Night Time is the Right Time

I've really done it now. Something subversive has attached itself to my sleeping self. I've been lying awake for nights now, unable to perceive any meaning in the pictures before me. I just have to ride it out.

An old stone wall ran straight, no longer tall, but unwavering across the forest floor. It intrigued me to find a dividing line, separating nothing. The sense of a time lost under the new growth heightened the feeling of history. Once something stood here that needed to be kept apart from something else, although the reason for it was gone. It was only two feet high and the loose stone was crumbled below that in places. The two truths, held apart from one another, lives as a warning to me, even now.

In psychic terms, a river is often used to represent the dividing line between levels of perception. The Celts believed that crossing a river represented crossing into an otherworld, separate from day to day reality. Here, the rules that govern the world are suspended and truth is outed in symbolic form. In Japanese myth, Botan ferries souls across Sanzu no Kawa to the Halls of Judgement. In modern psychology crossing the river means entering the world of subconscious thought and is used as a gateway to a hypnotic trance.

The baptism myth, with it's connotations of being drowned in one's own subconscious mind and then being brought back to life, the beginning of the process of individuation, illustrates the need for a person to free themselves from the influence of another and to hear the Voice of the self and to commit to one's destiny.

The division, the separation, the representation of crossing over and the emergence from the water, whole and unified in purpose.

No wonder I can't sleep. Maybe some warm milk will help.