The Surreal, David Lynch, & The Moon
No matter how much the new year buzz of January tries to push us into frenzied action, we are still in the deep sighs of winter. A time of hibernation, of sleep and slowness, of phantoms and shadows in the long cold nights. It is a surreal time, one that is not meant to make logical sense, but instead be felt and sensed. Yet even while the top of the lake is frozen over, things are still in motion under the surface. We are energetically shifting our realities long before our ego identities and the real world catch up to the changing tides.
It’s the perfect time to further explore moon energy, as the dreamstate of the unknown, of spirit and of the surreal, made even more potent within long nights and liminal states of being. But we’ll meander there by first discussing ways to hold the surreal, and how that affects our ability to sit fully within the light of the moon.
The Surreal
For anyone unfamiliar, the term surreal refers to that which is felt as unreal, or maybe more accurately, beyond real. It is the realness of a dream or vision, often incongruous and out of order, slightly distorted and fantastical, and somehow both unfamiliar and familiar in an uncanny valley sort of way.
You have experienced the surreal within your own life surely, at the very least within dreams. We might also come upon surreal experiences within occurrences of deja vu, synchronicities, premonitions, or lucid dreaming. And that’s nothing to say about intentionally induced surrealist experiences, like the psychedelic hallucinations of drug use, deep meditative trance states, or breathwork.
Surrealism as an art and philosophical movement arose in the 1920’s in post-war Europe. A response in many ways to the trauma of World War 1 and the global Spanish flu pandemic that followed, surrealism sought to find answers to these nonsensical horrors within the concept of the unconscious as was contemporarily being explored by Freud and Jung.
Why are men cruel? Why are men kind? What is the point of suffering? What is beauty? What is pain? What is real? Are the answers locked within us somewhere, within a dream, a poem, a painting?
We might take for granted today this line of questioning, as we are much more familiar with how the world of psychology has progressed over the last hundred years, with terms like the collective unconscious, repression and the shadow, archetypes and personal myth building, the inner child and reparenting all having entered the cultural zeitgeist in their own ways. But at one time these were new, not hashtags on social media, but hard and weird and odd concepts for the regular person to hold.
Normal people didn’t explore the unconscious.
But thankfully we are not normal here, and the unconscious influences are made even more plain when we intentionally explore them through the surreal. What themes are arising in my dreams? Why do I keep seeing the same word or phrase or number repeatedly? What are these thoughts and feelings that are lurking just below the surface of my waking life?
David Lynch
A quick aside to chat about one of my favorite surrealist creators, David Lynch.
Already coined “the great American surrealist” soon after his passing this week, Lynch was first a painter, who then stumbled his way into becoming an award winning film director and screenwriter, and then also a writer, a musician, an actor, and ultimately a cultural icon. He was also a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation and credited much of his creative inspiration to sitting in a meditative state twice a day for 20 minutes since his adopting of the method in the 1970’s.
My first watch of Twin Peaks in my mid 20’s left me buzzing in a way only good surrealist storytelling can. It’s a detective drama wrapped up in the philosophical and phantasmic musings of Lynch, his weaving storytelling exploring the rancid underbelly of the all-American cookie cutter image. And it’s great. Cosmic beings and UFO like encounters, spirit possession and apparitions, secret military bases and owls who know too much, a woman who talks to her dead husband through a log she carries with her everywhere, normal TV stuff.
And I was hooked. Watching numerous of his films, and then later his 25 year belated final season of Twin Peaks in 2017, cemented within me a love for his way of dreamingly conveying more than is shown, hinting at the ineffable in the oddest and sometimes most horrific of ways.
His work is not simple and it is not soft, but it is not pessimistic either. Rather his work operates like modern day fairy tales. Not the Disney versions with happy endings, but the original dark tales of witches who get away with it and creatures who will trick you for their own benefit and old systems of magic that have been nearly forgotten and children scared but still navigating a topsy-turvy reality as it morphs around them. The stories we all used to tell to remind us that our day-to-day realities are not all there is, and that there are some modes of being that are hard for us to understand and yet still they exist.
With Lynch’s passing, and all the tribute posts and sweet remembrances of him, it’s evident that he was a unique spirit in our modern day world of celebrities and media creators. An artist and visionary, surrealist dreamer and transcendental thinker, who also was kind and hopeful and eccentric and true to himself. He attributed much of his work to his spiritual and meditation practices, and I have no doubt that his ability to sit within the void of consciousness as a daily practice directly influenced his ability to convey the beyond real. This has been my own experience, that the more one sits with spirit, the weirder reality becomes, and that life is a Lychian ride in its own way.
