There are many ways we can connect dreams to astrology, and many don't require that you know all about your Natal Chart. In this column we will be exploring the symbolic rather than predictive aspects of astrology. Symbolic astrology attempts to use the images ofastrological to give meaning to one's life and empower choices rather than predict paths. We do this by imaginal overlay. In this process we impleach, (poetically interweave)dream, image, feeling, life and symbol in a way to evoke a felt sense of the dream's imagery and its position in our life.

This year we are focusing each month on a different House.The inner circle of the Natal or Birth Chart is divided into 12 distinct regions know as Houses. They relate to everyday activates. One will be about physical appearances and temperament, while another relates to possessions, for example. Planets and signs fall within these Houses and influence the areas of focus. We will be watching for images of planets, signs and other celestial events and hopefully begin to see the emergence of an astrological chart that dips into birth charts, dreams, and our waking life.

The Eighth House. Scorpio. To build an image of Eight House dreaming, The passions of Scorpio will need to be explored as well as death, and feelings and possessions gained through others. In partnership with the lower energy of the self possessions of the Second House, the eight house may be seen as the feelings and possessions gained through others. The life/death cycle in this house generates a variety of emotional and sexual energy, including love and hate, jealously and revenge, mysteries of occultism and psychism, after-death research, transmutations and transfor mations.

Dream: Grandfather sits in a chair by the fire and checks off a list as the children each talk to him. He is telling us what he is going to leave to us. I see that he go two checks on the list. He looks back at me an grins, and I feel an ancient hatred, but grin at him anyway and see that this upsets him and know this is a crucial moment for us.

In the Eight House the flow of feeling is between one and another. This can be positive as well.

Dream: When she finally was allowed into the room, we acted like we knew one another all our lives. I felt like a stream of feeling existed between us and knew she would be my bride, if I could only keep focused on the agreement.

Dream: I was about to say my oaths when I realized this wasn't my fiancé at all, but someone completely unknown. I panicked, but was so scared I didn't say anything and we got married anyway. I am waking around the house now, I can't believe this has happened.

This house is often called the House of Death, an over focus on one of its aspects, just as the "money received from others" is part of this house, but only an aspect. These interpretations are OK as far as they go, but don't really lead anywhere. Rather, I would suggest that the interchange of finances relates to the meaning of money as a symbol of emotional values. In the inheritance dream above, we could focus on the inheritance as an object that reveals the sibling rivalry, or we can look at the inheritance as that which accumulation of karmic emotion which flows in death to the next generation. Reading a dream as an eighth house dream leads to clues to the significance of our emotional constitution in matters of sex, emotional crisis, and the death and rebirth of the instincts as transformed desire.

In this sense, money too becomes a symbol of emotional dependence or freedom. Note in our culture the tie between money and how free or dependent we are in relationship, how sexual values are colored by our finances, how financial and emotional stinginess so often come together.

Watch for dreams at this level of difficult financial situations, odd partnership and marriage agreements, demanding partners, and selling sex for security or other gains.

Watch for crisis. The eighth house is a battleground for self-understanding and self-mastery via crisis. Here can be found the creative and procreative forces though which we contact others. Just like the way people come together in an earthquake or flood, or sex, the issue of this house lift us out of our personal world and unite us with a larger wheel. What for signs of resolution of these crises in symbols that combine opposites, such as the ourobouros, or serpent eating his own tail, the plumed serpent of the Aztecs, or mandala - circular symbolism that may initially repel but also fascinates.

Watch for issues of sexual inadequacy. While commonly seen as an issue of potency and compe tency, it may be better re-visioned from the view of the Eighth house as an issue of emotional fearfulness. This fear relates to giving up oneself to another on a social level, and giving up to death on a spiritual level. And these fears may be well founded and closely heeded. Forcing oneself to become more sexually competent is not the way to become more emotionally evolved. Neither is forcing emotional connection. The partner may be the wrong lover, and big issue of control, of violation, and emotional rejection may be at play. Becoming vulnerable with the wrong people can be abusive. On the other hand, with an open and willing partner, the exploration of emotional flow during sex can be quite liberating.

