Dreaming Worlds Awake by Esme Ellis – A Visionary Fiction Alliance Book Review by Jodine Turner
Dreaming Worlds Awake is the newest book by VFA member Esme Ellis.
This is a book that offers glimpses into the soul journey of the author. It could have gone the way of many memoir or Visionary Fiction books and been self-absorbed or pedantic. This does not happen in ‘Dreaming Worlds Awake’. Esme expresses her life experience through narrative, through life synchronicities, through her dreams, through conversations with mentors (dead and alive), and through poetry. This variety proves creative and interesting. Esme’s writing drew me in.
I particularly liked her description comparing the Heroe’s Journey and the Writer’s journey as being one and the same. How fashioning words, and paragraphs, and stories, is magic and is in effect casting a spell… (in its most basic form, when you ‘spell’ a word correctly you are casting a ‘spell’!)
In one of the dreams and past life remembrances Esme related, a priestess appears and gives symbolic messages about the inner feminine and masculine of both Esme personally, and the world at large. These reflections are so crucial to our world today, where these two aspects are out of balance and struggling to come together in harmony as they are meant to be.
Esme also asks an intriguing question which bears further contemplation – Is there an unconscious aspect to Divinity?
Esme, when you studied the art of sculpture, one of your earliest mentors chose you to be in the college program because he said you had ‘presence’. This indeed, comes through in the art of your writing. Well done.
I also see the connection between the hero and writer's journey, but I also see it applicable to real life. You pose an interesting question about the Divine possibly having an unconscious aspect. I have also wondered the same thing. So many possibilities…
Much of my book is taken up with responses from the 'ascended master, Kuthumi' to what I had written. A snippet of which is where I say; '… our image of 'God' at any one time, according to our state of consciousness, is a man-made) and very distorted and unbalanced) projection. In this dream I saw the Goddess Nut as wondrous, ethereal but incomplete, composed of a myriad crystalline stars, yet lying unconscious on what seemed like an operating table. Hidden behind a curtain stands the male Creator figure who is performing an operation on her. At this point enters a priestess. Kuthumi's comment is; You have managed to explore the duality of divinity in a very rich sense. … You show yourself that you have nothing to fear, for the priestess, i.e. the human goddess in you steps in as the protector. (Of course this snippet doesn't cover the whole complex scene as I wrote it.)
Esme Ellis’s Dreaming Worlds Awake is a “potpourri” in several of the word’s meanings. As announced in the subtitle, “Stories, Synchronicities, Dreams and Correspondence, with a scatter of poems,” it is a miscellany of literary extracts exploring: “New consciousness, New energy, New writing.” The book is true to its description.
But there were times while reading that my (patently masculine) mind went, “Hunh, why is this in here?” or “Are these actual quotes from a disembodied entity named Kuthumi or something the author made up?” In which case the book struck me as a potpourri in the sense of “any mixture, especially of unrelated objects, subjects, etc.” Perhaps intentionally, some of the tidbits tossed out left me hungry. I bless the Internet when it came to the sections on Jacob Epstein’s work—my education in sculpture is shamefully limited. It took the images there (e.g., The Rock Drill) to add substance to the author’s enthusiasm over art objects I’d never seen. But I don’t complain: I like a book that makes me look further to learn something new. What a gift to have come to know Jacob and the Angel and its powerful message, as Esme explained it: “Aspects of the human being which are normally, in some parts of the Christian world at any rate, seen as separate, the Divine and the born-in-sin, fallible human, here they’re in a process of attaining a Wholeness which embraces both Light and Dark.” I experienced, perhaps for the first time, a stone statue whirling with dynamic energy.
“Potpourri” has a third meaning that perhaps best, if metaphorically, applies to Esme’s delicately woven web: “a mixture of dried petals of roses or other flowers with spices, kept in a jar for their fragrance.” It was not a book I could toss aside upon completion, facilely assigning it five stars or one. Its impression lingers, evoking “I wonder if…” at unexpected moments. The bloody line between reality and fantasy, between the objective and subjective, between non-fiction and fiction, which I’m supposed to be able to count on when all else fails, has again been blurred and I’m left in that excruciating but oh-so-present “space between” where it is all up to me to decide, arbitrary as it may seem, what is and what isn’t.
Highly recommended, especially to those curious to get inside the writer’s mind and see the visionary genius at work.