[X] Start a creative endeavor, a passion project related to what you majored in at college
This feels different from "Pick up a hobby" to me because the thrill of learning and mastering a new thing seems like a pretty defined motivator for Ash. This is different - this is picking an old mastery back up again, as a way to walk back the whole "sold out as soon as you could in order to go into corporate" and reconnect with what Ash used to feel passionate about.
Ash: Asserts the integrity of their own existence.
The Sky: Lol. Lmao.
[X] Reach out to people from your dreams
[X] Reach out to lost friends from the past
Some of Ash's biggest regrets are about how alone they are. Regardless of what happens next during the Ascent, I think it's healthiest for them to try fixing that.
You stare for a moment at the sky, then back at your living room. Now that you're really looking for it, and the light is brighter, the same effect is present: it's not just a product of the sun. You pinch yourself, then when that does nothing you slap yourself as hard as you can make yourself do so.
Maybe it's because facing the peril kicked you out of the dream rather than you leaving it normally? You force yourself to sit down and assume a meditative position, then when your mind is some sort of first approximation of ordered you perform the exercise of "tugging" on your connection to your physical body, the same way you always end your dreamwalks so you can wake up. You've had enough practice at this that you don't need the meditative position or the incantations or the visualizations, you can just do it reflexively, but just for the sake of verification you go through all the steps like a raw beginner. Twice. Then, when you're certain you're awake and not still in the dream, and that your soul is as seated in its body as it's ever going to be, you let your eyes drift open placidly and, with contemplative serenity suffusing every corner of your being, gaze out the window in calm acceptance of whatever the universe has to show you.
The colors are still there. Mother of fuck-
Okay. Okay. Spiritual tranquility. You aren't still in the dream, you aren't incompletely returned to the physical world... you probably aren't hallucinating, though you did wake up under kind of a lot of stress and haven't had enough sleep and come to think of it you haven't actually eaten food yet, so you're probably not at your best physically and pulling yourself together a bit would be wise. What are other hypotheses?
You frown as a thought occurs to you. There was that line in the book about impurity, and your suspicion about what it is that perils do. Is this part of what that writer meant by purity? Come to think of it, your old buddy Zev ben Avram talked about "seeing with the eyes that look beyond the world" -- you thought it was a metaphor, but maybe it was more literal than that? This is the problem with occultists, everything that seems straightforward is a metaphor and everything important has to be wrapped in several layers of symbolic ellipsid so that only sufficiently wise people get it.
Right. You're not going to worry about it now. If it goes away after you take better care of yourself, great. If it doesn't, then you'll tentatively chalk it up as part and parcel with the... you're going to need a name for it other than "not-heartburn." The spiritual furnace? Overdramatic, but good enough for now.
You climb to your feet and head to the kitchen. Breakfast before other things.
After breakfast, you return your thoughts to the question of what, exactly, you intend to do with yourself. Yes, you expect that your progress on the Ascent will change you and/or your priorities, but you've got to do something with your days if you're going to keep existing within the world at all. And you're not above taking advice from a magically-manifested fragment of yourself: you're really fucking lonely, and as much as Hana has been a joy and a comfort in the less than a week you've had her, the presence of an animal, no matter how small and fuzzy and good, is not actually a replacement for the society of your fellow humans.
From now on, you resolve, you're going to more assertively try to get contact information for anyone you meet in the dreaming-realm. You got it for Idra and Jagoda, but not for Aiglan or Frank (though, you suppose, the locket-half could probably be used as a focus for a communication spell when you're in the dream itself). At twenty-eight, it's a lot harder than it was at five to bald-facedly say "hey do you want to be friends" -- but you can try to do more with the contact information you have, try to forge more of a connection than just the casual contact of information-sharing and generic positivity you have going on.
