All posts by Joanna

About Joanna

Joanna Gardner, PhD is a writer, mythologist, and magical realist whose focus areas include creativity, wonder tales, and goddesses. Joanna serves as adjunct professor in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program, and as director of marketing and communications for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, where she also contributes to the popular MythBlast essay series. Joanna is a cofounder of the Fates and Graces, leading webinars and workshops for the community of mythologists, and the author of The Practice of Enchantment: MythBlast Essays, 2020-2024. For more of Joanna's writing, visit the Publications page.

Rolling Up My Dream-Sleeves

OMG Mythology

One of my current school assignments is to “engage creatively” with one of my own dream images. I chose a dream I had a few years ago, which I remembered like this:

I’m walking down a glass corridor — glass floor, walls, and ceiling, but it’s dark outside. At the end, the hallway opens out onto a vast, starry field. Right in front of me is a huge transparent fetus, outlined in pale blue against the darker background.

Ok, first of all, we’re not talking about a literal pregnancy. Dreams happen in the realm of soul, so this is a soul baby. It’s new life in the world of the psyche, i.e. the inner world, i.e. the invisible world. So the image suggests things like growth, development, and imminence. The vast dimensions of the baby mean that all those associations take on a certain vastness as well. That fits with an excerpt from the first freewrite I did about the dream, imagining a conversation between the fetus and me:

Child: It’s about love. It’s about bigger love than you ever thought possible, given and received.
Joanna: How does one prepare for that?
Child: By loving, and by letting yourself be loved. I’m the child of the universe. And you’re part of the universe. Everyone is. That means I’m the child of everyone. All of you. Are you ready?

Are we ready? Hm. Lots to think about there. But then it occurred to me that I should go back to my journal and find the original dream. It was on September 16, 2010:

a long dim tunnel, at the end clear glass above, on both sides & straight ahead with a view into a huge dark blue space that is apparently a womb with placenta & fetus transparent but outlined in light light blue, not quite white. Tom Brokaw had died of a heart attack and so was doing public service announcements sitting in a chair wearing a dark blue fleece jacket covered with travel patches saying that the best way to avoid a heart attack is to love and be loved.

The details changed in my memory, and I’d forgotten about the ghost of Tom Brokaw. He’s an image of a wise old man, a voice trusted by millions, a figure who’s been all over the world and learned a thing or two, a representative of an older generation (older way of being) which is now ending and making way for the new. And he said nearly the same thing as the child in the writing exercise. All that love stuff is coming through loud and clear, yeah? I’m thinking the fetus is an image of vast new life and vast new love — love’s great capacity and potential on both the visible and invisible wavelengths.

And isn’t it marvelous how dreams weave the visible and invisible together? The visible alone is flat and inert, and the invisible alone is, well, invisible. But dreams use images derived from the waking world to create pictures of what’s going on below the surface, where normal instruments of measurement and analysis break down every time.

California Dreaming

OMG Mythology

This semester one of my classes is called “Dreams, Visions, Myths,” and at our last class we learned about how dreams were “incubated,” or induced, in ancient Greece in temples of Asclepius, the god of healing. People visited these temples hoping to be cured of various ailments. After a ritual bath and sacrifice, they were led into the temple to a stone slab where they would sleep that night. The hope was to receive a healing dream and leave the temple cured the following morning. An inscription at an Asclepieium in Africa reads, “Go in good, come out better.” (See Healing Dream and Ritual by C.A. Meier for more.)

So I was sitting there in class, taking notes as fast as I could because it was all so fantastic, and next thing I knew the teacher said, “We’re going to incubate some dreams now and see what happens.” She had us push back all the chairs, and we each got a blanket to spread out on the floor, just like in kindergarten. Then she turned out the lights, and led us — single-file and silent — out the room by one door, around the building, and back into the room by another door. We lay down, each on our own blanket, and she talked us through a guided meditation where we were to imagine we were on stone slabs in a temple. Then she stopped talking, and the room was quiet for half an hour.

I lay there thinking, This is fun, but come on, are we really supposed to dream? In half an hour? Lying on a hardwood floor somewhere in California? And so on and so forth, and next thing I knew, right over the mental chatter, something happened. I don’t know whether to call it dream or vision or imagination, but it was definitely visual, it occurred in the realm of the inner eye, and it wasn’t consciously willed. Here’s how I scribbled it into my notebook right afterwards:

I’m in a dark area. Behind me someone reaches forward and hands me something. Without turning around I reach back and take it, like a baton in a relay race. But it’s not a baton, it’s a stoppered vial. I open it and a pale blue mist rushes up and takes the shape of a beautiful woman. She smiles at me, leans down, cradles my jaw with both hands, and kisses my lips. Then she envelops me, the mist is all around my body, then it flows in through my skin. I exhale into the vial, exhaling the pale blue mist. I put the stopper back on the vial, and hand it forward, to another hand, this one reaching back toward me out of the darkness.