Also, sexually speaking from the Eighth house, one might be a "perfect lover" physically, but be blocking the flow of emotional energy. Watch in dreams for lovers that morph and change and don't remain stable during the actual act of sex.

If the Eighth House dream traveler can be said to be seeking something, it is connection. In their lower forms, these connections may be dependent, ill, defeating and abusive. But the underlying issue is really union over security, and particularly intense, transformative unions. Those who are reaching for the sky just to surrender (thank you Leonard Cohen) are in for a bumpy ride. Sex, money, relationships and feelings can be used to gain object security, but this leaves us generally unsatisfied without the real union with the deep levels of the unconscious that bring life-giving healing to oneself and others.

Next month: 9th House -Profound mental activities and foreign travel in foreign lands. Send in your dreams to
M. Aionia at aionia@dreamgate.com

Island (1997 August). Meditation on One Eighth House Facet: Sex and Sexuality. Electric Dreams 4(7). Retrieved July 26, 2000 from Electric Dreams on the World Wide Web: http://www.dreamgate.com/electric-dreams

July 31st: Today up about 7:15 following the first vivid dream in quite some time. The dream also followed on the heels of my in essence providing closure on doing further work related to HIV positive men and women, usually contracted sexually, and after nine years -- I began in August 1988.

"First Ring The Bell"
I dreamed LK (a legend in the gay community) comes to see me. I am both surprised and very happy to see him, and I tell him so. There is one thing especially on my mind -- what to do with the interviews, for I have better than 600 people who have spilled their guts. Then RM (another gay leader) shows and, although my husband and family are on the premises, perhaps in other rooms, it is as if the three of us bond together. At some point, we are laying together, and I feel very warm and affectionate toward them. But I also feel somewhat awkward -- would my husband understand that it has nothing really to do with sexuality?

LK and I leave to go a block away to eat breakfast. He chooses a breakfast place in a house that is among a row of old houses. The area looks rather dilapidated and rundown, but the breakfast place promises an authentic, old style breakfast. I barge right in, opening the door of this old mansion without ringing the bell or knocking, and LK corrects me. "Ring the bell first." I say, "I see nothing suggesting I should do that." I suddenly feel awkward, as if I've committed some faux pas, and wish to recover gracefully. I do not want LK's feeling about me to sour. But then I see on the lower left hand corner of the entrance plaque, positioned to the left side of the building, a small buzzer, suggesting that one ring the bell before entering. But you would have to really look hard to see it. Then I ask LK, "Where did you find this place?"

My feeling about it is, despite all appearances, there is something so authentic, so real, that it is an experience of a lifetime to breakfast there. The insiders pass along information about it, so what seems like a real and rare find to me is just common knowledge among the insiders. We enter and stand in the foyer.

At this point my husband and stepson are also there. They, however, complain about the smell, and how could LK bring us to such a place? I do detect an odor, but I am OK with it. Then LK leaves briefly to go to a gas station across the way, I believe, to get change. When he returns, we stand just inside the entrance, perhaps even on the porch or veranda. He embraces me and kisses me very affectionately, and I am surprised to feel he is sexually aroused. Odd, because he's gay. I can almost read his thoughts: if he had met me much earlier on, he might not have been gay and been forced to live such a disenfranchised life. [end of dream]

I hardly know LK and, though RM, a very close mutual friend, told me more than once that I was LK's female counterpart, I always resisted that perception. LK is a revolutionary. I am not. I have made little impact outside my little world. Here I am, after months of agonizing, prepared to let all the interviews go -- turn to something totally different and new -- suddenly dreaming about LK and RM. I do obsess about the interviews -- thousands of pages, millions of words -- about a world of cruelty and indifference surrounding an HIV positive person, unless he or she is aligned with other HIV positive people, but what can I do? The dream says, "First ring the bell." --"Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle," I can see me now, picking up a tiny little bell, and shaking it a few times. Not Quasimodo, ringing the bells of Notre Dame, with all the fervor of his being, though I have often imagined that I felt like Quasimodo, and quickly found myself aligning with others who felt similarly. Even as young as seven. Remember TCalamity who failed three or four times and stood several heads taller than the others in the second grade? Remember how they laughed and made fun of him? I hated that. And I told them so. But sometimes I have not been able to say a word, as if my tongue had been cut out of my mouth, like Shakespeare's Lavinia in Titus Andronicus.

