Category: THE FOREST DARK LOGBOOK

Sleepless Nights. Nightmare after nightmare. And is it still the nightmare, or is it real? Was that noise still part of the dream or not?  They’re here. These unholy spirits which whisper into our thoughts. We can really feel them. They’re already in the bedroom.  They want us to see the world from their perspective.  Some memories suddenly appear in a different light. Paranoia sets in, bad feelings, fear, which wasn’t there before. Is somebody creating this? Or is it only me? Perhaps it’s all in the imagination.

In some winter nights chaos seem closer to us. That’s why we have so many stories and old traditions about the rough nights. The rough nights are special winter nights, and the wild hunt is roaming through the woods. Usually the wild hunt is envisioned as a bunch of demons and lost souls. Some people believe Nordic God Wotan is their leader.

Only a few of us would believe that the wild hunt really exists. And regarding anxieties and weird feelings in certain winter nights we’re quick to blame the usual suspect – the weather.

However there is some truth here. If the Otherworld comes close to us, we can feel its different energies and entities. And in certain times it means entering a chaos zone, which is like being exposed to a very strong radiation.

The wild hunt might be related to the agents of chaos. This is what these dark energies which could be felt in the rough nights are about. The Otherworld is a storehouse of images – the demons of the wild hunt are symbolic expressions of this archetypical imaginary, which doesn’t mean they don’t exist. There is also an element of the archetype of apocalypse here, which could be felt in the rough nights. There are the most elementals forces at work here, and have a stronger influence on us as on other days. Like Sauron from Lord Of The Rings, which is lurking in darkness, the powerful energies of the wild hunt doesn’t like to reveal themselves but create something like a poisoning air; in which more crimes and other painful things do happen. It’s a dangerous time, that’s what the legends of the wild hunt and the rough nights want to tell us.

As always darkness and light are close together, and the light will come back. But before that happens we have to walk through the darkest corners of the forest dark once every year.

A gate is usually a building but we could also imagine many other forms of gates. Gates to the Otherworld might exist on another plane. The idea of a wormhole as portrayed in science fiction seems also to be a gate, which allows you to reach a distant planet or galaxy without loosing time and which presents more a concept rather than a literal gate. Gates exist between different countries or between different dimensions. Sometimes a gate is made for protection. In many stories a gate only opens when the hero passes the test.
We are walking through many gates in our lives. Perhaps a gate can also be a certain moment in time. Winter Solstice in some sense is a form of a gate itself. Every year again we enter this gate, and it’s the darkest time of the year. We don’t see much, and things are lurking in the dark…

The time between the winter solstice and New Year’s Eve is a time of transition. A lot of people believe that the veil between our world and the Otherworld becomes thin for some time. It’s often a time when old fears come up and we become intimidated.

In some stories there are dragons and other dangers waiting in the dark before the hero reaches the gate. In a metaphorical sense this applies also to many other circumstances. We need to pass through the gate if we want to see the light again. We hope for a safe journey, but if we see winter solstice symbolically as a gate, which opens up to a new beginning, this gate is a dark gate. It challenges us and it does test us in many ways before we see the light again. The gate of darkness might lead you also into your own darker side if you are not aware. If the veil between our world and the other world becomes thin not only well-meaning entities but also darker forces can open this gate from the other side and will have a stronger influence upon us. Many old rituals teach us that if we want to keep the darker forces away we need to become for some time a demon ourselves and even to dance with the demons. The biggest danger is always to neglect their existence. Maybe the dark gates, which exist in various forms, are supposed to check our weaknesses before we’re allowed to see the light again.

“If you go down to the woods today, You’re sure of a big surprise. If you go down to the woods today, You’d better go in disguise’, if you go down…” No, this is not a song about cute teddy bears. It’s about those beings, which are there at certain times. The woods have been terra incognita for thousands of years, and many of the mythical inhabitants seem to be alive at least in the collective consciousness; weird animals, big-foot and, of course, aliens. However sometimes the sightings sound more like a strange and weird encounter rather than a scary one, which makes you think you wouldn’t wonder if somebody would even report teddybears in the middle of the woods.

