OM DENNE EPISODE
This week's essay started as a dream about a house I didn't know I owned.
Then, it became something bigger — an investigation into why the nature of my dreaming changed the moment I moved to Lavender Hill Farm, and what it means that I'm finally, for the first time in my life, sleeping straight through the night.
In this episode I'm reading the full essay, which traces the dreaming through the science of REM sleep, the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript — a fifteenth-century illustrated codex full of plants that don't exist and a script no one has decoded in six hundred years — and into the work of Carl Jung, who went into his own basement at thirty-eight and came back with a map.
The essay also visits my cousin Janette, a botanist who told me years ago that she no longer daydreamed, which terrified me at the time. It took me decades to understand what she meant — and to recognize that something else was moving in to take daydreaming's place.
If you've been paying attention to your own dreams lately, or noticing that something in your interior life has shifted, this one is for you.
In this episode:
The house as the self — Jung, Bachelard, and why so many of us dream of rooms we didn't know we have
What actually happens in the final hours of sleep, and why most of us never stay down long enough to find it
The Voynich Manuscript and the long human tradition of trying to record what lives inside us
Active imagination — Jung's practice of going back into the dream and asking the figures what they want
The second half of life and the gold that's too close to see
Links and references:
The Voynich Manuscript — viewable in full at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Carl Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, W.W. Norton & Company, 2009 (affiliate link)
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958 (affiliate link)
If my work resonates with you:
Stable Roots publishes weekly essays on the land, the interior life, and the slow work of paying attention. Free subscribers receive each essay in their inbox. Paid subscribers support the farm and the writing, and get a little more of everything.
Stable Roots is written and read by Kim Carter and recorded at Lavender Hill Farm
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stableroots.substack.com/subscribe
