The Goddess

My dream; feel free to interpret:

I previously (previously meaning that in the dream, I came equipped with this information) knew about something special in an underground cavern. A great deal of the dream was concentrated on the look of the cavern and the experience of climbing down into it, as well as, traversing its floor.

We (there was another individual with me, male, similar age, undefined) entered through a roughly circular hole in the ground. I had the impression of a small sinkhole, about eight feet in diameter. We had to heft ourselves over the edge and climb down a vertical wall, much like descending one of these fabricated rock-climbing walls, except that this was grittier...crystalline, dirty white. It was calcified or like very hard salt. I remember that it was frightening, but the handholds were relatively simple to find, and we descended without any trouble. Nevertheless, I had strong feelings of claustrophobia that I had to fight.

Because I was the guide, I had to ignore my own fear about the cavern and lead on. At the bottom, the floor was extremely convoluted, the same texture and color as the walls. There didn't appear to be a light source, but the pale color was relatively uniform and seemed, because of its quality, not to require any light to be visible.

The floor, as I said, was extremely convoluted and had this same crystalline, crunchy texture. At one point, I could look down on us in the dream and see a shoeprint, not a footprint, but what looked like the mark of a man's dress shoe. There was nothing to say it had been made by a man, but I had that impression throughout. I deduced that the floor where we were walking was once molten/plastic/liquid and that someone had stepped upon it in that state and left his shoeprint as it cooled.

Our destination was not immediately visible, but a short walk of about 30 yards around a bend in the cavern revealed the object of our attention to my guest. It was a bronze statue of a goddess. She was approximately 6 feet high and stood on a base of another foot. Her arms were raised high at her sides (a bit like the arms of a many-armed goddess, but only one pair), and she had a semi-circular "halo," also of bronze.

She was stationary, but quite animate. Her eyes were aware. I remember being extremely afraid of her and wanting to fall down on my knees and beg her not to obliterate us and everyone else in the world with a blink of her eye. On the other hand, we felt so much admiration for her power that we also wanted to raise our hands and praise her over and over. You never quite lost your fear, even when assuming a posture of love, and you had a deep compulsion to sacrifice as a gift to her, even if you knew it was paltry and of no use to a being as powerful as she was.

My companion expressed his concern (to the goddess) that she shouldn't be hidden away in this small hole, but out where people could see and praise her beauty. In one breath, he sincerely meant that out of love AND he wanted to flatter the goddess out of fear.

I had to explain, somehow transmitting the thoughts of the goddess, that it didn't matter where the statue stood, that her power was far beyond the confines of matter or this image where we were alternately shuddering in fear and rejoicing with praise.

The only way she was hidden was when we (mortals) were too blind to see her. Despite that, her power continued to flow through everything in the world, sentient or not, living or not, every crystal of sand, every idea of man. In my mind, I could see her influence as a hazy blue sphere encompassing the whole globe of our planet, permeating the earth and the surrounding space. I remember wishing that I could love her without the fear, but the fear was integral, perhaps because of the great difference in power between us. I suspect that the fear was my fault, that I created it, that I nourished it unwittingly in every aspect of my life, that it had attached itself to me so strongly that only death would free me of it--if even then.

This is when I woke up, still afraid of the cavern and the goddess, and tried to shake off that creepy feeling you have after a nightmare, except this was a little different, not so intense a fear, but still enough to wake me.

*shudders* I still feel a tingle of fear at the back of my neck!