Sanctuary of Poetry

By Gianna Verien

The History of Flash333's Sanctuary of Poetry is really the story of the Peace Movement in the Dream. I have recorded Flash's oral history of this unique time and place and adventure. For the Peace Movement was not an activity of protests against war... it was a personal journey into the dream without arts, without weapons, and even without an avatar.... to find the joy of exploring the unknown... and reaching the undiscovered... and in normal avatars, it still continues to this day.

This is Flash333's oral history of this time, and how this sanctuary was given his name, recorded as well as possible by Gianna Verien.

I came into the dream in the time of the Great Awakening when the Freespirits were numerous. This Basin (of Stars) and Trinity were, and still are, the largest planes. A fault line lies between them from one side of the dream to the other, separating the Rifts. So, before the Rifts wiped out many on these planes, there were Dreamers who came from the Boundary mists into the dream, long, long ago.

And one dream, when I was young, Cronides, a dreamseer, was sent out by the Freespirits to search for lost entryways into the dream. The great Dreamseer teachers, Isun and Soulthief sent him out with a group of young explorers. Legend led us to believe the spots to be near Harrow Glades... but nothing was left out in our search.

I asked to go, and that was my first Sphere Task--to help find the way to the Boundary Mists. 'The Boundary Mist Quest' it was called. The house of the old Gathering of the Entranced was a house of equals. It was a house of study to decide answers, not to prove an answer. It was a holy place.

The Basin was filled with many travelers before the walls of the Dream collapsed. They made many pilgrimages to the house. This sanctuary and its secrets... well, during the Boundary Mist Quest, I found it. This back entrance was not here (through the water tunnels) in 1998 or in 1999, but I found an entrance in the mists. You could walk through a wall,a hidden portal that did not show up as a portal. You could not block it. It was magical from days of old... a passageway into the sanctuary for those who understood how to use it from the mists... and an escape from the sanctuary if the front portal was blockaded. If a normal dreamer used it to go out, he was sent to the entrance.

So the Boundary Mists Quest came to a close. The Sanctuary was given the name Flash333 before the back portal arrived. This portal is fairly new.

Walking through walls has a double meaning in my poem, but it was an actual event, and now that we merge through walls more and more, dreamers experience the thrill of adventure. But the meaning is, that there is more to the dream than climbing. There is friendship, and how hard it is to make friendships... and enemies.

It is called the Sanctuary of Poetry. I started with 5 poems for Kard, and 5 for Kudzoo, both major Dreamseer forces of the Dream, and here is where the Cause started with Kudzoo. I chose him as my mentor. I became the philosopher and sometimes poet that I was destined to be. It was my destiny to meet him and Kard, and do this path in the Dream, and this became my place of meditation and inspiration for poems... my starting place again.

Then came Blurp, my climbing mentor, who showed me how to climb Tux's sanctuary, which was not named at that time. I was first to climb all six like this (Tux's) to ground, and sanctuaries were some of my favorite climbs.

I taught many a climber first in sanctuary, as it was a sidestep method, which I chose to teach. My mentor was in the dream, teaching climbing, and when I wasn't teaching, I got more lessons.

Kudzoo, my DS mentor, also learned to climb from Blurp, but I spent hours with Kudzoo in the cause of peace. What it really was was friendship with the dream. Kudzoo was a charismatic Dreamer, who gave his friendship to the Dream. His students, Haleth Dagore, and Shadruith were great leaders too. And I understood the Cause that the Dream was more important than Arts and Spheres.

Another philosopher friend of Kudzoo was Boggen. He collapsed himself into a permasphere with Brother Timothy, starting the Four plus One. This great GateKeeper (Boggen) was a famous Mare Tamer, and his lair, with his pet Bogram, bears his name, and it was a meeting place for the Four plus One.

So Kudzoo and I joined. A sanctuary is about peace and friendship--and has no use for offensive Arts. Well, a permasphere is dreaming with no Arts, so we took it a step further. This is the Sanctuary that Kudzoo took the ceremony to become permasphere. When my turn came, I was collapsed outside the Sanctuary to become a permasphere. That was on another day. Each of us used Soul Evoke and then we could enter the Sanctuary and not be restored.

So this sanctuary was the place of my Four plus One initiation, a group that caused a major ripple in the Dream. Then Shadruith, a major DS teacher, and one of Kudzoo's former students, joined the Cause.

The group, the Cause, always goes on. It is an ideal.

The transformation to permasphere and dreaming that experience with my friends for 4 months, and teaching climbing in that form, was part of my dream.

Then came time to gain back my avatar--and Shadruith went to Thunberg and I was restored here in a ceremony with many friends. Boggen and many others came here, and Thunberg gave me a souvenir of Sphere 2 ascension, but he booby-trapped it. Well, it only had 1 charge. But here is where I became a permasphere, and here is where I became dedicated to teaching the Dream climbing. I taught Turbo-Speed to climb as a perma, and now joined him in avatar form, and he became better than me.

I found the next place to the mists... the flying zone. The place still exists, and maybe that is what we really wanted to find in the Boundary Mists Quest.

But they all left a Cause in the Dream. Each dreamer I meet pushes me on---if only to find another with a vision. And the dream goes on, the cause goes on, and another poem gets written, and another adventure climb... or maybe, I sit here in this room and get refreshed again as a Dreamseer.

Look at the stars in the walls, and ask questions of the Dream.

There are many happenings in this place, but the sanctuary is a pledge that I try to be what I was, yet follow my path in the dream for as long as it is my destiny.

The history of this place is far from over....

References

• https://web.archive.org/web/20030228234223/http://www.underlight.com/files/docs/Sanctuary-of-Poetry.doc