Few cards inspire the reaction that the Tower might. I have thought of journeying with this card for almost two years now, something in me resisting at first, drawn magnetically at second, and eventually, feeling a NEED to journey with it, to shake up the foundations I have built everything on, the trust I have in objects that don't deserve that sort of faith. So I sit this morning, in the energy of this card that has come forward often for me in this month. Is it a wish? Is it a knowing? Is something drawing me towards this precarious precipice?
I wake to find myself slowly walking a path that seems rather innocuous. There are dark meadows, grass yellowing in the autumn air, the sharp scent of change as leaves begin to decay. I look for the trees that have shed their leaves and find few with stark bare branches. There's a death energy here, something of moldering and rot.
To my right is a house, but a very strange house, built of many rooms, many levels and nothing at all stable. It's as if when someone started building it, they kept tacking on ideas, adding on stories. The additions are almost arbitrary and seem ready to topple. I make note of this cartoon type house, knowing in my mundane life it would never stand. But here in my dreams, it somehow finds purchase in this desolate, still place.
Ahead of me rests a door, barring my path. I will have to pass through this portal to continue my journey. I bid farewell to the haphazard house.in this strange place, lit in otherworldly tones
With a backwards glance, I step firmly through the doorway and find myself in a place that seems murky and pathless. I startle to realize I have no idea which way to go. Then to my right, some sort of detached plane, like a balance beam seems to appear. But as I walk on it, my body tilts heavily to the left side. I find it extremely difficult to keep my balance and my muscles grow fatigued and tired trying to hold this sideways posture. I feel my tolerance for this leaning ending when suddenly the plane shifts again and I am walking, leaning heavily to the right. At first I am relieved as this feels better than my entire body listing to the left. But surely, the fatigue sets in with this as well and I find myself frustrated and exhausted. I want to walk straight and upright but that seems lost to me.
I suddenly realize how dark things have grown and that I have come to the end of this strange projection path I have walked upon. I am suspended above a great chasm and startle as lightening begins to crash around me, the sound deafening my ears, a charge filling my body with painful prickles. Suddenly, what little I had to stand on is yanked out from under me. I fall in a dreadful hurtle, fast and faster, my being rising up into my throat, bile filling my mouth. I am terrified as this freefall seems to leave plenty of space to imagine what will happen when my body crash lands. Lightening continues to snap and crackle powerfully around me, filing my body with electric tremors and pain.
Down and down I fall wondering what will be my end. The sound is deafening, the roar of so much thunder, that I can't separate any one sound. I succumb, surrendering to the free fall.
And then I realize, it is over. I never felt the impact of landing, but here I am, in a dark and rain drenched space, unable to see much but this pervasive, dim grayness. I feel around and realize I sit in a sea of mud, thick and sticky. I feel the rain drenching every part of me, and find myself sobbing, adding to the wash of water. Something in these sobs tears at the deepest part of me, pulling, yanking, heaving. Every part of me, inside and out seems to be washed by this torrential rain. I gasp, feeling myself wanting to breath through my sobbing but the air is so heavy with moisture that I panic. I need air. I gasp and gasp again, and at last, I feel something ease a bit.
There is a deep ache in me. An emotional pain that wrenches the very depths of me. I feel so weak and tired.
Slowly, I stand. The rain has lessened. I still can't see much, but there is more of a silvery feeling in this place, the sky a bit brighter as the rainfall continues. I feel every joint of my body hurting, aching, every bone seemingly out of alignment. But the ground is firmer now, less muddy and I move forward on careful steps.
There's some sort of color ahead, the silver grayness of falling rain easing and I step towards that promising light. My hands are outstretched and I startle to find I am naked now, my clothes all but guttered away in that dreadful fall and ensuing storm. Still, I reach. I must find more air to breath, more light to fill my senses. Stepping, so slowly, each footfall a sacrifice when a part of me would rather lay down and drown, give up, sink into the blackness.
Suddenly I am outside of that dark bubble and I look back on an orb of destruction and lightening flashes. I seem to be upon a cliff, on the other side now, watching vague shadows in this sphere of black rain punctuated by terrifying lightening. There is a defined black bubble that I have passed through. I step back involuntarily, terrified by the power I feel in that orb. I am safe now. I am in this golden place. I am beyond the terror of that dark night. I am forever changed by my experience of the Tower. I didn't realize before, but it is a passage, a portal, a dark chamber that strips all I ever knew before, away from what I am.
(Card pictured - The Tower from the Dark Mansion Tarot)