My entire life I've been dreaming of a tower.

Never the same tower. Just someplace where the stairs led up and down into places wonderful and strange.

When the folks and I moved from Phoenix to the small town where I came of legal age, I thought I had found it. Parts of it anyway. The high school had a gymnasium. On one corner was a stage. Below that was the boys and girls locker rooms and the weight room.

Not long after we moved there, the school built a new auditorium, complete with new band rooms and a small TV studio. In high school I took television production classes and I helped out on the stage crew when they needed a reliable hand. I wasn't a "drama geek" but I was reliable and not sure of myself enough to try sex with the actresses. Hey you may laugh, but it was a small town. That was a major qualification, especially when the other stage crew got canned.

Anyway, the building was full of stairs and ladders that led to darkened catwalks far above the audience and the stage. Just the place to explore. Especially for a kid who believed in theatrics.

But none of this was my tower.

I've sketched my tower a few times. Sometimes it's a lonely spire, very phallus like, emerging from a wilderness. For a while it was very much a ziggurat combined with hanging gardens. Sometimes it's low and squat, like a kiva.

Here's what my dreams say about it. The space above is differant than the space below, and there are stairs going in both directions.

Probably the clearest image of it I had was when I tried to combine everything I had dreamt about.

So in the distance, it was a glass pyramid with a metallic capstone.

Inside the glass was my ziggurat garden, filled with life and plants.

But at the very center was a cool dark core, smooth as polished steel and with no passage to the inside of the pyramid.

The only way to the core was through an underground labyrinth that began well outside the pyramid. At the end of the the labyrinth, a very small pool, well shaped with a small light shining dimly. Off course it is well shaped, stones along the side and everything, just like a water well. Down in the well, an underwater tunnel led into a grotto. The dim light comes from the grotto side. Sometimes in my off moments I would call it the Well of Souls.

If the motif sounds familiar, it should. Especially when I add the bit that you need to shed your clothing and jewelry before you enter the labyrinth. Only you and your skin and your silence are allowed. No lights. No voices. A journey made in darkness without a guide, and with the only sound your own movements.

The underwater tunnel is long enough to be a strain on the lungs.

Yep, it's ritualized purification and birth.

Which has some interesting implications considering the phallus/tower that runs through the core of the pyramid.

No sexual metaphors here. Nope. Not at all. Unless one knows that in "primitive" cultures the vagina is often depicted as a "V." And then well, maybe.

So the stairs of the tower wind upwards through the double walls, with storage and ritual areas set above the grotto. To the very top room, which is totally open and the only one with windows. And above that is the capstone.

Which really isn't a capstone, but four metallic panels that fold down along the sides of the pyramid. Leaving a wide flat area totally exposed to sun and sky and moon and stars and storm and wind. A high place that can only be reached through a labyrinth, a underwater tunnel, and a long, winding stair between two walls.

I'm sure by now you've made all sorts of assumptions as to what this really represents and why it fills my dreams.

But you'd be wrong. It's not sex, although sex could be involved. It's not birth and death, although those are included.

Have you guessed yet?

It's a worldtree.

I dream of a worldtree. Sometimes I dream of building it. Sometimes I dream of protecting it.

But mostly I dream of the silent darkness and the light emerging from the hidden heart.

And sometimes I dream of greeting Brother Sun from the top as he rises into a new day.