The mountain-gathering vision explained

Part One - up to now

First I'll post the vision itself, rewritten, perhaps with better language skills.

I saw myself amidst a lot of sandy fog as I was walking in a desert of dried-out soil on a bright day. My clothing was usual for me at that time, a black leather coat with all my other clothes were black as well. I was walking, first I thought alone, but then there were people coming behind me, maybe four or five. I could not identify them.
Our destination was a mountain. One single mountain of a yellowish-brownish colour, the same as most of the colours of the vision.
Then as I saw myself again, I saw that with me there were now thousands of people going towards the mountain. I was still going out front, though.
As we reached the base of the mountain, I saw eight or nine people (more probably nine). While they had human form, they were totally black, as if there was only an outline and an inside dipped with a paint bucket in a drawing software. On one of them there may have been glasses because the sunlight reflected from something near the eyes. After a cut, I saw us walking up on the side of the mountain.
This whole image sequence repeated itself three or four times until I woke up. There was no talking in this dream, just the images and the Indian raga music playing from the speakers in the classroom where I fell into a trance to see this vision.

When I put this up at Spirit Online, people arrived who had their own visions, partly or almost totally different from mine, but all had the motifs of the desert, the mountain and the gathering in it.
Back then, everyone had their idea of what the visions may be about, most - including me - had a fairly literal reading about it, and we were trying to put the visions into one. We were also searching for possible locations where this gathering could take place. At the time, being both a newbie and a teenager (deadly combination, now that I look back), I, among others, associated large happenings with this vision, world-saving and whatever else.

Part Two - the explanation

Early this year I set out to study dreaming, I thought that by learning about how dreaming works I'd understand my vision more. This small quest lead me to realize that dreams are very rarely literal, they are mostly symbolic, but they don't necessarily come from inside the mind either. Reading the vision as a symbolic one rather then a literal one gives a more clearer and a more analysable view.
Another feature of the dreamworld is the role of the person dreaming. A term like 'fear' may appear as a lion in one person's dream, as a spider in another person's dream, and as the mother-in-law to a third dreamer. This accounts to the small differences in the visions of different people, eg. robed people instead of people covered totally in black.

I had a conversation with a mythologist friend who is an expert in mythology and religions, and to whom I had sent the visions earlier. She said that this dream-vision is an initiation dream similar to ones found in Celtic texts and in India.

The basic theme is the Search and the Goal, the two central words of initiation. Of course the Search phase is the desert and the Goal is the mountaion. The Search part of the initiation process is identified in archaic systems as the part of chaos, premordiality, the period before creation.
The Search is symbolized by two places, identical but different. The first is the jungle ("The shaman's sould travels to the jungle on the back of a tiger", goes an Indian text), which is without order, which is disintegrated. The second is the desert, which is the symbol of (primordeal) nothingness.

There is a story in the Mahabharata which connects to the vision. This is quite a long story and it is not necessary to read to understand the connection, but it is edifying and a good example of initiation.
The tale is of the five Pandava-brothers who, when they got old, decided they want not to die lying in bed but die the death of initiation. So, they set out to cross the desert to get to the mountain of the Himalaya.
As they start their journey, their wife joins them, but as they reach the edge of the desert, she thinks of the pain she feels because of needing to let go of her children, and she dies. Going in the desert, four of the five brothers perishes. The first, Sahadeva, dies because he took pleasure in his own beauty. The second, Sahadeva's twin, Nakula, dies because of his conceit. The third, Bima perishes for he is gluttonous. The fourth, Ardzhuna (a hero of the Mahabharata) has to die because while he is a hero, he is vainglorious.
The fifth and eldest brother, Judhistira reaches the mountain. Indra appears before him and invites him to the land of the Gods. But then, Judhistira notices that their family dog went with them and reached the mountain as well. Indra commands Judhistira to leave the dog and go with him. But the dog looks at Judhistira with a look of entreaty, so Judhistira recites the rule that it is one of the biggest sins to dismiss one who begs.
Indra argues, "But how do you think that a creature of such impurity can enter where only the gods and the selected few may enter?", but Judhistira says that either Indra lets both of them in or he denies the initiation. Then, the dog turns into the god Dharma, revealing that this was the last test of the initiation process, and Judhistira has passed.
Of course, the story is to be taken symbolically.
The wife and the five brothers are only symbols of the parts of Judhistira's ego that he needs to leave behind, and so he does, without looking back for a second. The wife, while she did love her children, her death had to happen because she loved them with a possessing love rather than a free love. Judhistira's love towards the dog in the end, however, was free love, and that was the final test about.

The connection point to the gathering vision is the beginning. While I had thought that the few people behind me in the beginning must mean the few people that will grow to a large number of people by the end, this idea does not entirely work. While the people in the end (where there is no more fog) are clearly visible people, in the beginning the few are unrecognisable, I had never been able to see faces on them. Which is a clue for the same type of process than in the previous story, leaving behind shadow selves, overcoming vices.

In this respect, the end of the vision becomes more clear. The many people are not people who need to be gathered, no. They are all the ones who also came through the fog, who also left behind their shadow selves and evolved spiritually.

However, there is still one part of the vision that remains, which are the people dipped in black. If there are 8 of them, that is the number of Earth, of vitality - which is not a good association with the colour of pitch black. 9, however, is the number of the initiation death, of going under, of the suffering involved with initiation.
The Scandinavian god Odin hung himself on the tree of Yggdrasil and remained there for nine days in exchange for the mystery of the runes. This seems to be the last step of the initiation process, just before the story ends happily by the people going up on the side of the mountain.

Summing up all that has been said, the visions of the gathering and reaching the mountain in the desert do not seem to be about a group event, but a collection of individual paths, all going through the fog and the chaos to form order and find the mountain.

One last reflection on ShadowWalker's vision, the one in which she was on top of that mountain, where in a cave she heard a voice from the mountain speak: "The children will come...in time...when they--and you--are ready, you shall meet...and the world shall undergo a great and wondrous change." Back then, I associated this sentence with one single, large change but in spite of what has been said and experience, it seems that the large change is the spiritual change in so many of us, which, if united and these people working together, can in reality bring wondrous changes.

Those who have read this, thank you doing so.

FirstChild

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