You sit down and you hammer out some messages to Idra and Jagoda. They are roughly similar -- more discussion of your Ascent, of course, in general terms, going into more detail about the Ascent itself to Idra and more detail into the vistas and places and beings you encountered to Jagoda, but also including more about your life, as gracefully as you can. You describe yourself as "between jobs and living off savings," which seems better than trying to go into that whole painful saga, and talk about moving to Cleveland for the city conveniences and attractions you were accustomed to while being more affordable than the coastal metropolises, which is true albeit incomplete. You mention a little bit how you got started in wise-dreaming, but segue from that into the adoption of Hana. You include a picture of her sprawled out on her side on the carpet, quietly vibing in the midst of a scattered number of her toys. That's how to make friends as an adult, right? You edit a bit and then hit Send before you can talk yourself out of it.
...great, now it's time for confronting the actual painful saga. You decide to procrastinate on that: you can't actually fill your days with writing emails, and sending them and then staring at your phone for your notifications to go off is just going to drive you crazier than you already possibly are, so you're going to figure out a fitness program and get started on that first, with what remains of the morning into the afternoon, and write the letters in the evening. It's not cowardice, you tell yourself, it's really the responsible thing to do when you think about it.
So you dump a few hours into looking up gyms near you (there's a Planet Fitness in walking distance, which seems fine -- sadly your apartment building doesn't have one), reading reviews to see if any non-cis people had reported harassment (didn't seem like it, but you still intend to change and shower at home anyway, at first at least), and looking up beginner guides to put together some sort of workout routine plan. A lot depends on what is actually available at the gym, so you decide to get changed and head over there, sign up, look around, and get started: you'll take it easy, since you're still coming off only a few hours' sleep, but hey, no time like the present for avoiding things you don't want to do.
Finally, you're home, and you can't delay any more. You've been to the gym, you've signed up, you've worked out, you've showered, you've logged your workout in a little tracking spreadsheet, you've set up pivot tables for the little tracking spreadsheet because you might not be in the business of giving presentations anymore but good dataviz is not something you just set aside, you've eaten dinner... there's nothing else you can persuade yourself you need to do. It's time.
One at a time. You don't need to reach out to everyone at once. Take it slow. You can handle that, right?
You write a letter to Zach and Nikki. It is a clumsy, sprawling thing, full of rambling self-recrimination and too much detail about your emotional landscape and way-too-elaborately-constructed references to the good times you had in college, see, we're totally great friends, see? and stories about the things you've been up to that swing wildly between projecting an image of having your shit together and making it clear how desperately lonely you are. You stare at it, then delete it, then think better of deleting it and save it in a notes file so you can strip-mine it for spare parts. Slowly, carefully, you put together a second draft: something much shorter, where you ruthlessly quash your every attempt to hide what the letter is actually about: I'm sorry I treated you like afterthoughts. It was wrong of me. I've changed how I'm approaching life. You're important to me, and I'd like to talk more, if that's OK. Not in those words, but near enough.
It's still not as good as it could be. You send it anyway. Perfect is the enemy of done.
Then you turn off notifications on your phone, binge-watch a web series until your physical exertion and lack of sleep catch up with you, and cast yourself into the dreaming-realm once more.
Night after night, you climb higher; night after night, you approach the greater powers of the dream. You may or may not be ready for them, but they draw closer, regardless...
Cards added to the Ascent Deck: The Queen and King of Swords, the Queen and King of Wands, the Queen and King of Pentacles, the Queen and King of Cups, XVI The Tower
[] No change to Aspiration
[] Write-in a new Aspiration, which must begin with "I aspire to" and include the Aspiration's suit in parentheses
The top two were an obvious place to stop but, like, it doesn't take that long to write emails, so what else can Ash do with their Day? Luckily, the third-place vote had an answer.
You include a picture of her sprawled out on her side on the carpet, quietly vibing in the midst of a scattered number of her toys. That's how to make friends as an adult, right?
I can confirm that cat pictures do help with making friends.
[X] I aspire to create a better guide to the higher levels of Ascension. (Wands.)
I don't expect this to gain traction, but. The instruction manuals for this suck. No one said the sky would go crazy. Or that your mirror self would try to kill/assimilate you. Or that you'd start burning from the inside. No wonder so many people get lost during the Ascent. To Ash's professional mind, this is just terribly negligent.
