Cabinet of curiosities
There's a vault inside my head
Last night I dreamed of a cabinet carved from rosewood with endless hidden compartments. I unfolded it to a shelf, another shelf, a breakfast table. I hid it in the back of my apartment, untouched. I puzzled about it with my spouse, wondering what to make of it. What is this cabinet of curiosities?
In my dream, my parents had helped pay for this cabinet. My parents who I have no contact with.
My parents; the providence through which I’ve acquired this strange, spiritual gift. My parents; the DNA that bore a pact made long before their time, before any of our time. My parents, spiritual only according to a religion that was forced on our ancestors, but certainly resistant to whatever now haunts my dreams.
When Pan first appeared to me, I was quite a few years off from seeking spirit guides. In the spring and summer of 2022, I wanted only to find peace. I opened myself up in meditation—in the quiet, candlelit corridors of my bathtub, of my temporarily quieted mind—and what came through was a surprise to all parts of me.
In that meditation, I began to see a cave materialize around me. And filling that space was none other than Pan himself—known to me then as a semi-translucent, leafy green man who introduced himself as an ancestral spirit.
Two years later, I would incarnate him in a journal. Still, thinking that all of the ideas he fed me—about an ancestral gift reserved especially for me—no more than an emotional processing tool, a metaphor for intergenerational trauma.
I kept an open mind but a closed heart. I had precious little spaciousness left in me for magick.
It took a YouTube tarot reader (that rumble you hear is me laughing at the dark comedy of it all) confirming this message for me to actually entertain it. Even after multiple gods and guides had repeated it back to me, I still couldn’t quite believe it. And why is that? Why, in all the spectacular events of my life, was this one so hard to embrace? To accept?
Well, maybe I had a resistance to being a ‘Chosen One.’
Maybe I had come to distrust such narratives because of how firmly they were foisted upon me only to dissolve when I desperately needed to actually be chosen.
Such strange beings have been attracted to my channel in recent years that I’m forced to feed their names into Google in order to find out if they are real. I never stop being surprised to find confirmation of their existence. Proof that the names and designations my mind proffers aren’t just real, they’re are capable of being confirmed outside me.
I think of that cabinet in my dreams…my husband and I try to slide into that breakfast table that folds outwards only to find we don’t fit. We are too big for it. It slices into us at the waist, nearly severing us in two.
Just before this discovery, I am exploring an antique mall where I find two beautiful blankets. I take them to the counter and inquire about their pricing, knowing I have precious little money to spend on blankets.
But the lady at the desk informs me they are mine to keep for free.
She says it with a knowing smile, as if she sees something in me I would find missing from my own reflection. When a mirror can lie, where are we to turn to for the truth? Can I trust this stranger before me, burdening me with free gifts and beckoning me out the door?
I slide into the passenger seat when Cody arrives to pick me up and the rest of the dream—barring the peculiar cabinet—plays out like any other day for us. We discuss where we will get dinner. We make plans. The mundanity of the dream’s progression all blurs together.
What are these blankets? What does this gift mean?
How am I to interpret them?
Am I being offered a cozy shield? “Gather under these reams of fabric and your enemies shall not find you.”
Am I being offered a playmat? “Lay these blankets down and build your dreams atop them.”
Am I being invited to take an epic slumber? “Rest your eyes and your ears and your heart, let inspiration ferment within you.”
As much as I love dream interpretation, I would prefer my internal landscape remain a mystery. I would rather know it as it is, a strange symbolism, an unusual circumstance. A numinous void that sparkles in and out of view.
How am I to decode the mysteries when I find myself so in love with mystery itself?
The cabinet of curiosities beckons and it begs me to divine its secrets in the sumptuous swirls of its wood.
“What do you know of ovals and eyes?” it asks.
And I reply, “as of now, not much.”
Before I lose myself in the mirage of it all.
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You have a beautiful mind and still it’s the least interesting part about you.