, she watched with me in her inner vision as I created a beautiful form, a long, elegant, snakelike dragon of several blues and purples. The transformation started at its shoulders, running down the long, supple length of its back and tail, also changing the cave walls from the sickly yellow they had been into clean stone.
I pulled the crystal light up towards its head, and the beast began to be afraid. So I got closer to it, pulling its head onto my lap. Its head, about as long as my own body, was just sketched in with light, but it had substance enough for me to stroke it.
“Easy, easy,” I told it, putting love into my touch. Elizabeth and I both calmed it until .its head was nearly fully created. Then I suddenly told her, “It wants a crystal in its head. All dragons have carbuncles, you know, rubies, in the center of their foreheads. But this one doesn’t want red. It wants a clear, diamond-like crystal.”
I took the green crystal that we had used to transform the beast: it had become clear as I had held it. I placed it into the dragon’s head. The dragon was overcome with astonished happiness. Elizabeth said eagerly, “Help it find its way out of the cave.”
Of course, I thought: that’s what it has wanted the whole time. “See?” I said to the dragon, “There’s an underground cave river here. We can swim through it, up into the sea.” It looked at me, tipping its beautiful head as it listened.
And then I said with sudden inspiration, “I know!” and turned my human form into an otter’s shape as I had done in personal meditations before.
The dragon blinked at me in real surprise. “I didn’t know you could do that!”
I turned back. “Or, I know how to breathe underwater, I remember how to from dreams. Let’s do that! Come on!”
So the dragon and I went under the cave wall where I stood, into the hidden river. It was dark, but the dragon’s eyes shone pure white in the dark like lamps, revealing the limestone curtains, the spires of stalagmites, and the draperies of stalactites.
After a little time, we burst out into the ocean with a free rush and a roar. I climbed onto its shoulders and felt its exuberant delight in its own sinuous, powerful movement through the water as it swam eagerly to the surface.
We leaped out joyfully into a beautiful sky. Elizabeth said, “Find a way so that it can call you when it needs you, and you can call it.”
“It will know when I need it,” I replied, smiling. I asked the dragon, “But what do you want to use to call me?” We decided that it would ring some bells that I could hear when it needed to speak with me.
Elizabeth, as tired and excited as I, said, “Now we can release it,” and I did. She told me she’d seen the dragon’s shape as she had talked, feeling its sinuous, graceful length flowing around her. “It is elegant,” she said. “Very long and beautiful.”
I felt happy and proud. However, it was not long before the dragon called me with the bells. “I’m sorry,” it said. “I do not know how to be a dragon.”
“That’s easy,” I replied. “I’ll just send you on to the constellation, Draco, who is the dragon of all dragons. He’ll know.” And so Draco came, shining all starlight and silver, and gathered the new dragon into its power and light with a thunder of joy.
