I had a dream a couple of nights ago, a complicated, long dream that was very dependent on this series of adjacent locations in the dream-landscape. Among these locations was a set of purple and lavender office buildings, the nondescript two story office-suite kind you find in the suburbs that is invariably three-quarters full of doctors, insurance salesmen, and after-school tutors, and is one-quarter full of empty space. But unlike the ones you find in real life, this one was purple, and although I remember no sign, I understood that somehow these offices belonged to the god Dionysus, or at the very least to some organization or corporation that represented him.
I do not remember clearly what I did while I was at this office, but I remember sitting in a reception area and possibly filling out some paperwork. I might have flipped through a coffee-table book in the waiting area. I interacted with a moderately friendly receptionist: businesslike but not unpleasant.
Somehow in the middle of this fairly mundane corporate bullshit, the presence of the god was unmistakable. Either his presence permeated the completely contradictory surroundings, or I have a major lacuna in my sense of the narrative: it is possible that something extremely significant happened, some direct contact with the god, and I remember the approaching sense of divinity and power leading up to the event and the power receding afterwards, but the event itself is like a lost period of time, something like what UFO abductees often report.
In the dream I think I knew what was going on, but now in the waking world, the details of what role Dionysus was playing, what benefit I got out of our meeting, and exactly what I was doing there is all kind of obscure and abstract. Something and nothing at the same time, and I’m not entirely sure how it related to the other elements of the dream landscape (a thick wilderness, a military installation that reminded me of Sand Hill at Fort Benning where I did basic training and infantry school, a police academy, a series of rural roads, a witches’ sabbat, the offices of a nameless law firm, and a cyborg super-soldier created by the Department of Transportation to defend roads under construction and he had this sweet gun that shot blue pulses of massively destructive kinetic energy), but at the conclusion of my business in the purple office building of Dionysus, I was told very clearly (by a representative or the receptionist maybe) that the office would henceforth be forever closed to me. I was never to return.
I’m not sure what this means. Am I no longer to worship Dionysus? Was his role in m life only as a gateway god, to lead me to more and fuller experiences with his Hellenic co-deities, but not to stay with me for the long run? Was it a message that formal worship of Dionysus is for some reason not appropriate for me? The dream was completely suffused with the trappings of formality: government, offices, law, military, law enforcement. And then I walked out of the office into the night and witnessed the witches’ sabbat I mentioned earlier. Is the message that I am to leave Dionysus alone now, or is it somehow specifically connected to the formality of the setting? As I have mentioned in a few previous posts, I have been a little worried for awhile that I have neglected Dionysus in my zeal to worship Aphrodite and the other gods and goddesses, and also because I can’t really figure out a way to worship him or even directly interact with him that makes sense to me. His presence in my life has been powerful, but it has never felt right to transform it into anything resembling the regular, formal worship of the other gods?
In myth, Dionysus was worshipped separately in Bacchic rites, out in the wilderness away from the demos and the religious/cultural/political structures that Greek religion otherwise revolved around. Is this dream somehow significant to that distinction? I’m just not sure. Shit, maybe it was just a weird dream.
Sailing to Byzantium 
I love doing armchair dream analysis, so here’s my take:
The office building of Dionysus represents, as you say, a formal establishment, a god’s place of business. The banality of its setting is a sort of a joke – religion made as ordinary as a trip to the dentist’s office. I don’t think this is really about your relationship with Dionysus so much as it’s about your relationship with… I’m looking for the right word here and not finding it. Your relationship with ordinary religion, I guess.
Let me try that again. In our culture, there are religions that are OK with the dominant culture – institutionally supported religions. If you’re admitted to the hospital you can tell the staff that you’re Lutheran or Jewish or Mormon or Catholic or whatever, and while there are of course still prejudices among various religious sects, no one is going to think you are totally off the map or around the bend for claiming to be part of one of the many “OK” religions that exist. That’s what I mean here by “ordinary religion.”
Now, by working with Dionysus and other pagan gods, by participating in modern paganism at all, you have gone around that bend. You can tell the EMT or the lawyer or the judge or your boss or your teacher that you are a pagan, but it’s not likely to mean anything at all to them, and if it does, it will mean that you are either kooky or scary or both in a way that will make them extremely uncomfortable with you.
By accepting Dionysus, you don’t get to go back to the safety and comfort of being a cultural insider – you don’t get to be one of the normal people who go worship in the religious equivalent of an office building. Instead, you step outside to the witches’ sabbat.
But I have no idea what’s up with the awesome cyborg DOT worker. Sorry.
But in the dream there was definitely the sense that I was barred from Dionysus’s office, not from offices in general.
Also, the cyborg let me use his gun, and I shot a lot of windows and glass stuff with it. It was super-awesome.
Like Nettle’s, my analysis is off the cuff, but perhaps the message could be that Dionysus does not want worship to be formalized (the office park) but to happen “out there.”
Somehow I am reminded of what Ginette Paris (Pagan-friendly post-Jungian analyst and teacher) said, that a shoe store display window could manifest Aphrodite, or words to that effect.
The gods sometimes might prefer not to be acknowledged in formal “religious” settings?
Anyway, if you have not read Paris’s (give it the French pronunciation; she is Quebequois) books PAGAN GRACE and PAGAN MEDITATIONS, I recommend them.
Something I posted in a thread on Hellenistai.com:
http://forum.hellenistai.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=416