Celebrated a birthday recently, and was out looking for symbolic and fun "toys" as my wife and I perused a local Barnes and Noble bookstore. There wasn't anything I was looking for in particular and asked if I could present my birthday present wishes after I get back from traveling in Mexico soon. Figured there'd be some cool new compact cameras announced soon, and then there's that sexy iPhone 5 rumored to be coming out soon as well.
Still, in order to fulfill my inner child's wish for a birthday treat, I did my best to find something in the funky B&N gift bins. I keep to myself most of the time, travel alone and don't really have the cultivated network of friends that most people seem to have, so my sweet wife does her best to make up for the fact I'm basically a loner. ;)
There wasn't really anything that was catching my eye except for a box of "competition" yo-yos with instruction booklet. One of the yo-yos has a light that fires up when the yo-yo is in action, and the other yo-yo is a plain, wooden one for doing tricks. Seemed perfect.
Then, I noticed some Tarot cards. Most of them seemed really over-priced for what they are. The artwork on Tarots has always intrigued me for some reason, so I looked at all of them until my wife found a purple box that had nicely designed cards and included a booklet as well. Reasonably-priced too so I decided this would appease the inner birthday child sufficiently.
When we got home I broke into the yo-yo box first and dazzled our cats with the one that lit up as it spun. A few drops later and I was ready to bust into that box of Tarot cards. I really don't know anything at all about Tarot cards... only that they looked sorta cool and thought they'd be fun to play with at some point.
The booklet explained how you shouldn't let other's handle your cards too much and that there was some sort of "bonding period" where some put their cards in purple or black silk bags and sleep with them under their pillow. We couldn't scare up a silk bag, but my wife grabbed a silk scarf to wrap them up in. This was all part of pretending to be a goofy child again, so I followed the instructions and put them under my pillow to begin the bonding process.
I had pretty much forgotten they were under my pillow until yesterday morning and through the night I kept waking up with the most bizarre dreams. There wasn't anything unusual I'd eaten and there wasn't any other change out of the ordinary to account for these extremely vivid dreams that were so powerful they were waking me up. For three nights it's gone on like this.
When I was making the bed I felt something odd under my pillow and remembered the silk-wrapped Tarot cards underneath and realized it was the night I put them under my pillow that the dreams started. Now, these aren't your run-of-the-mill intense dreams. These had a very strange feeling as if I was watching someone else's dreams. I don't know how to describe it any other way than they simply didn't feel like anything I would normally dream about and the people in these dreams... well, it all just felt like it was part of someone else's psychic experience.
The only close approximation to what they felt like happened to me around this time last year when I was in the sacred Wirikuta desert region of San Luis Potosi, Mexico. I wrote a blog post about it called Transported from Quemado.
What's interesting is that I'm leaving for Mexico once again and plan on returning to that very place to check up on the stone peace sign I started in 2009. Although I try to travel as light as possible, I'm thinking maybe I'll take these Tarot cards to that same place in the desert... just to see what happens.
I wonder if there's anything to the Tarot or strange sacred places? Or, if it's just my imagination, once again... runnin' away with me?
Skip Hunt
Austin, Texas