One of the modern haunted forests of our days seems to be Rendlesam Forest in the UK. It became famous for its UFO-Sighting on 26. December 1980 which involved a security patrol of the nearby NATO-Base Woodsbridge. The servicemen reported a strange glowing object with coloured lights. “The animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy” according to a memo by the deputy base commander Lt Col Charles I. Hall, who investigated the case. One of the servicemen, Sgt. Jim Penniston, while undergoing regression hypnosis in 1994, subsequently claimed that the “craft” he encountered had come from our future, and was occupied by time travellers, not extraterrestrials (source: Wikipedia). Later on, Hall and the servicemen returned to the site and found burn marks, broken trees and three impressions or depressions in a triangular pattern. During the investigation a flashing light was reported (which could stem by a light-house some miles away) and starlights. The brightest of them “seemed to beam down a stream of light from time to time”.

The Rendlesham Forest events became one of the key-events in contemporary UFO-mythology and triggered conspiracy theories as reactions similar to religious wonders (believers return to the place regularly like pilgrims to a sanctuary).

The story of the servicemen sounds a bit too stereotypical, a bit too much cliche. However considering the number of people involved as witnesses it’s very unlikely that it was a hoax by some good-old-boys-company. Something must have happened there. There was something in the woods, which didn’t make sense (or somebody was indeed there). Even if the investigation may have found explanations for some of the events there is an element here which isn’t easily understood – not so much the physical traces but the deep impression the event posed upon the servicemen.

Maybe, if we go down into the woods alone we experience sometimes hallucinations like in sensory deprivation experiments but here it was a group which reported the event. The point  about the Ufo and the time-travellers is that the reports sound more like an interpretation of the event rather then a description of what really happened. It’a s bit what you would already expect what will happen if somebody tells you about a strange light in the sky. It’s predictable. The reports bear also strong similarities with the encounters with fairies and demons in medieval times. The strong similarity of Ufo-sightings with fairy encounters was described by Jacques Vallees who compared it with the “secret commonwealth”.

Even there are no real primal forests left the woods are still the place which can keep a secret. It looks like we share this planet with some sort of intelligent beings we don’t know a lot about. In our technical world we only accept what can be proved in a scientific way, but in certain places in the woods there must be a backdoor and there, from time to time, they slip back into our minds. We can’t see what we don’t understand (or we only want to see what makes some sense too us) but as the log lady in Twin Peaks said “the owls are not what they seem”. If we could see what they really are it might be too frightening to us, we may loose our wits as we know from certain fairy encounters.  It reminds us of Greek philosopher Proclus who said:

“In all initiations and Mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and sometimes indeed an unfigured Light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this Light is figured according to human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape. Some of the figures are not gods and excite alarm”.

So, be sure of a really big surprise if you go down into the woods at certain times…

The forest has always been seen as a place of encounter, encounter with nature, with the gods, with yourself. Coming back to the idea of archetypes, the forest is a place to encounter something which is very old and which also have been known for a very long time.

Our ancestors believed that the trees where the seats of the gods, thus we find often remainders of pagan worship in the woods.

The elder gods might have been gone for long as many of the sacred places but from time to time you can find places and things in the forest, which indeed have some sort of “archetypical quality”. To me it’s happen a lot when I see a very old tree. There aren’t many left, but some of them still exist, which are more than 1000 years old.

Some trees are the oldest living creatures on earth. In Italy there are olive trees, which are older than 3000 years. Imagine what stories they would tell, if they could talk (some believe it’s possible to talk to trees, so don’t be surprised if they answer).

Encountering these giants they leave a deep impression. They are awesome. And a bit scary in certain moments.

It’s like when you look sometimes in the faces of old people and think I have seen this face somewhere before. There is something very impressive about them, they are both very old but they still seem very powerful.

Let imagination play,  and you will get some ideas what they might represent. They resembling more than just a tree, sometimes it feels like there is a very old energy stored up here.

Like the elder gods they seem to have a complex character, these oak trees. They represent strength, they might be protective, for example if they offer shelter inside a cave in their trunk, but they can also frightening, intimidating.

It’s indeed like meeting someone who has been here long before man arrived on Earth. Maybe they will be still there when man has left the Earth, and the forest is alone again with whatever lives deep inside.