Ah, Saturday! No alarm clocks to get in the way. No need to leave by a certain hour. Just me, my bed, and the dream of sleeping in while a two foot tall glowing sigil floats in front of my face.
I was lucid, and knew I was dreaming. The room was perfectly presented in the dream, right down to the imperfections in the spaces between the blinds. And yet, here was the shoal sigil just hanging out like it had been hung as decoration.
I turned in my bed to face the sigil and spoke to it. “Okay. What am I missing? Have I forgotten to do anything?”
The sigil moved away from my bed to my table and began to twist itself as if wringing itself out. The glow faded and the sigil squeezed itself into the empty mug of coffee sitting on the table. I understood what I needed to do. As I nodded in agreement, the dream ended.
I opened my eyes to find the room identical to what I had dreamt, minus the supernatural image. I parted the blinds, winced at the invading daylight, and snatched the empty mug off the table as I went to the kitchen to make the morning coffee.
This time, I waited until the coffee mug was full and ready before drawing the shoal sigil in the air over it like a required blessing. I was amused to be woken up by the magic of the shoal sigil and took that as a marker of a “good day”.
My family has realized that my escape move last year was not the mark of an petulant child after all but that there is a small chance that perhaps my critique and deconstruction of their actions towards me over the previous decades may have been the result of a minor lapse of judgment. (It is the closest I will ever get to an apology before the cold death of the universe. Still not going back.) As an offering of peace, my mother had sent to me a particular mailing as a gesture of good will.
The subject of that mailing relates directly to one of the five latent goals of the shoal sigil and is a step towards making that goal a reality. Before the move, she would have used that mailing to further abuse me by denying me access to something she knew I have been seeking. Is that mailing a marker of the shoal’s effectiveness? Maybe yes, maybe no. The month is young and it is far too early to declare the end of a race that still has yet to complete its first lap.
The day was filled with things to do as Saturdays usually do. As the afternoon hardened into the evening, I found the shoal sigil on my mind unprompted. I traced its lines in the air to both empower it and to dismiss it from consciousness. As the evening continued to strengthen, so did the fierceness of the recall of the shoal sigil. Just tracing it wasn’t making it leave my consciousness but seemed to reinforce its intrusion into my thoughts.
Realizing I might be forgetting something, I pulled the list of desires that went into making the shoal. Got my coffee. Got that mailing. Did my yoga. Greeted friends with cheer. Prepped for this, made room for that. Will sleep tonight… eventually.
Oh.
I forgot to eat today.
I haven’t had anything since coffee o’clock.
That might also explain the light-headedness, too, while I’m at it.
I went to go eat and traced the shoal sigil over the food as a blessing. It wasn’t the best of dinners, but it was a good dinner, and you know, that’s all I could ask for under these circumstances.
I did not get to sleep until very late in the evening as I almost allowed an important deadline to slip past me unworked. As I finally crawled into bed, again enjoying the thought of a morning without alarm clocks, I traced the shoal sigil over my head in the same place the morning’s dream sigil hung. Sleep snatched me quickly.
Be of good cheer.