Navigating Inspiration, Intimacy, Conflict, and Sleep in a Pagan Community

Abstract

This chapter discusses the navigating inspiration, intimacy, conflict, and sleep in a Pagan community. Closely connected with the idea of sleep as a state of spiritual potential is the concept of the threshold, the ambiguous time between sleep and awareness that is explored as particularly potent. Thresholds in Paganism are seen as potent spiritual junctures, connected through their liminality with altered states of consciousness and with mysticism. One such journey took place during the Oregon witchcamp, where members of the Priestessing path walked through the muddy pathways and across a bridge at night, away from the main camp, sleeping bags in tow. Such trance journeys play to the importance of dreams as spiritual devices in Reclaiming. But they also draw on the potential for sleeplessness to contribute to altered states of consciousness and the sensory potency of the hypnagogic period. In this way, they speak to the interplay of waking and sleeping, pointing to the instability of this opposition and the potential for one to bleed into the other. More generally, this is the purpose of 'edgewalking' in Reclaiming: exploiting liminal states, such as that between sleep and waking, to blur the divide between spiritual and material realms. The use of late-night trance journeys to move through the threshold between these two states places sleeplessness and sleep, waking and dreaming, into explicit relationship with one another. It points to the aporia of sleeping and waking, to their instability and their constitution as mutually informing realms of human experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)