The Branch Building and the Fen

I’ve been having flashes of a dream about an old dead hollow tree trunk in a fen; a swirl of bats issue from the hollow in the twilight. There was some kind of minor problem with it that I was addressing.

In my other dream flashes, we were preparing a church program at a small, flat rectangular building. Probably a small branch building, one of those where its just one room that gets used for church but also everything else. There was a grape vine that sprung up next to one of the walls and was causing some kind of trouble with the building, so I dug it up.

Last night, the dreams converged.

I am at my parents’ place. My dad comes in looking troubled. He says the deep root of the grape vine is still there and is trying to grow into the building.

We walk out of the house. In the way of dreams, the branch building is now on the other side of my dad’s corral. The fen is back behind us on the other side of my dad’s place. It is evident that the deep grape root actually comes from the old, sinister tree in the fen. It is hoping to pierce the little rectangle building and sap its power.  Because the building is a power, and that power has something to do with its simple geometrical rectangular shape.  My dad tells me he’s been battling hard against the fen tree the last few days to preserve his place and the building. He’s even had to fight off the white crows. The white crows?  I recognize that therefore this is a very serious situation.  He says the attacks are getting worse. He’s afraid the white crows will return.

As we get out to the branch building we are both hit with a kind of psychic attack from the power that is in the fens. We run inside the building so its strength will help us.. Looking out the far window I see an elevated ditch bank and riding along it on two fine horses are the two white crows. They are not crows the way you would normally think. They are nothing but white feathers, none too clean. They have no eyes, no beak, no limbs, no wings, no features. In shape they are something like a crescent that has been slanted off true and is thicker towards the bottom. Imagine a crescent merged with a tear drop and skewed.  A lump that tapers at both ends.  They are large, the size of a man’s torso. Their mental focus is all on us. Their mental attack is strong. Even inside the building my dad and I are suffering. We are frantically tracing squares in the air and adding more papers with drawings of squares and rectangles and right angles to the wall on top of the ones that are already there from my dad’s prior efforts. The orderly shape has some kind of power to it, connected to the power of the rectangular building, that opposes the power of the fen and its dead hollow tree. But now this square power is not enough.  Our minds start to go  The building appears to be swirling around us. My dad, or maybe me, I am too overwhelmed to know, start chanting numbers to resist the assault. 1+1 is 2. 2+2 is 4. 4+4 is 8. 8+8 is 16. . . . Perhaps its the 8s that inspire me, but I do suddenly get an inspiration. Would cubes resist the crows more? There are, conveniently, dice in a little cupboard where Uno and a couple of boardgames and other stuff are stowed. As already mentioned, this church building is just one multipurpose room (with a nice wooden floor, I might add). I start rolling the dice. The white feather crows are thrown back.  I keep rolling them.  They reluctantly leave off the attack and ride off. My dad and I are able to flee to his old white truck and drive off looking for some kind of unknown help. I am rolling the dice to protect us and we soon realize that the dice can be used to determine our direction–hopefully. We follow the dice directions through the streets and lanes of my dad’s rural little town until we come to a fella’s construction yard. As we pull in, we see that his big earth-moving equipment (it is really big, so long that it has a swivel in the middle).  But what really catches our eye on the machine is it has large cubes made of pipe dangling off of it. My dad and I grin at each other. This is clearly the right place.  The dice led us right.

The fella there comes out, I greet him in jest with “we meet on the square,” he sort of instantly realizes that we are his kind of person just as we realize he is ours, then we drive back to our place while he follows in his big long front-hoe. He drives it out into the field near the corral, right up next to the building, then digs waaay down and rips out the deep root. The fen is defeated, the attack is over. That’s it.  We of course don’t pave over the field with more rectangular buildings or try to attack the fen because the principle of vitality and nature the fen represents is important, it just can’t be allowed to overwhelm the orderly principle of the square shape and the rectangular building.
The end.

When I woke up, I saw a message in it for me. That I need to emphasize order and discipline in my life for a season, that the principle of wild vitality in me has become too strong.

But the building being a church, and connected with an ordered principle represented by squares and right angles, has also seemed very significant to me as I have thought it over.