Over the last several years, I have consistently seen a female character and her story in my head. While the story changes, the general feeling remains the same: she is a mission that is deeply spiritual in nature, revisiting and moving deeper into things that have kept energy and pain blocked in order to transform and free it up.
A year ago, I got images of a version/dimension of this character, but now in the future. She lives in a time after humans have ruined Earth, and she is in a huge spaceship with a population of humans hurtling across space trying to survive.
There is a particular technology on this ship, one that allows people to go back into time through accessing the history/ancestors coded into their genes.
Therefore, they can only go back to visit people that they are related to, because they are really just accessing their own already-connection with them.
In my mind, the female character always visits someone during our current time, or at least around that, perhaps 5-10 years further if anything.
As I’ve been trying to figure out how she might actually appear to her ancestors, I’ve been watching some TV shows and finding myself caught on these images where people are visiting someone but they are trapped in another dimension, so the person they are visiting does not fully experience them but rather, experiences them as if they are a ghost or a strange presence in the room.
There’s a lot around the visitor being there and having to communicate in much more subtle ways to the person they are visiting, and the risk of being unseen, ignored, or perceived as a frightening presence.
That made me wonder if my female character might enter into this other time and communicate with her ancestor in the same way.
**SPOILER ALERT FOR THE OA, STRANGER THINGS, THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE**
Nell as a child being haunted by “The Bent Neck Lady”, who turns out to be herself
The most “haunting”, literally, for instance, is Nell’s ghost on the Haunting of Hill House. She is terrified of this presence for her whole life yet we learn that it is actually her own soul getting trapped in the house and coming back to haunt herself as a child.
Then, in Stranger Things, there’s alot of communication between the Upside Down and our reality through a sense of presences and being ignored, like Eleven when she tries to reach Mike.
What is required, then, is for the person who is being visited to take more notice of these sensations and visions and take them seriously in order to receive the message.
In Season 2 of Stranger Things, for instance, Will is having these visions of the Upside Down and everyone wants to say it’s just a psychological thing, perhaps linked to trauma. It takes his mother and friends to believe it’s actually REAL to help deal with it.
Or, if you look at it from what happens when you don’t pay attention, you can look at where The OA seems to be going. At the end of Season 2, the OA ends up in a dimension where she is an actress on a show about being an angel, and so my guess from all the hints is that she will not realize she really IS an angel and think it’s just a story she’s acting out. That’s when she’s vulnerable to manipulation and forgetting herself and her own strength.
Now here’s where it gets trippy.
Yesterday I was sitting in my car after having pulled up home, finishing up a song and enjoying the night air, when I felt that old familiar kind of intense pull around this female character. It doesn’t seem to be solved by simply writing about it…it’s like this intense pulling, as if there’s a child tearing at my sleeve. And because I’ve been doing all this thinking about presences and spirits, it made me realize that it felt exactly like that— a presence of something.
It made me wonder, what if this “female character” isn’t even really a character? What if the visions I’m getting are really communications from someone/something?
It’s quite a strange part of creativity— I’ve been really wondering if when we create, we are genuinely channeling something from beyond. Even if it’s not an actual “person” it could be an energy in the world, a foresight gained from deep animalistic insights mixed with subconscious processing, that is translated out into words or images.
You can say that everything is just a metaphor for real things, but at the same time, I wonder how much of these fantastical stories are ways to explain real things that are beyond our current vocabulary/knowledge, using images that we can access.
In Stranger Things, for instance, when they are plotting to reveal Barb’s murder and Hawkin’s lab to the town, they say they must water it down to make it more accessible, connect it to something familiar and understandable but that creates the same rousing effect.
I’m not sure, but in that moment, I found myself asking, “Is she here?”
And suddenly the energy that normally seems to be a bit overwhelming because I don’t know what to do with it and it pounds at the confines of my head seemed to just ground itself, as if something had magnetized it back into some center inside of my heart. It just went woosh, right there.
I don’t really know if I have a spirit guide in the way that TV shows have to show it and really overt spirituality talks about it. But I did feel something important shift in me to feel as if the presence I’ve been putting at a distance as just some story, just a good idea for a book, is not just that— that somehow, it is real.
Perhaps, it may not even be anything more than just me acknowledging the realness of my characters, for many authors will say that their characters become real to them. I don’t know.
But I do now there’s was a distance I put between myself and this creativity by trying to make it as pat as just a good story I’m writing, hey, what a cool idea…and that by crossing the bridge into accepting that whatever is courting me might be something more mysterious and bigger than I can imagine, and that I am not in control of it as much as I am in service of it and following it, discovering it, engaging with it as a part of something bigger, I can help to decrease that distance and possibly unlock more.
So I’m going to keep asking, “Is she here?” For that question allows me to live in a place where “she” might be visiting, and I can begin to engage at a deeper level then the superficial level of just seeing her as a character I made up for a book that I wanted to write so that I could impress people.
It’s time to move on from that. Again, I have no idea if it really just is me writing a story…
But I can say I’m opening it up to being really about more than I can understand, and that is good because it stops me from manipulating it to my small human desires and helps me to simply serve my role.
I wonder, if for you, you might have wondered, or could wonder, about something similar.
How might your limitations around your creativity have to do with the self-serving way you’re using it?
and…
What might it look like/feel like to acknowledge you might have no idea why you are drawn to creating and begin to build a bigger possibility…one that is so big it goes beyond your ability to manipulate it and puts you in a place where you’re just opening to the mystery and waiting for what it tells you to do?