These letters flitted across my dream screen in October, 2001, a month after 9/11, while I was investigating and writing about oil at the heart of 9/11 and the U.S. attack on Afghanistan.

In POLITICAL DIARY, the digital publication I founded in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential elections to wake journalists, politicians, and citizens to the truth-telling power of dreams, I penned (PD #5 — The Complicity Connection/From the Editor) about the dream clue:

“I expected to write a story detailing the role the Central Intelligence Agency played in Afghanistan since 1979: how this shadow government operating at the behest of elected presidents {and their corporate masters} implemented U.S. geopolitical interests—training rebels, nurturing Islamic fundamentalists notably Osama bin Laden, and creating the Taliban to do the bidding for UNOCAL so the U.S. oil company could build a $2-billion dollar pipeline through Afghanistan to the huge markets of Asia.”

Discovering  a covert action arm of the CIA was eye-opening for this reporter, schooled in social welfare reporting. Discovering there was more to CIA operations than intelligence gathering and spying was a big step in my awakening to Deep Politics.

Still, after nearly a decade as a political reporter in Washington, D.C. followed by more than a dozen years calling on dream guidance in all phases of my life, I sidestepped the message of the three letter dream — a certain clue to the Who of the five W’s a journalist seeks to answer in any story.

Denial — or perhaps healthy caution — spread through mind and writing. In PD #5 Editor’s Letter, I made a U-turn, back to the secure, safe perch of a month earlier:

“We (a human rights activist and I) had met at a Media Alliance event about Afghanistan a week after 9/11 and I decided to investigate. However, I admit I thought it preposterous the U.S. — the Bush Administration and/or the CIA — had foreknowledge of or involvement in the events of September 11.

“I would look into the oil connections and Bush family and associates financial dealings. I would, I thought to myself, sidestep the Complicity Connection and let {him) investigate that piece of the pie.”

In PD #5, I wrote 8,000 words debunking the mainstream media mantra about the bumbling intelligence agencies, asking, “What did the CIA know and when did it know it.”

The lengthy exploration did contain a few nuggets:

– A half dozen top CIA operatives from the Reagan-Bush and Bush 1 administrations held key posts for Central Asia in the Bush 2 State Department.

Bush’s team in the State Department are “the very same individuals who indoctrinated Osama bin Laden under the Administration of his father {a one-time CIA director},” wrote Yoichi Clark Shimatsu, former general editor of The Japan Times Weekly in a September 20, 2011 article.

– The importance of the UNOCAL pipeline. (I discovered later its partner was Enron, whose financial fortunes. I would conclude, were linked to the pipeline.)

–The decades-long working triangle of the U.S.-Pakistani-Saudi Arabia intelligence agencies, creators of the “enemy” blamed for 9/11.

– A recitation of U.S. planned or executed false flag operations, including Operation Northwoods, eerily like what occurred on 9/11.

I also urged an independent Citizen’s Commission to investigate 9/11. Yet, the question I proposed for its investigation mirrored the media/congressional line: What did the CIA knew and when.

Perhaps, the U-turn was justified caution rather than real-time fear. After all, as a political reporter in the nation’s capital, I covered domestic matters, not foreign policy. And then, until the 2000 presidential election and illuminating dreams predicting the recount results, I wrote about metaphysical matters.

So, perhaps, hesitancy was smart and professional.

By Spring, 2002 intuitive and investigative ducks lined up.

The post-9/11 dreams about oil and the CIA awakened me and permitted journalistic consideration of an alternative story-line to the government/media mantra 9/11 was a terrorist attack by a previously unnamed group of Islamic fundamentalists called al-Qaeda.

– Joyce Lynn, Editor

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Recovery Series by Artist Janis Kirstein

Igneous Formed Dreams
c Janis Kirstein

There was another bad car accident. It occurred between our apartment and my husband’s deceased mother’s house. Then, I was walking out of
the pile of vehicles, and I was walking with Jesus.

by
Joyce Lynn

Elegant in an emerald green blouse, artist Janis Kirstein sat,
incongruously, in a swivel chair, before her bleak wall-sized
expressionist painting. Large swathes of black interspersed with small
patches of gray filled the canvas. Iridescent color — purples and
pinks — tinged the intersections, offering hope. The painting evokes
Robert Motherwell, the renowned New York School/Abstract Expressionist
painter. Kirstein in portraiture summons artist Frida Kahlo.

