Broken mirror

I had an interesting dream last night, partially inspired by the winter time story series I am listening to with my women's group and which this year centres on Andersen's The Snow Queen.

Remember, the one about the devil's mirror, which when you looked at it showed only the ugliness of everything. And about how the little demons wanted to have fun with their new toy, and flew it around, high above the earth, and how they dropped it (clumsy clumsy demons), and it fell and shattered into a thousand pieces. And how the people found those pieces and put them to good use, for cathedral windows, for regular window panes, for mirrors large and small.

But also how some pieces of the  mirror were so tiny, they would fall like dust specks into people's eyes, or into their hearts...

And about a little boy, Kai, and his friend the little girl Gerda, and how he was stolen by the Snow Queen, and how she helped him to return.

Anyway, a beautiful, profound story, given a whole new layer of meaning by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in the audio series we are listening to.

And the night after I sat by the fire, with my women, listening to this story, and together weaving the winter's dreamscape, one thread at a time, I dreamt this dream, that felt so intense and almost prophetic, that I feel compelled to share it here.

I dreamt that the pain I have suffered from for many weeks now, a sharp pain in my right eye that only comes in the dead of night and is bad enough to have me weeping on my knees (a pain that incidentally deserves an account of its own, that will just have to wait for another post), that this pain was due to the fact that I too, like Kai, had a speck of the devil's mirror in my eye, causing me to suffer, and to only see ugliness and lies in everything.

In the dream I had help, in the form of a team of committed shamans, who took me to Ghana and subjected me to a series of healing procedures (the dream gets a bit vague around this point, but it was none of it too unpleasant I am happy to report) at the end of which they were able to remove the piece of glass from my eye.

At this point I heard a gentle deus ex machina voice (not entirely unlike my car's navigation system) saying: Look around! You can see clearly now, so look around! What do you see?

So I looked around, and what I saw was people, lots of people, children, adults, older people, people on streets, in houses, schools, offices, on buses, in cafés, all of them with their fingers and faces glued to screens of different sizes: phones, tablets, laptops, PCs. Everywhere.

'What do you see?' the deus ex machina asked again. 'What do you see?'

And I saw what I saw.

Pieces of the devil's mirror, in every hand or pocket, on every desk. Shiny pieces of glass, with such  riveting colours and vivid images, promising to show us the world as it really is. In sharpest detail, in brightest colours.

But instead... instead they blind us to the beauty of the ordinary, of ordinary colours (not so vivid, and without back-lighting), of the unedited unfiltered stuff of life around the perfect Instagram shot, of ordinary bodies, ordinary homes, ordinary lives.

They blind us on every level: from the most matter (starving our physical eyes of texture and depth, overstimulating them with otherworldly hues and bright blue light) to the most soul (lulling us away from our only mission ever, which is to be here).

I woke up stunned. And have been reeling since. I knew already that screen-time in my own life is all too often a waste of time. I did not know this. I cannot un-know it now. And I am clueless as to how to proceed.

But clueless is not a bad place (I should know, I spend a lot of time there...). In fact, as far as I know, clueless is the door to every and any sort of adventure....

So... I'll keep you posted.