Moonlit Carol's Craft & Resonance

People ask me how. So here it is, plain. None of this is dangerous if you go gently and keep good company. All of it is dangerous if you are reckless, or alone, or trying to prove something. The door does not care about your reasons.

☾ Step one — the sound (two tones, one door)

You need headphones, proper ones, over the ears, because each ear must hear a different note. Play one steady tone in the left ear and a slightly different one in the right, and your own mind, trying to reconcile two notes that won't agree, invents a third: a slow pulse, felt more than heard. That pulse is the thing. We call it the beat. Tune the two tones so the beat lands where you want it:

• Theta — a beat of about 4 to 7 a second, the dreaming edge. This is where the gentle ones come. Start here. Always start here.
• Delta — a beat of 1 to 3 a second, deep, deep water, where the old slow ones live. Never go to delta on your own, and never the first time.

☾ Step two — the light (the lamp must agree with the tone)

Now a soft light, flickering at the same rate as your beat — if your beat is 6 a second, your lamp flickers 6 a second. Sit, close your eyes, and let the flicker fall on the lids. Colours rise out of nowhere: lattices, spirals, sometimes faces. That is not the lamp; the lamp is only knocking. The lamp and the tone must agree, or all you get is a headache. (I made my first one with a desk lamp and a bicycle wheel with card in the spokes. Raymond built me a proper one. It is also, in a roundabout way, why my email is shielded into oblivion. Long story. Be gentle with Raymond.)

☾ Step three — entrainment (the brain follows the leader)

Sound and light together, agreeing, for ten minutes or so, and a wonderful thing happens: your own brainwaves fall into step with the beat. They follow the leader. That stepping-into-time is the whole secret — a mind in step is a mind with the door propped open. Then you do the hardest part, which is nothing. You do not reach for them. You make a quiet room, you leave the door ajar, and you wait to be visited.

☾ Step four — the sigil (who you are calling)

The beat opens a door; the sigil decides who you have opened it to. A sigil is a little drawn sign, a knot of lines, that holds the name-feeling of one kind of visitor. You draw it on card, you hold the kind in your heart, you charge it (I breathe on mine; some folk sing to theirs), and you set it where the light falls. Different signs, different callers. Draw the sign wrong and you may still get an answer — just not from who you meant, and not always kindly.

my sigil card. please don't copy them carelessly — the bottom one is not for beginners.

☾ My working table

This is what I actually use. Tune gently, start at the top, headphones for the sound and a soft flicker for the light. Never the bottom row, and never the bottom row alone.

go gently. — Carol ☾