Now again, normal people don’t do this.
But thankfully we are not normal people, and luckily Lynch wasn’t either.
RIP David
The Moon
I previously discussed the Moon’s energy, both in tandem with Sun energy and as it relates to the Black Moon Lillith point in modern astrology, but it deserves an exploration of its own.
A reminder that within the myths of Mesopotamia, the birthplace of western astrology, the Moon was a male father deity revered for his wisdom and intuition. His children, the divine twins of the Sun god and the Venus goddess, were seen as powerful actors on the human world, while the Moon was almost above acting directly on the world, instead revered in the council of the gods to make decisions on their behalf. He also appears to have consistently represented time, as makes sense with us using the phases of the moon even now for time keeping, and ruled over concepts like fate and destiny.
Thus the moon represents our internal worlds and our intuitive function, that both have the power to direct all our other actions if invited. And somehow this part of us exists both within this present moment and all moments, this season and our larger winding paths of fated cycles and phases. Our unconscious selves, or soul selves, that are ever present and somehow also eternal, live in this space.
But it is here I want to weave in the wisdom of the tarot as well, for The Moon card in the tarot holds the right amount of disorientation that we are bound to experience when confronting the unconscious self. The Moon card, as drawn by Pamela Colmen Smith, depicts a path coming out of water with a crayfish present, symbols of the first awakening of the subconscious, and then winding between a dog and wolf, the both tamed and untamed versions of ourselves, before ending between two pillars, representing a gateway that we must willingly cross to bring the lessons of this dark space into the light of day, as the next card in this wisdom journey of the tarot is The Sun.
And yet this surreal nighttime scene is one often described as disorienting, dream-like, and distorted, and this card can signal a time of deep soul searching which isn’t alway easy or fun. It is a time of creatures and unknown paths and nightmarish revelations, and which heralds the need for courage to bring anything from that space through the gate of awareness and into our conscious realities.
Why am I cruel? Why am I kind? What is the point of my suffering? What is my deep beauty? What is my deep pain? What is real? Are the answers locked within me somewhere, within a dream, a poem, a painting?
These are not easy questions and the unconscious will not give you easy answers. Instead, like a surrealist painting or Lynchian scene, when we ask our deepest selves for clarity we instead receive feelings and sounds, vibrations and echos, inner creatures and beings, memories and fables all mixed into one.
Within my own soul readings and healing work, I am still constantly surprised by the beings and images that arise, and how something that makes no sense to my human self can still have an impact on my sitter because it has tapped into this soul nerve within. Concepts like soul guides, past or future lives, simultaneous timelines, other forms of existence and being, ancestors and genetic memory, nature spirits and animal guides are all fantastical and mind boggling and yet make total sense as the conveyers of deep soul truths.
If I wanted a human message I can ask many a human messenger, but if I want a soul message, I must allow the soul to speak in all its wondrous, disorienting ways. We can not walk within the dream space of the unconscious and expect realities we recognize.
You don’t need to come to a reader though to tap into your own unconscious and explore its depths in safe ways. Guided meditation or hypnosis, automatic writing, intentional dreamwork, or sitting in trance can all be ways to explore your own inner Moon world, the murky waters that sit just below the frozen lake above. And when you do, simply welcome the information and messengers that arise, for they are honored beings of your own Moon self, here to give you guidance on the dark and weaving path.
Now let’s end with a little wisdom from one of my teachers, Tony Stockwell, as shared in a mediumship class as just a simple reminder, and already the refrain of this little essay: “Normal people don’t do this.”
Normal people don’t explore their inner selves.
Normal people don’t talk with their soul friends, spirit family, and higher selves.
Normal people don’t ask their own internal Moon for wisdom.
Normal people don’t do this.
But thankfully, we are not normal people.
To honor this Moon exploration, and give you some vibey tunes for inspiring some internal exploration, I’ve created a playlist for your surrealist pleasure. It’s dreamy and disorienting, featuring old and new artists, uncanny covers, and of course a few Lynchian homages tucked within. Hope it carries you through this wintery dreamland, with the light of your own Moon to guide you.
Yours in the surrealist sense,
l.
or listen to the mix on youtube here <3
