Imagine with me if you will. You are sick in bed. Your bed has been moved to the center of a large room by your family, and they are very afraid for your well-being. You can barely see and the heat is terrible. You can’t rest even when you faint from exhaustion.

In this large room is a presence. The room is dark, and you can’t really see anyone else. You hear chanting and it keeps a steady rhythm, but you can’t make sense of it. You begin to fall asleep again from the exhaustion only to hear a loud screech. CAW! You look up to see what seems like a huge monster, strong features, intense eyes. It isn’t moving like a person, and it won’t talk to you. It passes over you repeatedly, making the same loud screeching noise. Your heart beats hard and you feel yourself shiver. This bird thing seems to peck at you repeatedly, first one place then another, each time striking a place that hurts. Each time the painful place tenses. Eventually, you faint, not from the illness, but from fear.

This is like a nightmare I had! I have a question for you. Did you wake feeling very good in the morning? More alive? How did that day go?

I woke up trying to get the bird off my face. I couldn’t separate the dream from reality. You couldn’t, because there is no meaningful separation.

I thought it was flying repeatedly at my face. Ah, may I guess at what had been troubling you at the time? Were you experiencing a period of serious self-doubt? Feeling of being lost and worthless?

Yes, over my career. Definitely lost, not sure about worthlessness. I’m under a lot of pressure at work to take up a management post and I’m unsure whether I want to. I think that’s what triggered it. Did that end soon after? The shamans still exist.

That big monster was a shaman? Yes, and it was trying to empower. Crow is a liberator, a herald of change. It was a crow.

What other forms do they take? Is it always animal or can it be another human? They take many forms, and I will summarize those forms and the meaning of all this.

You will have a mask, because you want power over your life. You need power over your life, contact with your life. You will either feel your mask, or learn it.

I can offer the way to find your mask of true power. The mask of true power has love. I don’t mean any specific type of love, I mean the attraction, the love that is the will to live. The iron mask or death mask drains love, drains the sense of purpose or reason.

“ism”s definitely drain love. They make useful fetishes, but poor masks. As long as an ism is something you can move, and put down if necessary, then it’s a good thing. You don’t want the ritual spear embedded in your chest.

Now the map of masks. Someone asked about the scope of the mask collection.

We love life, and we love the things that tell us, if only subconsciously, that we will be able to go on living. So the animal forms do that. They represent the modes of life in physical form, life embodied. The elements do that, and our subconscious will give the elements a face, naturally, like seeing a face in the clouds. And there are forms beyond the material world as we know it. We think in this day and age that we just imagine them.

I see faces everywhere. Funny how you never see butts in a cloud. I have seen butts, and hands, and feet, but my brain is wired funny. I see everything everywhere. It’s sometimes hard to deal with.

But yes, masks. There is no such thing as something you just imagined. Even neuroscience is saying that you don’t actually have the ability to direct how your brain works.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~