" The soul of a sleeper is supposed to wander away from his body and actually visit the places, to see the persons, and to perform the acts of which he dreams." (The Golden Bough p. 218)

The earliest memory that I am able to recall(aside from scattered impressionistic flashes and physical sensations) is from when I was about two. I was with my mom and my sister Erica(who would've been four or five)in the cabin up Gallatin canyon, and Mom is telling Erica that Grandpa Duane(my father's father) had died. Erica is devastated and crying, and I feel concerned and impressed at the magnitude of her emotions. I grasp that this is something serious and final, death. I have no memories of Grandpa Duane, but I do remember the telling of his death.

On a curiously related note, I had a deeply frightening dream the other night. In the dream both my mother and my sister Erica die, and I keep moving around a vast, darkly hued scape of rolling hills and cliffs, always coming back to the old cabin in Gallatin Canyon. I awoke to a strange sensation of smothering(I'm not sure how else to put it). It just seems that there was a circling back to the fears and understandings of my two year old self. In a way, perhaps I never really stopped being my two year old self.

Perhaps all of this relates to mythology's attempting to confront the Final and the Massive and the Unfaceable, which must be faced anyway. Well I wonder...