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Another important dream, just a couple of nights ago. We are still doing our spiritual/mental/physical Three Wings routine, having skipped a couple of nights for the recent holiday and recovery from it. Taking a short break seems to help a bit, gives a person the chance to recover and adapt -- taking a break of a week starts the downward spiral.

So many things have been going well since we started this practice that we're very likely to keep it going. We're more productive at our work, which takes some of the stress off things -- nice for a change to feel like I'm meeting my obligations there. Our time off seems better spent. I don't have that feeling I frequently have that there is no time to do anything but solve problems, no time for simply sitting or just thinking. Physically we're both doing much better. Our running is improving and we're both feeling results from the stance training already, seeing that we're stronger and feeling different about ourselves. All of that is very positive.

What I've worried about is that this might bring too much of the unusual part of the old practice into the house. I think I mentioned the knocks on the bedroom wall and window we heard. That sort of thing can get out of control. Someday soon I'll put a story up on American Shaman about some things that happened in that way a few years ago. I wouldn't want a return to those days, when the house seemed like Grand Central Station at night.

Follow up:

Two nights ago I dreamed about a tiger. Not just any tiger -- I dreamed about a white tiger, one of the old immortal alchemy symbols. Tigers have been a part of this experience since it began in the early 90's and haven't always been a good thing. In the old system the tiger personifies the enemy force, the thing that tries to kill you if you learn any of this. It was all explained to me carefully, that the tiger was an important motive force and necessary to the process. When I finished the training the tiger wouldn't be a danger to me any longer. If I didn't complete the training and master the arts in question, the tiger would eat me. Kind of a self-policing system, if you don't make the grade you get cleaned up. When I did graduate the course I wasn't inclined to go back and mess with things, it was nice to be able to sleep at night without keeping one eye open.

Now the tiger's back. This happened in a dream about growing ginseng in the sandy bottomlands of a little valley. That's something I used to do, and ginseng is another of those old immortal symbols, an herb that helps in the process of transformation the old system fosters. I was working in the ginseng plantings with a friend of mine I haven't seen for years, a fellow who was a natural Dreamer but untrained, when we began talking about the tiger that had been seen hanging around the area. Lots of people knew about it and wondered where it had come from, and even though this wasn't in its natural range it seemed to be doing well enough. Not a starving tame tiger escaped from a farm but a wild tiger which knew how to make a living.

Ginseng grows best in a natural setting and needs a lot of shade, so where we were working was about as close to jungle as it gets in this part of the country. Wasn't surprising then that the tiger showed up. We saw him lounging on the creek bank gnawing on the remains of a goose he'd caught -- another symbol of the immortal practice, this time of somebody who didn't quite make it through the system. For some reason neither of us were afraid of this tiger, just a little cautious. My friend was less cautious and we both went over to the tiger to check it out.

The tiger was one of the big white cats that the old Taoist illustrations show, and was also one of those things you encounter in Dreaming that's obviously real but not quite what it seems to be. The air around it glowed and you got the impression that if you touched it you'd feel something very different from what you saw. We pulled bits of meat from the carcass of the goose and fed them to the big cat, which was lying there gorged and fat and happy, dozing in the sunshine. He was huge, his head as big as my chest.

We went back to work in the ginseng field and the tiger drifted into the shadows. I started wondering aloud how this was going to go, would we have to watch our backs every minute now? expecting the tiger to pounce on us if we didn't pay constant attention? That's how it used to be and I don't want that back.

Towards evening we quit work and wandered off on our separate paths. Mine took me past the edge of a big corn field, all the stalks dry now but not yet cut, and just beyond the field was a house and a garden. I could see the white tiger prowling in the corn, near the garden and looking in my direction. Behind him in the garden near the farmhouse a man stood, slowly raising a gun to shoot at the animal.

I still had my shovel in my hand and I started running towards the fellow yelling at him not to shoot. He started yelling back that he had every right and I couldn't stop him. I put on some speed and flashed the shovel through the air in one of the old kung fu movements I've learned, one that's supposed to scare people into backing off instead of attacking. He shut up and backed away.

"Don't shoot him," I warned the farmer. "He's my friend."

I looked back and the tiger had disappeared into the corn. Then I came home.

This time around, things are looking pretty good.