Dream Quest for Unknown Gifts

A long time ago two young women barely out of their teens had a series of dreams.  As this was long before the advent of the internet or the ease of communication via social media, the two young women did not know each other, and had no way of knowing that the other was alive on the earth. They lived many thousands of miles apart.

The dreams were disturbing and described the story of two sisters who seemed to have lived almost a thousand years ago on a cliffside caer above the sea. The story ran through childhood, into adolescence, and seemed full of what the two women dubbed “breadcrumbs”: clues about who these girls were and what happened to them. There were betrothals, a lost love, a magical inheritance, a war, murder, and the disownment of the sisters by a powerful relative that caused them to flee, possibly in the company of a soldier. It is a violent and disturbing tale. As they fled they hid something in the stairway of the postern gate of the caer. One of the sisters died of pneumonia shortly after. The other married but was under a kind of house arrest ever after.

In the early “teens” of the 21st century the two women met via the internet and started chatting over social media. They discovered that they had a lot in common, even over time and great distance.  In 2019 as the two dreamers chatted and grew to know each other better, they began to share their personal stories. One of the women was sitting vigil for her dying mother during that summer of smoke and ashes. In the wee hours of Northern California, as wildfires crept ever closer, and in the afternoon of a tiny village in Yorkshire, the subject of dreams came up. Perhaps it was that surreal moment when death is near and the doors between the worlds open, but they discovered that they’d had the same dreams, over and over again, at the same time in their late teens and early twenties. In the mountains of Northern California as one messaged across the internet, a coyote howled. In Yorkshire, as the other answered, jackdaws chattered. As if the spirits of the land had heard the words of each woman as she texted:  “Something hidden in Old Gwynedd under a stone stairway. Running away in a time of fear. There are dolphins in the stonework over the door.” “There is a beach below with a cave… and haystacks offshore.” “There are ravens and little golden birds everywhere.” 

Over the next year, the women tried to discover more: was this place real? What could they find by following the trail of  tiny breadcrumbs? It became a kind of obsession. The dreams returned and were expanded upon. Sometimes the women didn’t have to be asleep to “hear” the voices of the distant past. “There is a well in a forest of trees with white bark.” “There is an older man with a red face shouting.” “We are throwing stones over a crenellated wall at an army attempting to breach our caer.”

This is where the story gets very strange. The women feel that mythical creatures are nearby, whispering, “Go search. Quest. You are Called.”

They begin to see, as if in a memory, visions of each other as other women in different times and places: in rapid succession, the distant past, the Reformation, the late 19th century, WWI, WWII, always returning, seeking that place under the stairs where something is hidden under the stones. They hear names, they see other people. They meet a young women with dreams and visions of the same places and time who hid something in a rock. The three feel compelled to share their stories. The Quest has begun.

The story winds itself out and our modern day heroines realise that, whatever else it is, it is a terrific story and resolve to write it. 

The three women are real. The dreams are real. How much of this tale is real? How much is imagination? None of the three knows, only that they must tell this tale and, once again, Quest to find the hidden things. The places may be imaginary, they may only exist in dreams. Regardless, the women feel compelled to walk the remaining wild places of an ancient Celtic country to find out. There are “breadcrumbs” to follow: a cliff side where there are tiny yellow birds and bright wildflowers amid stone ruins, a forest where there is a well, an old Roman road, a silver mine and the source of much of their wealth, and a series of haystacks offshore. There, the voices from the past say, are the steps where something is hidden. Find it.

It is a Quest. It will be done in the form of a Quest. As the women are artists, it will be art. A walking form of art that describes the parameters of a quest as discussed by Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade, it will be documented through photos, and in words by blogging.

The real treasure is the story to be written by these three unlikely friends. The tale of women in a time of war who long ago hid something in a rock and under the stone steps at the postern gate of a caer on a cliff overlooking the sea, and called across time to tell their story.