In my memory, the mist tingled inside my body, and the blue woman was really happy to see me. It felt fantastic, and it was clear that it was to be shared. So, here you go. Yours can be the hand that receives the vial next, if you’re so inclined.

Another Reason to Love Joseph Campbell

OMG Mythology

From The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell:

The two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured only as distinct from each other–different as life and death, as day and night. … Nevertheless–and here is a great key to understanding myth and symbol–the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero.

Oh yes. This is precisely why “realism” feels so flat to me: it willfully persists in forgetting about the sublime. Or worse, it pretends no such thing exists. Yuck. That’s no way to live.

Goddesses and Southwest Airlines

Journal, OMG Mythology

I made it through the fall semester! My final papers had to be postmarked by December 27, a barbaric deadline about which I still harbor resentment. Because did I finish early so I could relax and enjoy the holidays? No. I was at the post office on the 27th with my three manila envelopes, and now the homework for winter semester has already begun. Before I get too busy, though, I want to tell you about an encounter I had with the goddess Kali.

First, some backstory. Last fall I studied several Hindu goddesses, including Kali, who is fearsome. Her skin is black, sometimes blue-black, and blood drips from her bared fangs. She has four arms. In one hand she brandishes a bloodied sword, and in the hand below that she holds a severed head. Another hand is raised in the “fear not” gesture, and another is extended, offering boons. They say she uses the sword to slay demons and to cut away whatever we don’t need, what holds us back, especially the ego nonsense symbolized by the severed head–all that thinky self-talk that paralyzes us. Kali is powerful and complex, and despite her alarming appearance, she is very much on our side.

Ok, so when I was in California for class last December, I thanked my Hindu Traditions professor for recommending one particular book about goddesses. He said, “I’m glad you like it. Which goddesses have you met so far?” I said, “Durga and Lakshmi, and I’m about to get acquainted with Kali.” A few days later, after the session was over, I boarded the plane from Los Angeles to Chicago. It was a Southwest flight, which meant open seating, and by some December miracle the flight wasn’t full. I took an aisle seat in a row with an empty middle seat, and an African-American woman sitting by the window. The woman wore a red and black tunic with a tribal-looking design. We said hello-hello, and isn’t it nice to have all this space? I offered her some of the cashews I was just opening. She said No thanks, she’d been eating almonds and was sick of them. I said, Well if you get hungry for cashews you know where they are. Then we left each other alone. I had some papers to read, and when I looked up, a few hours had gone by.

The woman and I started chatting again. She told me she was on her way home from Maui. She’d been on a pilgrimage to a healing site on top of a mountain, a place where a rainforest waterfall spilled down through seven successive pools, and the energy was electric. She’d also been to a small temple where a Hindu monk and his wife lived, and she’d participated in a ritual called Ho’oponopono. She taught me a little of it. She said, “Say, ‘I forgive myself, I accept myself, I love myself, I bless myself.'” So I said all that with her. She kept going, telling me about how she’d been swimming in the ocean with whales and how angry she was about the dolphins dying in Florida, until finally, when the flight was nearly over, I said, “What do you do? What’s your work?” She said she was a natural healer. I thought, Huh, how bout that. Then on an impulse I said, “My name’s Joanna. What’s your name?” She said, “Kali.”

I gasped, and I’m sure my face showed my shock. Evidently in reply, she said, “Yeah, like the goddess.” Then I managed to speak, and out it all babbled, about how I was studying Hindu goddesses and was just about to read about Kali. The woman nodded, entirely unsurprised, and said, “I wondered if there wasn’t something going on when you sat down and were so friendly.” I spluttered something else, still staring in open astonishment at her Kali-esque skin and the Kali colors of her tunic, and she said, “Yeah, and it’s extra weird, because I was named after my great-grandmother Kali, who was a slave, and delivered me, and there wasn’t even a k-sound in her tribal language.” I spluttered further, and she said, “You know what, I’m going to put your name in the ocean.” At that I finally put a sentence together and said, “I’m going to hold your name in my heart!”

Then the flight was over. When I got home I opened the book about goddesses, and sure enough, I had stopped reading on the first page of the Kali chapter, the page with those four letters blazoned across the top, K-A-L-I. Kali, the goddess who was a woman who was a goddess. She sat next to me for four hours. She’s a healer. She put my name in the ocean. I’ll bet anything she’d do the same for you. All you have to do is ask.

