For a long time, I felt that my art was not going in the right direction, that it felt "dry" and uninspired. I felt like I had lost something after childhood and I wanted to get it back. It was April this year where I tried to do something about that. I read up on creativity and psychology books and did their exercises. At first it was harmless, until I was walking home exhausted one night and I had a flood of hallucinations. It felt like a dam holding back water was destroyed. Since then, I feel like my art has more "juice" and more "meat" and I could submerge in my imagination whenever I wanted. It was great, but I was not prepared for the other things that came with it. I suddenly had trouble with "self-management". I was doing things that were reckless, immature and/or impulsive. And what's funny is that I knew they were reckless, immature and/or impulsive but I did them anyways. I felt like different versions of me were fighting for dominance of my body. I felt my emotions twice as intensely. I used to have more control over them, but they overpowered me. It's like everything that I'd learned about managing my emotions, relating with people, thinking rationally, and making sound choices was deleted from my brain. I felt like a teenager again.
My friend told me that "it sounds like Dionysus." Out of desperation, I read on paganism and Hellenic gods and did a few rituals. I discovered that Apollo and Dionysus have some kind of pull over me, and I have been doing small rituals for them to help retain my sanity.
I was hurting myself and the people around me in non-physical and sometimes verging on physical ways, and my life felt like it was going on a bit of tailspin. I have to suddenly deal with internal and external challenges all at the same time. I feel like the gods have ganged up on me or something.
I'm much more stable now since it started, my art is still "juicy", I can still call up a deluge of imagination at will, I still feel emotions twice as strong, but I have much more control than before. I probably won't be needing a shrink but I still have a menagerie of internal and external challenges to deal with.
Some of my adventures since the breaking of dam include: struggling to combat suicide, prophetic lyrics, unbidden and dangerous hallucinations, nervous breakdowns where I almost get roadkilled, SEVERE migraines that have the WORST timing (but I've learned I could give a decent presentation about reproductive health while having the whole left side of my vision blanked out), a vision or hallucination of Apollo that appeared while I was asking about a job for commodity trading and instead getting a lecture about following your passion (It felt like the usually distant Apollo had to make a personal appearance "DON'T TAKE YOUR EYES OFF THE TARGET", like how my piano teacher would grab my fingers when I was playing weird and make me play the right notes), going into a ritual trance and taking off my shirt in public (hurt the day after), and the most recent (three days ago): depression-induced eye poke!
I'm writing this now as I'm hoping maybe the community can give me more insight on Apollo and Dionysus. I've been having many dreams about the both of them. I've had a dream about astronauts and my mother having a traumatic eye operation. I've had a dream where I've been training this ability to make people go crazy, and I've had to fight a gunman with the power to heal. In a recent dream, I was able to see Apollo: a golden man whose face I can't see because it's too bright, and he's always carrying a bow around, which makes him difficult to hug but doesn't mean you can't try. This dream says that he has been my trainer since I was young, honing my skills, and I'd been memory wiped at some point so that I'd forget them. These are cool dreams but with the villains I've had to face in them, I'm glad they're just dreams. I've also prayed to Apollo before sleeping to heal my eye, and I had a dream in a dream where I woke up with my eye fixed, and then I realized it was a dream and from that I woke up with my eye fixed and I hugged my mother but I realized it was a dream and I woke up and my eye was still the same. I was Inceptioned. My eye is much better now though.
So! My experiences with the gods have been very gut-wrenching, insightful and emotional. I've had my encounters with other divinities as well: The Muses, Hermes, Ares, Aphrodite, Athena, Benzaiten, Hera, though Apollo and Dionysus remain at the focal point of my experiences. I'm hoping the community can tell me more about these gods, and especially Dionysus and Apollo, maybe your experiences with them as well?
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