Seven more Kirstein canvases cover the walls of the main gallery. In
the back room at Zephyr Gallery, Louisville, Kentucky, the first
Friday of July 2010, Paul Klee-like drawings Kirstein created while
lying on her back, the only position she could find not unbearably
painful for her, command one wall. These pieces emerged as automatic
writing/drawing, prophetic pictographs of her journey.

Fearful she might never paint large again, Kirstein created the 5′ by 6′
“Under the Knife” paintings in two months. Those 60 days hung
suspended between a diagnosis of degenerative disk disease, the
debilitating residue of a life altering event 26 years before, and
emergency surgery scheduled for less than two weeks after the show
opened. Kirstein’s doctors told her the surgery was mandatory if she
were to ever stand or walk again.

On December 14, 1984, Kirstein and a fellow Kentucky Arts Council artist
were returning to their homes in Louisville on the Western Kentucky
Parkway when engine trouble caused them to turn back toward Benton.
Less than five minutes later, an escapee from Eddyville Prison in a
Ford Impala sedan plowed into the rear of their VW bug.

A Jaws of Life extracted Kirstein from the mangled car, which had flipped
over 16 times.

When she regained consciousness in the Benton Hospital, crushed car
metal chunks embedded in her snarled hair, Kirstein suffered memory loss.

“I forgot who lots of people were,” she remembers now.
“When someone would call, I had no idea who they were, but I could remember the feelings attached to that particular relationship, just none of the facts.”

Regaining her memory was one of many challenges facing Kirstein, so smart she read Sigmund Freud’s book on dreams when she was 12 years old.

SAVED

Dreams are also the bookends of what Kirstein calls her “walk of life.”

A few months before the accident, a Tarot reading yielded the death
card. Just as in a dream, death in a reading does not necessarily
signify death of the body; a part of the Self may be dying. Soon
afterwards, a dream reinforced the Tarot reading:

A guy with red hair on a white horse rode up to me and picked me up and delivered me to safety.

So, Kirstein believed something drastic was about to happen, but she
would be saved. Heeding the warning, she prepared for disaster. She
bought health insurance (although not enough), physically built up her
body, and said a prayer daily to the Saint Patrick Breastplate she would
survive the unknown future.

Since childhood, Kirstein has experienced premonitions. “I see things,”
she says as naturally as the sun rising every day. The seeing is different than the physical act of viewing with the eye and its retina, cornea, and lens. Rather, it is the metaphysical activity of perceiving. “To some, it seems crazy, but it is rather regular for me.”

The two plus decades after the accident were an emotional roller
coaster, sometimes studded with anger, for Kirstein. “Something was taken away,” she told me at lunch between the exhibition opening and the surgery.

Her surgery was pronounced successful within days and within a week,
she was at home, walking around her tree-shaded neighborhood.

Then, she remembered another dream in which she emerges from another car wreck, this time walking with Jesus. She would capture this spiritual aspect of her recovery in Igneous Formed Dreams, an expression of her powerful post-surgery dream and physical and emotional healing.

At first, Kirstein feared the dream foretold another car accident.
Then, she wondered if the Hollywood-like scene might reflect the
destruction in the world from war and greed. On a personal plane, was
she walking away from the destruction and disillusionment of her life
in the aftermath of the 1984 Kentucky Highway devastation, beginning
yet another recovery process?

Now, she now lives from a renewed place of forgiveness and love as she
confronts the challenges in her resurrected landscape.

During the weeks after her surgery and the walking with Jesus dream,
Kirstein began painting another series. The paintings in the series
titled Recovery are softer, the grays more glowing with larger
splashes of color. They hold remnants of the past but also offer
prayers of gratitude for the present and patches of prospects for the
future.

For Kirstein, her RECOVERY series reflects “the feeling of regaining
what I lost, a renaissance/rebirth from a near death experience.”

(Recently, the “management” style of several leaders, notably women, reminded me of the first dream I ever remembered, its message,  my (intended) ground of being, and a wise mode of being for all healthy, positive relationships.)

My black and white etching of five women

entwined in work and play appears.

The women pulsate with life.

In placid stillness

moving effortlessly

combing hair

serenading

drawing

writing

reading

Whispering/singing/whistling

Sunbursts, bold stripes, wavy lines

unfold horizontally

Daisies mark the scene.

The women, different nationalities,

yet interrelated,

interconnected.

The women powerful simply because

they do not seek power.

They seek to empower themselves.

They seek to empower each other.

– from Plum Dreams Diary by Joyce Lynn