A few years later, Otto told me that the same dream eventually comes to every religious at the shrine. There is a young girl walking alongside one of the Great Lakes. She walks with three other girls. In some dreams the young girl has dark hair and her companions light, in others the young girl has light hair and her companions dark - it is never the same. The young girl and her coterie move with a girlish ease. The dreamer hears giggles above their murmuring.
Under the young girl’s right arm is a goldwork net trailing in the sand. Incredibly delicate writing covers the lines. On the warplines there are poems, written by the succession of seers[1]. On the weftlines are written the true names of the Lakes - understood as such, but never remembered. Soon, the dreamer sees the young girl approach the shore and stop. She casts the goldwork net over the water and, as if pulled by angels, the net opens to cover the entire Lake.
Ritual procession. Here, the young girl and her coterie are walking out upon the goldwork net, they walk stately and quiet, stopping only in the middle of the Lake with arms joined. The play of light upon the goldwork net above the waves is disorienting to the dreamer. To the girls it is solid as greystone ground.
Without cue, (yet not without a few sad glances) the girls seperate to walk true north, to walk true east, to walk true south, to walk true west.The weftway girls leave, murmuring the poems of the seers. The warpway girls leave, murmuring the true names of the Lakes.
The dreamer is left alone at the center. They do not lose their sense of time, though the dream is long. The dreamer often believes they are in the afterlife. The dreamer has only the sky, the net, the sound of the waves - has only the sun, to anchor their soul upon.
Then suddenly, after many days, the dreamer feels that they can move, and as they take their first step they come awake.
[1] More often than not, this is how the religious discovers that his or her dream was not unique. Unlike the names of the lakes mentioned below, the poems of the seers are accessible (although not outright exhibited) to all. It is not rare for a religious to find, amid idle browsing in the temple library, the poems from the goldwork net and from there, to corroborate their dream with a peer.