I know I’ve strayed out of my own head in dreams, when I look up and the sky is backwards. The zodiac runs left to right, rather than right to left. I remember that on the night of the Grand Conjunction, the sky in Hastings was too cloudy to see – but I saw Jupiter and Saturn conjoin in my dream that night, in the backwards sky, and was grateful to have been shown it from the opposite view.
I’ve seen Mars twice too, mistaken it for the moon in fact, but then I look elsewhere in the sky and I see the moon in its correct position and phase. And in the dream I think, ‘Well, if that’s the moon, then what’s that big pink-hued planet?’ Then when I wake up, I check the ephemeris and lo and behold, the planet in the mirror realm corresponds to Mars.
About a week or so ago, the second time I dreamt of Mars, I took a bus and got off at the wrong stop. It was bright daylight, but by the time I crossed the road to the opposite stop it had faded to twilight, and a row of men in white stood venerating what looked to be a pink-blush waning-gibbous moon. ‘But the moon is over there,’ I thought to myself, pointing at the silvery waning crescent close by.
I asked the men what was happening, and the nearest answered in a language I didn’t know, although I caught reference to ‘Parsi’. ‘Are you Parsis?’ I asked. The man next to him laughed. ‘No! Shaheen. Tigers. Invaders of Parsi.’
When I woke up, I discovered that the pink planet was Mars – where I expected it given its location in my dream – and the men were Sassanians. Why did I visit the Sassanians? Dunno. Wrong bus stop.
The Talmudic sages say that sleep is 1/60th of death. I can only imagine what 1/60th of a living person would look like to a citizen of the underworld, especially one who’s been dead for a couple thousand years. I’ll have to ask the Sassanians next time I visit.
Sonya Blanck writings 