It's also clearly linked to the prima materia in alchemy: the formless, chaotic substance from which everything is eventually formed and transformed. I had a dream in which I saw it and its effects recently (please excuse the Star Trek references. I frequently get them in my dreams, and they say all sorts of fun occult stuff, but I'm aware they may seem a bit odd for anyone who's not a semi-Trekkie like me. When I say semi-Trekkie, I mean that the whole of Voyager, and half of Next Gen and the Original Series are irredeemable shite) - the following is the relevant excerpt from my dream journal:
My whole nuclear family is now in some kind of future New York/San Francisco. There are snakelike train tunnels that curl around a giant central structure, protruding out over the city towards the sea in one place like a huge beak. We are watching/involved with a new Star Trek movie, and it's unlike anything I've ever seen. All the characters are inside the central structure, for reasons unknown - they may be just visiting. Some kind of anomaly exists here, and the characters venture inside it one by one, to bathe. It has transformative properties - to the outsider it looks as though it is a swirling mass of multi-coloured energies, encompassing anyone who ventures inside. However, it looks like more than just energy, like clouds of congealed baileys as it curdles when pured into other spirits, or oil poured across water forming rainbows, or the Aurora Borealis. It seems to be utterly unknowable, defying all attempts to explain the centre, as though it conceptually contains far more than it visually contains, and it visually contains more than is describable in words. For now it is a localised phenomena, appearing on the upper level of a lounge/office area, and can be entered. After waking, the area in which it occupied reminded me of Venus' open clam. Female characters bathe in its waters, and are covered in soap, an amusing reference to Marvel comics bathing scenes, in which the bubbles and steam obscure the nudity. This is not a sexual image, primarily - although it has a primary essence that encompasses all sexuality. As characters bathe they are transformed, and it has an enebriating effect, slowly transforming them into something other. I have many rememberances of a drunken Picard, trying to explain/defend the anomaly. At one stage, two more characters arrive on the floor below the office: in the office we hear a knocking sound from below, and then sddenly a panel in the shape of a semi circle (dvided into two quarter circles) gives way under his feet, and he tumbles into the floor before. Data becomes entirely bald in its waters, and seems to develop characteristics of that unknowable other (he seems to develop mystic properties). One character enters to become a living lake in human form, a being made of pure water, with fish swimming inside him (I do not remember which character). Finally Wesley and one other character (forgotten who) arrive to save the day (typical shitty Star Trek narrative - I hate Wesley Crusher). They encounter Picard before they arrive, and his transformation is amazing: he is becoming a living tree, with branches protuding out of him at crazy angles, an untidy knot of them protruding from his forehead. He has a three meter long branch instead of a tongue, which interferes when he tries to speak. This section of the dream ends with the giant "beak" opening in a rush, and the energy/anomaly it contains sweeping in a huge arc over the future city, the Enterprise flying alongside it (dwarfed by it's size), and a voiceover (Picard) saying that this may be the final stable wormhole known to man. |