Wonder why? Breakfast. Break - fast. Should I break away fast? Should I apply the brakes quickly? Should I break the fast -- somehow release myself from a perpetual fasting mentality? Or should I enjoy a good hearty breakfast, like the kind Auntie used to cook on the farm? With buscuits and churned butter and maple syrup and grits and eggs and sausages and pies and fruit and juice? That old style breakfast where a lot of people are gathered, enjoying the early morning, and a huge table piled with food? I am so conflicted. What to do? What to really do? How could I be brought to such a place by LK? So my husband and my stepson do not like the smell (of decay and death? of the interior? of what)? Why am I OK with it and they are not? Why do I believe that to be gay is not defined by one's sexuality really. To my mind there is something else going on than just merely being attracted to a same sex partner. To my mind a heterosexual can be gay. But of course, I'm ridiculously wrong. And that thought at the end of the dream, that had he met me earlier on, he might not have been gay, or taken a different path, well -- that doesn't really refer to LK. That must be MK -- will I ever get over his suicide?

So I ask LK: "Where did you find this place" [in your heart]? How did you discover it [your heart]?" Only the insiders know. Just "first ring the bell." Auntie. The only one who ever fixed those huge, old style breakfasts that put me in awe. I'm so glad I told Calamity (her daughter) recently that Auntie had the biggest heart of anyone I had ever known -- it was big enough to embrace the Universe. Each one of her five children are the sweetest, gentlest, best human beings I have ever known. Odd but in their community, they were ostracized throughout their childhood. Separated. Made to feel "less than." People talked about them behind their backs, in whispers, excluded them. Even their own first cousins were forbidden to have anything to do with them. They found out why once they became adults. What could they do about the fact that their mother was dying of cancer for more than 20 years and their father in the meantime started a second family with a black woman in a rural southern town with the KKK on the rampage just thirty miles away. Their father is as wonderful a man as Auntie is a woman. They were the perfect pair, and yet -- the cancer struck her in her twenties, so many cobalt treatments, her sexual urges must have been affected soon thereafter -- and the black woman he ended up with helped Auntie run the house. How did everything get so twisted and tangled and knotted? In their family? In mine? That's why I have a million questions about sex and sexuality. Does sexuality -- primal -- who can really do anything to alter its impact, no matter how its flow is diverted and rechanneled -- somehow do the twisting and the tangling and the knotting? How do we untangle ourselves?

I just ran across this passage! Steinbeck puts the matter plainly in the preacher's mouth in Grapes of Wrath:

"I says to myself, 'What's gnawin' you? Is it the screwin'?' an' I says, 'No, it's the sin.' An' I says, "why is it that when a fella ought to be just about mule-ass proof against sin, an' full up of Jesus, why is it that's the time a fella gets fingerin' his pants buttons?'" He laid two fingers down in his palm in rhythm, as though he gently placed each word there side by side. "I says, 'Maybe it ain't a sin. Maybe it's just the way folks is. Maybe we been whippin' the hell out of ourselves for nothin'.' An' I thought how some sisters took to beatin' theirselves with a three-foot shag of bobwire. An' I thought how maybe they liked to hurt themselves, an' maybe I liked to hurt myself. Well, I was layin' under a tree when I figured that out, and I went to sleep. And it come night, an' it was dark when I come to. They was a coyote squawkin' near by. Before I knowed it, I was sayiin' out loud, 'The hell with it! There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain't nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say.'"

Steinbeck may have begun to answer some question for himself...will my questions ever be answered? What about my first original question before I turned six? "Why do human beings do what they do to each other?" Is sexuality (or lack of) the root of it? Is it fear of death? What is it? What? What?
What?

Island