Luc Arnault: "These visions fed your dreams"

My friend Luc wrote today:

It wasn't enough, you wanted more. So you rolled around in bed and tried to sleep in. The dim light coming through the curtains told you it was maybe only 7 or 8. Not enough you thought. Although you were tired you could not go back to sleep. Your mind started wandering back to last night. You remembered the tedious and dull expression on the faces of passengers sitting on a bus. The excited laughters of boys celebrating the coming of the weekend. The insane loudness of countless birds perching on the few lonely trees as night was falling on the busy streets. Your own reflection superimposing itself over placid restaurant customers eating garlic bread behind glass windows. You were hungry. Terribly hungry. In fact, you hadn't had any food all day and starvation was starting to crush your belly into hundreds of painful spasms. You considered your dining options as you kept on roaming aimlessly through the city. The vacant look of mobile phone holders talking away their weeklong load of worries and stress. Wide open mouths behind hamburgers. Nightlife street performers and hard-out starring beggers. You imagined yourself swimming across the waves of cars and pedestrians, of pigeons and neon lights. The pure blue eyes of a pale-faced girl grabbed your attention. Before too long you fell back into a deep sleep. These visions fed your dreams.

Beatrice

Matt the day he found out he has cardiac arrhythmia

Daniell Street: Breakfast with my friend Miranda. I was half-dead after a night without sleep and she nurtured me back to life with black coffee and fresh bread. Outside it was raining.

Stabat Mater: Kristara is sometimes sad

Gabrielle with tired eyes

Ghost story about Hildegard von Bingen's ghost daughter.

I told my friend Annalena (who was wearing the last six roses of my garden in her long ginger hair) that today we will try to recreate the legend of Hildegard von Bingen's ghost daughter.

Few people know that Saint Hildegard von Bingen, the legendary 11th century writer, philosopher, visionary mystic, Benedictine abbess, and musician with an infinite capacity for beauty (remember her graceful “Voice of the Living Light”) secretly had a daughter who died soon after birth, in mysterious circumstances, and that it was this experience which triggered her first documented ecstatic vision.
How the young woman managed to go out of the enclosed church, when she was under constant supervision from an older nun named Jutta (the daughter of Count Stephan II of Sponheim), is still a matter of debate. It was also not known who the father was. It was speculated that he could have been Volmar († 1173), the Saint Dissibod monk who was Hildegard’s mentor and confessor, as, in his secret diary discovered recently in a niche in the wall of his cell in St. Ruppertsberg monastery, he wrote, in Latin, few days after the birth of the child, this puzzling phrase: “Re atroci facta, a me laesus sum”, the literal sense of which being “a terrible thing having taken place, I cut mysef” or, as some audacious interpreters translated, “after a terrible thing took place, I castrated myself”. 
As Hildegard was so skilful in the arts of botany, medicine, cosmology, and magical liturgy, she used her talent as an enchantress to conjure up the spirit of her dead daughter, who thereafter accompanied her mother as a living ghost, invisible to all the others.
It was the daughter who would go out in the woods to look for healing herbs and aromatic plants, and in the caves of the mountains, to look for minerals and precious stones, which helped the mother write what might be the first medieval pharmaceutical treatise, “Causae et Curae”.
The stream of light that appeared in Saint Hildegard’s room when she died, and later that night in the sky above the monastery (as observed and scrupulously noted by the other nuns), was in fact the ghost daughter showing her mother the way to the world of the dead. 

A ghost story about a Moldavian princess, who is prisoner in Constantinople, and about her father's despair

I told my friend Linda: Imagine you are that graceful medieval Moldavian princess, Domniţa Ruxandra, who was kept prisoner in Constantinople by the Ottoman Sultan, to the great distress of her father, the powerful prince Vasile "the Wolf" (Vasile Lupu).

Domniţa Ruxandra was famous all over Europe for her beauty, intelligence and many foreign princes wanted to marry her. Her father, filled with a jealous love, had always refused to give her away, until she had been captured and brought to Constantinople. The princess spent her captive years thinking about the love of her father, and the love of the king of Poland's son, who would wait for her no matter what.

All of a sudden I heard a wolf howling. At first I thought I just imagined it. But afterwards I heard it closer, and I asked Linda if she heard it, too. She answered: Yes, but this is strange, there are no wolves in New Zealand. We came to the conclusion that it was probably the ghost of the murdered princess's father, who was known even during his life time as being able to transform into a wolf.

Poitiers from my window

My friend told me this story:

One night, when her grandmother was a young girl living in a fishing village near La Rochelle, she saw her father, whom she knew had gone at sea with his boat, standing by her bed, looking at her, white light iradiating from his skin. She thought she was dreaming so she closed her eyes and forced herself back to sleep. But in the morning she saw the carpet soaked where she had seen him, and later in the day, she found out that her father had drowned at sea, that very same night.
Her grandmother also told her about her young sister. One evening the girl decided to go dancing in the nearby village. While crossing a wooden bridge, she stopped to look at the flowing water. All of a sudden, from the stream rose the giant transparent image of a man the girl was in love with, who gave her a knife, and dissapeared. Though the girl knew that the man was at sea at that time with other fishermen, she took the knife and went to the dance. Some days later, the man returned from the sea, and, not long after, married the girl. Some months later he discovered the knife in a hidden place in the house, became really angry, and killed her. He never knew why he did this - but my friend's grandmother thought that it was her young sister's fault, because she trusted the river ghost, and took the knife from it.

Tasman Street: Alisha and Sam two day before leaving the country