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I woke from a recent dream gasping, thinking of the impending Pisces eclipse. In the dream, I wasn’t myself. I was a famous actress, and I was walking with a man, a well known actor, along a desolate island road—an inky ocean glimmering sinisterly in the distance. We were laughing and happy. Our laughter stopped when we spotted our exact doubles. Different clothing, but everything else the same—-hair, faces, bodies—walking in the opposite direction. The handsome actor turned to me and excitedly said, “how often does that happen? Let’s follow them.” I reluctantly agreed. We changed directions and began trailing them. The couple kept turning back and looking at us, deeply perturbed. To be looked at like that both dissolved and reconstituted my dreamself. They quickened their steps.
We four were the only ones on the road. (During the very first lunar eclipse in Pisces two years ago, I was on Martha’s Vineyard, walking along a similar island road, looking up at the dreaming moon). They whispered to each other. When they’d turn around, I’d drown a little in the pool of their gaze. I felt certain that we should not be following them—that they were meant to live some other life—far from us and ours—and that if we were to meet face to face, something awful would happen. Still, some fated current pulled us along. After the tense walk along the water, they disappeared into a party—a gallery opening of sorts—at the end of a long skinny dock. We followed them in, and the duo looked more pissed than ever. Suddenly, it hit me. Duh. To them, we were the doppelgängers: their creepy doubles, harbingers of death, doom, etc.
The end of the dream was cinematic, demonic, and darkly funny. The guests chased us out of the building and off the dock, away from our doubles, laughing madly and yelling. In the dream, I felt that we were alternate versions of one another, never meant to cross paths, and that, had we met, lives would be foreshortened, deleted, gone. But also: that in almost-meeting them, some other path opened. Nothing would ever be the same. An end of summer dream. Night-force coming for the day. A dream that seemed to echo this final Pisces eclipse—the last in a series that began in September 2024. Eclipses have long been spoken of as turning points, changes of fate. In the dream, we changed and changed directions and almost, breathless, met our other selves at water’s edge.
People talk about “jumping timelines” or “entering portals.” But an eclipse brings a change of direction and vision, not really by choice. Inevitable, frightening, bewitching. There is something especially double about this eclipse. Pisces, like Virgo, Sagittarius, and Gemini, is a mutable i.e. double bodied sign. It has two bodies. Two fish swim in opposite directions, like the double couples in my dream walking in opposite directions along the dirt road before one of them changed course. The fishes are connected by a cord so that they don’t get lost in rushes of water, dissolution, night. (In the myth, Aphrodite and Eros were walking along the river Euphrates when a monster appeared. They fled the monster by changing into fishes. “One dives into water in order to be reborn and changed,” writes Gaston Bachelard in Water and Dreams.)
I found myself, the day before that maritime doppelgänger dream, talking to my father and my grandfather about learning to swim. My grandfather told us, laughing, about how his uncle threw him into the Delaware River. Terrified, he eventually started to dog paddle. “It worked.” My dad, on the other hand, said that his own father was showing off at a pool party one day and announced to the crowd that if he threw his son in the pool, he’d definitely be able to swim. Not so much. Dad sunk to the bottom and his dad had to dive in.
Pisces, like its Virgo counterpart where our sun currently shines, takes us into the equinox: equal day and night, light and dark. We swim in the distressing and transcendent play of opposites. Walk the island road. Go to the edge of the dock. Sit with the impossible. Dive into shadowy water. Get altered. Begin again. Here’s what Dane Rudhyar says: “Mind, in the Signs preceding the equinoxes (Virgo and Pisces), is the constant critic, cutting away the crystallizations or fallacies of the past and intent upon clearing the stage for a new kind of living and realization. It is mind telling what should be forgotten, pruned away, regenerated or transcended.” And also: “Pisces is an era of storms and of wholesale disintegration. But Piscean winds of destiny may impel men of vision and courage to discover many a ‘new world.’”
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