Intention: I spent my day preparing pictures and information for my presentation at the IASD conference in Montreal. My presentation is focused around a dream of an Aboriginal   woman, that took place the night after a camping trip and small group meditation at the Cave of the Serpent - an aboriginal rock art site in the mountainous Grampians region of Victoria, Australia.


As part of my investigations, I discovered that my University library had a one of a kind find - a book from the 1980s, offering a comprehensive archeological survey of the site. The report not only detailed the motifs present on the cave wall, but also revealed that Aboriginal people may have been using the cave up until the 1840s.


Reading the report renewed my interest in the nature of the site and it’s use amongst Aboriginal people. The motifs show evidence of ritual renewal. I wondered why.

I imagined myself entering the “heart and mind” of an Aboriginal man as he worked at  renewing the markings.

I am near my local train station. It is as though I am primary school age again. I am with someone I recognise as an old primary school friend. At first things are OK, but then James insults me. I accept this at first, but the issue begins to bother me. I know what will stop him. I threaten him, with “telling his mum”.


It doesn’t work. Now I am further away from the shelter, alone in the carpark area. James’ friends are with him - other people I remember from primary school as well. Some of them have rocks. They begin to throw in my direction. It’s me versus a group of them. I am small. I have to back down. 


*next scene*

I am in a place that resembles the front area of my family’s land. I am pent up in what seems like a chicken coop. It’s fairly wide, but the roof is low. So low that I have to bend forward, with my back angled in towards the ground. My back has been battered, cut up and bruised. It wears the marks of ongoing beating and torture.
I walk in and around this cage. It feels like something I have been doing for many years now.   The same routine. I think of a girl ‘Sabah’, and how she must have felt when this happened to her. There’s another older woman in this caged area. She seems close, but also distant. We don’t seem to speak.



As I walk through the ground and past the woman on my right, I realise how far things have come. The years of abuse have taken their toll. I have become so used to being treated as worthless, that I now believe it. I didn’t think this would ever happen to me.

I am trying to imagine a time when things will change? “Will they ever change?” I seem ask myself. I am not so sure any more.



As the dream ends, I walk slowly towards the end of the caged area.



*perspective changes*


I appear to be at a door. I see it’s frame close up - cut from sharp, sawtooth lines.



Feelings
:
Compassion

Reality Check:


Primary School -

The dream took me back to school years, reminding me of personal fears and the threat of bullying that seem distant now, but may have been far more of a reality at that time.



Shelter -

On drawing the dream I was reminded that the opening scene took place near the shelter at the train station. This seemed significant since the cave contains a tunnel like-shelter which the Aboriginal people of the areas are believed to have lived in at times.


Throwing Rocks -

This brings to mind quite literal images of the treatment Aboriginal people may have received, that I read in a book by Judith Wright - The Cry for the Dead.


Beating -
The feeling of having been beaten was very tangible. This may well have related to the torment aboriginal people received during the years of white settlement.

Sabah -

The name of a girl from a school I once taught at. The section about her being beaten does not relate to any waking understanding of my own. I looked into the name online and found that it is an Arabic name which means “sunrise” or “morning”.


Sawtooth doorframe -

A doorway to another realm - death? The mans only way out from the cage. The sharp, sawtooth lines gave this impression, as well as the fact that it appeared all on it’s own - and in close-up.


I took the dream on face-value, as a response to my original intention.

When I woke from the dream, I was still in a light state of mind. I closed my eyes, and imagined my mind focused on the section of the cave painting I had drawn on my dream-intention-sheet. I heard the words “Journey to Mount II”, perhaps with association to the man from my previous dream.