Daemon Sleep Aid @winebrightruby

By the time I go to bed, my daughter has been asleep for a couple of hours. Under her Frozen blanket, her shoulders barely move; her eyelashes shadow her cherubic cheeks. I check the baby monitor and lay down in bed for my final task of the day: sending my daemon to sleep beside her.

“Daemon” is the Greek word for “spirit” and could historically refer to lesser immortal beings, the gods themselves, the in-dwelling spirit of a place, the Fortune that attended a person, or other numinous beings. But in the case of this particular working, the term and concept come from Phillip Pullman’s work of fiction, The Golden Compass (and following works in that universe). In this fictional version of our world, humans’ spirits are externalized as daemons, animal-form sentient beings who are sort of a person’s conscience, sort of a person’s soul, and sort of a person’s own identity reflected as another being. I read Pullman’s books young, so, like most fans, I wondered what animal my daemon would be. What would my soul look like, sound like, as an external animal companion?

This concept may sound similar to one that periodically re-circulates through witchblr: the fetch-beast. As most commonly used on witchblr at this point, a fetch or fetch-beast is the animal form a witch’s spirit assumes when it travels from her body. (There are other historical meanings/usages that are beyond the scope of this piece.) Several months ago, when my two year old daughter began having trouble sleeping through the night, I merged these two concepts and developed a simple technique that, so far, has proven effective in helping her stay asleep at night (aka, the number one priority in my, or really any parent’s, life).

Sending Forth the Daemon

I lay on my bed and breathe deeply, calmly - meditative breathing. My body relaxes, and my awareness of it subsides, leaving my mind clear. In my spirit, I allow the image of “my daemon”1 to form in my spirit. At the same time, I extend my senses and locate my daughter. She is asleep down the hall, drowsy and warm as a banked hearth. Beside my bed, the daemon forms: four velveted paws, a creamy belly and tan coat, a black-tipped tail. Her blue-green eyes and expressive ears come into focus last. She is a North American cougar, Puma concolor couguar, a mountain lion of the southeastern United States.

I maintain the meditation until her form is so vivid and detailed I might be able to reach out and touch her pink nose. By that time, I can feel her drowsiness as well as my own, the unfamiliar power in her muscles as she rises to her feet and yawns, the deadly claws needing only a quick flex to reveal them. She has never felt the need to show her claws in my home.

Our senses flow into one another: I don’t find the shadowed hallway difficult to navigate, and she doesn’t have any doubt about where to go. We sneak into my baby’s room, quiet on those soft paws, and step up easily into her bed. There is plenty of space for the cougar to lie down between the toddler and her bed-rails, adding her weight2 and warmth to the bed. Her tail swishes over my daughter’s legs. She nuzzles the pile of flyaway curls on baby’s head, then lays her own head on her paws and closes her eyes.

I re-ground my awareness in my body: feet, legs, hips, belly, lungs, arms, hands, head. I don’t know how long that particular emanation of my spirit remains externalized; she’s always gone by the time I wake up, and there are never any missing ‘parts’ of me. Just a well-rested toddler who spent the night snuggled close to a mountain lion, as kittens do.

1 I, as an avowed nerd, went through months of meditations and personality quizzes and internal examination to determine what I really truly think my daemon would be in the Pullman-verse. The first time I did this particular working, the animal that appeared was not the same as the daemon to which I’d accustomed myself. Every time since, I’ve had the same result: never once has my Pullman-verse daemon appeared. I theorize that, for most people, there are a variety of animals and figures one’s spirit might appear as in these various spirit-flight-related activities. I suspect that the, to steal a term from friends funnier than I am, “fursona of the arte” way of thinking of the fetch (as a singular animal-shaped representation of one’s spirit) is not universally accurate to most people’s experiences. 2 Her weight is technically none, which is good because the bed is approved for normal human toddler amounts of weight, not an extra ~100 or so pounds. But in her sleep, my daughter turns toward the cat, exactly as if she feels the mattress shift from 10 someone sitting down beside her.

I suspect there are near countless variations on this technique that would work, but this is the way I tried, and I’m reluctant to test out alternatives and gamble with my sleep. In the past two months of sending my spirit to sleep in her room, my daughter has woken up only four times.3 This is a vast improvement over the 3-5 nights per week that she had been waking up, and I know some of that success is directly attributable to this magic.

3 I started using this technique around the winter holidays, but I only have hard data from the past two months because I clear out my sleep-tracker that often. Her sleep has been steadily improving since January, barring a recent, thankfully mild, illness that kept her up all night for several days.