Also, the idea here is an off-shoot of Ash's current Aspiration: From understanding the Dreaming Realm in abstract to charting and understanding the important bits that almost killed them, and, frustratingly, there is basically bubkis in terms of useful and helpful literature.
Hm hm, okay, I know I was talking about changing Aspirations but the events of the day have thrown a bit of a wrench in the works...insofar as Ash is clearly focusing on interpersonal connections in their waking life, but also, that's very much still a work in progress. So it'd be inconsistent to switch to something other than Cups, but premature to switch to Cups, I feel like?
...hm. @picklepikkl remind me what the cooldown is on Aspiration-switching? Doesn't appear to be clearly specified in the Informational threadmark.
If you switch on Day N, then on day N+1 the vote to change Aspiration will not be available, because I want to encourage some consistency. However, you can still change if you hit a Seven and decide to accept the prophecy (though that will also trigger a cooldown if one isn't currently active). I'll add the following language to the Mechanics threadmark to clarify: If you change your Aspiration, whether by voluntary end-of-Day vote or by card mechanics, then the next Day will not have an end-of-Day vote to change Aspiration. Even if Aspiration changing is "on cooldown," card mechanics that change Aspirations continue to function as normal.
(Though I will say again that any prospective Cups Aspiration must be something that requires the dreaming-realm -- "I want to make friends and stop being a no-life loser" is a very reasonable goal to have, one which the thread has clearly communicated in the most recent vote, but it is a fundamentally Earthly desire, not something of the supernal realm. I assume, Wiadi, that this is what you mean by "premature to switch to Cups," but I figured I would clarify for the sake of the rest of the thread.)
I'm fine keeping on as-is. The real world changes are certainly for the better, but we bank the fires to strive onwards to our goal, not to make them the goal themselves.
(Though I will say again that any prospective Cups Aspiration must be something that requires the dreaming-realm -- "I want to make friends and stop being a no-life loser" is a very reasonable goal to have, one which the thread has clearly communicated in the most recent vote, but it is a fundamentally Earthly desire, not something of the supernal realm. I assume, Wiadi, that this is what you mean by "premature to switch to Cups," but I figured I would clarify for the sake of the rest of the thread.)
More or less. I figure once we do start connecting with people in the waking world, especially our fellow occultists, there may emerge some ways in which the dreaming realm could be relevant to those connections, but right now we'd just be guessing blind.
That said, if the cooldown's only one night (and doesn't interfere with card effects), I don't hate the idea of a more "intermediate" step which we then might further shift from as things develop. To which end, something like Derpmind's suggestion actually seems pretty appealing - still a Wands-based Aspiration, but one that focuses more on concern for other people (at least in the abstract) rather than seeking a sort of pure knowledge that, again, doesn't seem to entirely fit Ash's character IMO. A couple more nights down the line, we can see how things are going with Ash's personal connections and if any/all of them yet justify a further change to a fully Connection-focused Aspiration.
[X] I aspire to create a better guide to the higher levels of Ascension. (Wands.)
@Wiadi If you can suggest an aspiration change more in line with what you're angling for, I'll approval vote for it. You make really good points about the split between Ash's aspirations and capital-A Aspiration.
That's the thing. There are zero standards. It's nothing but a bunch of handwaving in the general direction of "Here there be dragons." And Ash very much almost got eaten.
@Wiadi If you can suggest an aspiration change more in line with what you're angling for, I'll approval vote for it. You make really good points about the split between Ash's aspirations and capital-A Aspiration.
I'll post one if I can think of it, but this honestly hits most of the notes I'd have been looking for. It's a good bridge between the current Aspiration and a potential future Connection-focused one, and if we end up just staying on it instead, that's also a fine thing to do - after all, how many of the past guides to the Ascent were written by people who were explicitly focused on that, rather than just people who attempted it for other reasons and then recorded their experiences?
It seems like Ash still wants to figure out WTF is up with the whole Dreaming thing, and while creating a better guide to Ascension is a worthy goal, it feels like something that would be possible without being a capital-A Aspiration... unless the goal is to create a definitive guide, which... sounds a bit too all-encompassing.
