Tuesday 8 December 2015

A Dream of Tarot and Collectable Tea Cards


I had a rather odd dream one night last week.

Do you remember those collectable cards you used to get in packs of tea? They used to also come in packs of cigarettes, but it is the tea ones I remember best. There were lots of different series with various themes and I loved to collect them when I was a child. My favourite was the one on wild flowers.

Anyway, in my dream I had a box of these collectable tea cards that showed tarot images. I don't think there was ever a tarot series of tea cards in real life, but there was in my dream, and it had more than just the 78 cards you get in a standard tarot deck. There were lots different tarot images, each printed on tea cards with some text about what it meant on it too.

For some reason in my dream I carried my box of tarot tea cards up some steps into a building. Inside the building was a long hall with a table down the middle. Seated around the table were people who looked like figures from the tarot major arcana. A woman with white hair and a long blue dress stood up from the table, walked towards me and started looking at my box of cards.

I remember feeling a bit apologetic and saying that I didn't think it was a complete set. The woman looked at the cards and told me that although it wasn't complete, I had some rare ones. She explained that this series had several different versions of each card, and that was why there were more than 78 to collect. Some of the variants were extremely rare. The woman told me my collection was valuable, but that I had to go back and find the missing ones. I left the building feeling a lot happier about my collection than when I had entered and eager to get on with the task of finding the others. Then I woke up.

A day or two later, on Saturday, I went to a games convention in London. Chatting in the bar with a couple of friends I had met there, they told me that they had at one time collected Magic the Gathering cards - a collectable card game - but had sold them all recently and found out that some of the early cards were now worth a large amount of money. It reminded me that I had some old Magic the Gathering cards in a cardboard box up in my loft. I'd played the game a bit when it was first launched - probably about 20 years ago - but had lost interest and hadn't played for years. My friends suggested I bring my cardboard box round to their place some time and they offered to help me value them. It was at that point I got a strange sense of deja vu.

Now, I have no idea if my dream had anything to do with my forgotten collection of Magic the Gathering cards. At the time I had the dream, I suspected it was based on the Fairy tarot deck that I've been using quite a lot recently. The images I remember on my dream cards were rather like the Fairy tarot images - right down to having text saying what they mean printed on them. The white-haired elderly woman in the blue dress could have been inspired by any of the three cards in the photo at the top - probably the Hermit.

However, when I go up into the loft to get out the Christmas decorations to put up later this week I just might search around a little more and try to find my box of Magic the Gathering cards too.

I am intrigued as to whether my dream meant anything, If it did, was it a prophecy of finding great wealth in collectable cards or the start of a search for more spiritual insight?  I don't suppose I could have both, could I?

Links and previous related posts
http://www.badwitch.co.uk/2015/11/review-fairy-tarot-cards-by-doreen.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering

No comments: