Catastrophic penguin molt

I was sitting in a meeting at work this week, minding my own business, when I started to have flashbacks of dreams I'd had about work over the past 3 years or so: lengthy, nonsensical dreams that were related to the people around the table. The dream memories temporarily felt more real than my actual reality. Fortunately, my work dreams are boring enough that it wasn't like some sea monster was coming to get me, it was just an introduction of a bunch of plot lines and projects that weren't actually real, but felt like they were for a few hours. It was one of the scariest and most disorienting things that has ever happened to me. I went home and tried to ground myself (hot tip: weighted vests are great for this--I made fun of people wearing them because obviously they're a fad, but then bought one for non-workout purposes to feel more "contained" when I'm getting too spacey) and the polarities slowly reversed themselves: dream reality faded and real-reality came back, and I calmed down. I knew intellectually that I had 1. an active Neptune transit (and Neptune's been stationing to turn direct, making it temporarily 10x more potent), 2. Mars applying to my birth Neptune by transit (a very temporary doubling of the potency) 3. a storied history of weird Neptune-related shit (like being a working psychic, for example). This was just a new phenomenon for me.

Being naturally irascible, my reaction was "are you fucking kidding me?" Like, if I must deal with Neptune, can't I do it at night when I'm alone, like I normally do? (Can't I have my weird-ass dreams at night like normal?) Why does Neptune need to bother me on Tuesday during the day? Why do I need to worry I am having a psychotic break when I know I'm not?

I apologize if I write about Neptune too much: I also live it too much, if that makes you feel any better. But I landed on a good metaphor for it that I will now share with you that will make your Neptune transits a little easier to understand. But in order to do this, we must discuss penguins.

For those of you who haven't been to the zoo lately or didn't watch March of the Penguins, penguins molt all at once, and when they molt 1. they look hilarious 2. they aren't waterproof and can't swim, therefore can't hunt 3. they need to bulk up before they molt or they aren't in good health to begin with, they run the risk of starving to death. Oh and 4. they stink. March of then Penguins didn't tell me that, some Antarctic researchers I met once did. But I guess they stink extra when they can't swim, which makes sense. It's called the "catastrophic penguin molt."

When you have a setup similar to mine or transits that emphasize psychic nonsense, you, too, can undergo a catastrophic molt... of an invisible layer that protects you from the general spiritual ethos we live in, and you can't do much except wait for it to grow back. And here's the other twist: the stronger your Saturn in your chart, the harder this molt is to endure, because you're used to fighting whims off with reality, but that's a weapon that doesn't work in the psychic realm. The harder you lean into trying to grasp reality, the harder Neptune pulls you into unreality. In my case this week, "unreality" entailed flooding my conscious mind with subconscious information: my dreams.

Basically, it feels like how molting penguins look like they feel. And you feel vaguely miserable and can't explain it, and then sometimes you sleep a lot and other times you can't sleep and sometimes you start seeing ghosts. That's a key indicator you're missing a psychic layer, by the way: when I had Pluto conjunct Neptune back in the day (my 8th house and 12th house rulers, respectively for those of you on advanced astrology mode), I had a 2 year period (off and on) where I woke up in the middle of the night and saw beings standing over my bed, watching me. And then I started screaming (sometimes internally and sometimes out loud). (This was in the "before" times, psychically speaking, where now, if that happened, I'd just be like "nope." and roll over. Fortunately I don't normally see ghosts, I feel them around, because my gift is clairsentience, which is "clear feeling," rather than clairvoyance, which is "clear seeing" or clairaudience, which is "clear hearing." Those other two would be super distracting. But if I tune into the clairsentience, I become able to see and feel, but if I ignore my feelings, I can do things like paperwork and take phone calls from angry people.) Our psychic layer is necessary because it keeps us somewhat ignorant about what's going on around us (like how other people feel or what's going on in the cultural zeitgeist when we're not interested in that information on a given day). No layer? No filter! It's this simple. We like a filter. Filters keep us minding our business. Filters keep us on a normal hygiene schedule.

So anyway, when you lose your filter, which you will at least a handful of times in life with varying degrees of severity, you just have to sit on your hands and wait for your feathers to grow back. I'm being honest about my experience in real time, which is rare for me, because I want people who might be going through something similar to understand that this CAN happen, and it's not as crazy as it feels like it is. Having said that, I want my layer back. Feathers optional.