This is a letter I once wrote to a friend, who'd had similar experiences.

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Dear ---,

I find myself reluctant to get into the following matter over the telephone. I fear the overall quality of my spoken English and the lack of at-hand notes would make my entire testimony garbled and easily misunderstood. Yet I feel it should be acknowledged in some form. Our recent conversations have strengthened my trust over you and knowing you're not the first person to shy off from the unconventional (not to mention your interest and knowledge regarding the Celtic culture), I figure you might be a reasonable choice to discuss the matter with. Ironically, it superficially has nothing to do with our mutual relationship, yet we may have incidentally studied the same ground. This is my story and I'm sticking to it.

I started paying attention to my dreams a few years ago. While your dreamscape was ruled over by the walking man, my dreams were haunted by a lady. Since the dawn of the new millennium, she'd appear steadily every few years, initially emerging as a fair lady in the gallows and morphing into a hag during the same dream. She'd stab me in the chest with a dagger if only to disappear for an undetermined time. A few years later she returns; first the lady, now well into a state of decay, followed by the hag, emerging behind my back and taunting me, saying aloud whatever would cross my mind and daring me to return to the woods of my native Middle-Finland home. I never saw her then, never looked back.

The third dream took place some months after first meeting you in 2004. At that time I was in a folk high school, living in the middle of the city in an old, maze-like building, with the remnants of a damn-near Suspiria-like witch's cradle still visible after the renovations. There were five floors, in the dream I see my father in the second one. The ground floor (which was now below ground level) is overran by malicious spirits. My father is visibly sorry towards me, telling how he'd always wanted to spare me from whatever it was that by now had invaded the premises below.

Situated in the third floor, I see the stairs leading up to the fourth. There is a woman, who at that time was posing in the dreams as my muse; call it artistic aspiration, if you may. It's dark up there. The darkness has worn out her eyes, driven her insane. She's running up and down the stairs frantically, yet never does she descend fully into the light to appear in plain sight. At that moment, I know what was waiting for me up in the fifth floor, yet I do not understand what it means. It is what I fear the most. In my dream, I call the apparition '˜the three-fold woman'.

Little under a year later, I started maintaining a dream diary out of a whim. Nothing really came out of at first, the most interesting bit crawled out of the woodwork in the form of a waking life vision. I was in front of a mirror when all of a sudden, I saw a red-headed woman sitting on an old tree trunk, the sun setting into the impenetrable woods behind her. Her voice was inhumanly fast, whispering something about a rope she'd been weaving out of her own hair, which she'd then used to climb up and reach me.

In December, the night after I'd confided to an old friend about the vision, I see the two of us back in the folk high school. Behind him, at the corner of my eye, I spot movement. I tell him someone's about to hang himself. I repeat the words as the rope tightens. In a flash we scurry, preventing a re-enactment of her death over six years prior. Her, a naked lady with raven-black hair. The very same who'd previously decayed nearly beyond regocnition. I carry her in my arms, trying find something to revitalize her. A plainclothes doctor is chasing me, yelling I'm heading in the wrong direction. I keep on going despite of it. She's already cold and pale as I find someone. She's being hosed with water. Her body regains color. There's a bleeding in her upper lip; once the stream hits it, it's as if the colored liquid throws a crimson veil over her features. I feel ill.

After this I briefly find myself walking on the street and calling the other half of a past acrimonious split, now feeling the appropriate guilt yet being unable to change the course of events. It all happens again, pretty much as I had remembered it. After this, I am back in front of the mirror. I look into it, see the spiral beyond matter, beyond life. I now realize the road taken will lead me to die alone; into this cold abyss. Then I see it. It looks like me, although I know it's a shell, possessed so that something might be able to speak to me. 'Cul-de-Sac', it says. I shudder, lower my gaze. As I look back up, I see my own reflection again, now magnified, out of focus. The last fright.

The first half of the following year was spent with my vigorous attempts in turning the lady of my dreams into a workable student film screenplay. I was quite pleased with the results, even if I failed to translate any of the above sequences into a cinematically doable form as such. But those are the films, I'd imagine, interpretations of the symbols found in our most profound nocturnal journeys.

The dreams eased on down somewhat during the writing, with the lady taking various shapes and guises while visiting me, as if to peek above my shoulder without startling me by appearing in her innermost form. The film is yet to be made, and this story remains unfinished. While biding my time between projects, another friend (oblivious of everything I've written above) suggested I'd read Ambrose Bierce's The Death of Halpin Frayser. Until then, I had remained a stranger to the Bierce novella. Saying I had shivers after reading it would be an understatement.

Feeling that through the Bierce novella, I had the chance to dig deeper into the three-fold lady, I immediately acquired Robert Graves' The White Goddess, a book with which I assume you're familiar with. This was last October, almost exactly a full year after the lady's first day-time appearance. Through the year, I had continued to keep a diary on my dreams, which now lends credence to some interesting events. While starting The White Goddess, I wrote my initial notes for future reference. They are dated for Oct. 21st, marking also the first time I ever sat down with the book. The night before, however, something else happened. 

In my dream, I'm in a prison, stirring a huge cauldron. We're boiling dead babies in their mothers' bodily fluids. The remains of the bodies can be sold out in the black market, the contents of the cauldron as moonshine. I'm jaded about my surroundings. Suddenly, there's a splash, and the brew sprays all over me. I inhale deeply, clearly smelling urine on my clothes. This is the first olfactory sensation I have in the entire dream, a moment of realization, if you may.

The following day I began reading about Graves' description of the Theme, God of the waxing year losing the fight to God of the waning year out of love for the Muse, the three-fold goddess, recurring in racial memory throughout the ages, along with examples of different female deities. One that struck a chord was the Sumerian Belili, goddess of the moon, love and the underworld, who, according to Graves, was demonized by the Christians as the masculine Belial. The Semitic Beliy y'al translates as 'from which one comes not up again'. Even though I was possibly looking for certain references I wanted to find, it all nevertheless sounded quite interesting.

From Graves' notes on The Book of Taliesin, I learned about the Cauldron of Cerridwen, also known as the cauldron of inspiration. Her little helper, Gwion, had three drops land on his finger while stirring the brew at the end of his year-long work. Consuming them made him aware of all things, past, present and future, also realizing Cerridwen would kill him, as the brew was reserved for her hideously ugly son, Afagddu. 'He fled away, and she pursued him like a screaming black hag.'

Alas, it wasn't until I got to reading about Cad Arianrhod when I truly began to worry whether my faculties had failed me. Graves makes Arianrhod (Silver Wheel) an aspect of Cerridwen, meaning the cauldron is also situated in her castle. The gist of it is that Cad Arianrhod was a prison, as it was referred to as such in the poem Hans Taliesin. Situated in the cold North, where the sun never shines, it was a royal purgatory for 'kings, chieftains, poets or magicians waiting to be reborn'.

Damn me for not tasting the brew. But the story goes on. In December 2006, a day short of a year of seeing the rather unpleasant dream about the spiral of death, I'm again with my aforementioned companion, this time enjoying some strange brews of our own. After overestimating my stamina, I throw up and fall down into blackened haze. After regaining conciousness, I try to piece together whatever it is I now had the strange memory of seeing.

An image that keeps popping up reminds me of the Scottish Highlands. I've never been there, but apparently it feels right. The moors are divided by a waist-high stone wall, reaching into both sides as far as the eye can see. Following the wall, I come across a gateway to the other side, with the lady I've seen before expecting me. I'm quite relieved by her presence. She offers to let me in, even if I had arrived before my time. For whatever reason, I decide to part ways with her, heading back to my side of the moors, knowing she'll wait for me to arrive another day.

While I can never be sure whether this recollection was a strange figment of retrospective imagination or not, I hate to say I seem to find it all more plausible than I might prefer. What I would gladly refuse to speak out loud is that I occasionally feel that somewhere deep down, something wanted to reassure my concious mind about the existence of a level two, and that it can one day be reached without cheating. Regardless, for more than a month afterwards I felt like gliding through the days in a never-before experienced serenity.

As if there was a greater goal worth pursuing within.

Yours,

x

ps. In the midst of my writing, I took a pause to have a cigarette. As I came back, The X-Files was on in the background, with Fox Mulder giving a voice-over monologue on the war between Heaven and Earth, while visitors make first contact with anonymous government officials. Somehow his choice of words is what stays with me.