My Kind of Physics

OMG Mythology

From How Philosophers Saved Myths: Allegorical Interpretation and Classical Mythology, by Luc Brisson, trans. by Catherine Tihanyi:

Love, as any philosopher knew, is the principle that enables the cohesion of the elements with each other so as to form the universe.

That’s my favorite sentence in the whole book. Maybe my favorite sentence ever.

Ah, California

Journal

Today I called my school in Santa Barbara to pay tuition, and I had a lovely chat with David in the Student Accounts office:

David: I see you’re in Rochester.
JoJo: That’s right.
David: How’s the weather there?
JoJo: Oh, it’s gorgeous. This whole month has been beautiful.
David: Really? I thought you had that stuff, what do you call it… snow?

Wow. I think I’m about to cross some kind of inter-dimensional threshold. I think I’m about to like it.

Take That, Genesis

OMG Mythology

From Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, by Heinrich Zimmer:

When the divine life substance is about to put forth the universe, the cosmic waters grow a thousand-petaled lotus of pure gold, radiant as the sun. This is the door or gate, the opening or mouth, of the womb of the universe.

Now there’s a creation image with a sense of aesthetics! And vitality! And friendliness toward the feminine! I feel refreshed.

“Required Reading” for a “Homework Assignment”

OMG Mythology

From The Upanishads: The Wisdom of the Hindu Mystics, trans. Prabhavananda & Manchester:

This moon is honey for all beings, and all beings are honey for this moon. The intelligent, immortal being, the soul of this moon, and the intelligent, immortal being, the soul in the individual being–each is honey to the other.

Do you think my teachers will mind if all my papers are about how much I love every single thing we read? By the way, that honey moon will be full on Tuesday, August 20. You can get details at this handy-dandy US Naval Observatory page.

Dream Interpretation, Please

Journal

I dreamed I flew to the City of Angels, then drove to a college in a coastal woodland. The school had been designed around my particular interests and desires, and its grounds smelled like eucalyptus and orange blossoms. It was my birthday. Then I flew to an island of Aloha with my friend Amy, where we stayed on an estate on a slope 1000 feet above the water. The nights were cool and quiet. We drank strong coffee. We ate fresh papaya, and spicy fish tacos. We rode a boat out away from shore in the afternoon sun, and swam with dolphins who kept leaping out of the water and spinning and spinning in mid-air. After dark, when the moon was just shy of half, we snorkeled with three giant manta rays, each of whom was ten feet across at least. They did a winged ballet below us, in and out of bright flashlight beams that crisscrossed the dark blue water. Then the mantas came to the surface, rolled onto their backs, and swam right with us, their bellies to ours, inches away, over and over and over again. The next day, after passionfruit cheesecake for lunch, I showered, packed, and flew home.

I didn’t really dream that. I lived it in the waking world, just last week. It feels like a dream though–unreal, fleeting, full of wonder–so let the interpretations begin!

Ok, what have we got? We have many changes in elevation (air, land, ocean), i.e. a suggestion of moving up and down through different realms of consciousness. There’s also Aloha, which means much more than hello/goodbye. It’s a way of being, having to do with love, affection, respect, and harmony. Then we have the dolphins–playful, joyful, sociable, strong. And of course the manta rays, creatures of grace, peace, patience, fluidity.

Ahhh, great stuff. But I have no idea what the larger meaning might be. I’m still too close to it. All I know is that the whole thing was a tremendous gift, and I am tremendously grateful. Any actual interpretations are welcome, especially answers to the key question: how do you make waking dreams like that happen more often?

Viewer’s Guide to Beasts of the Southern Wild, FAQ

FAQ Movie Reviews

Q: Wow, was that movie as good as I think it was?
A: Wait until tomorrow morning. You’ll love it even more.

Q: But I’m not sure it made much sense…
A: That’s why it’s so great! At every turn it says, “No, my dear, you may not take this literally. You must feel your way into any meaning that might or might not be here.”

Q: What are you talking about?
A: The movie’s impossibilities confuse your linear, logical, analytical mind just enough that it quiets down, making space for other faculties, such as imagination, courage, love, beauty–things that make no sense and yet make life worth living.

Q: Still, all that fuss for a bit of fried crocodile?
A: You could pretend the fried crocodile is an elixir brought back from the underworld. You could pretend it’s unevolved reptilian energy transformed into a substance humans can digest to fuel the soul’s evolution. You could pretend it’s something else. And you could pretend it’s fried crocodile, all at the same time.

Q: Ok, but was that woman Hushpuppy’s mother or not? She couldn’t be, because, come on, what are the odds? On the other hand, how could she not be?
A: Exactly! It’s one of the movie’s many mysteries that stand in for The Mystery. Criminy, it’s enough to restore your faith in film. That does it, I’ve got to go watch it again.