The feelings of dread the previous nightmare had left me with proved to be the alchemical prima materia, the chaotic mass out of which I was able to extract inspiration. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Several months later, I had the following dream:

Dream 3: I’m in an advanced state of pregnancy, but I realise I haven’t felt the baby kick in some time. I’m worried it might be dead, but another woman insists that she can feel it kicking. I start to give birth. The labour pains are intense and it is a great struggle to push the baby out.

Contrary to my fears, the baby is still alive, although there appears to be something wrong with her. She has sores or gaps in her skin, as if she hadn’t quite finished her development. In addition the blood hasn’t been wiped from her eyes, so it isn’t clear whether there is something wrong with her vision: at the moment, all I can see is the blood.

Someone has put her in a ziplock bag, but nonetheless I can touch her. Her skin feels hot, almost as if she were "cooking", and I make sure she isn’t being suffocated.

Everyone leaves and I see the child sitting on a shelf in the ziplock bag.

This dream woke me with terror and a sense of shock at the state of the infant and the fact of her being abandoned—shelved, to be exact. I had many thoughts about what this nightmare might signify, but it only became clear several weeks later when I received an entry form for a poetry competition. At first I thought I had nothing to submit, but then I remembered the poem I had begun the day of the ‘alien invasion’ dream. I got it out along with two other unfinished works, and started to revise them.

The child in the dream is bloody, unfinished and hot, and at the time I imagined that she was put in the ziplock bag so that she could continue to cook. This was certainly the state in which I found myself over the next couple of weeks. Working on the three poems as a group, I came to realise that they embodied my experience of what is often casually referred to as the return of the Goddess.

Some time later I realised that the dream also pictured the rebirth of my own feminine identity, and the difficulty I found in owning aspects of the feminine that some sides of my psyche wanted to keep ‘on the shelf’ zipped up in plastic. This was a period during which I struggled with my entire religious upbringing. Here is the dreadful ‘divine’ child who carries as big a threat to my world view as any other sword bringer; contained in the finished poems (an unforeseen planting, Black Magnificat and Song of Asherah) is the passionate standpoint pictured in my earlier dream as potentially explosive.

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