It is not enough to latch onto inner silence — a Borges seated in the lotus position beneath the tree of our mind, every thought drained of distractions and escapes, yet a brick that builds imaginary cities, Tlön, the tigers and the pointed towers, hanging gardens from which to observe one’s own life as a landscape, or the unconscious and submerged Atlantis of ourselves, unconscious, oceanic. To verbalize the breath like the chant of a priestess with her nails on an oracle, to feel heart, lungs and liver working and pulsing separately, oiled by blood and by that dark energy that escapes astrophysicists and that only some Don Juan has grasped by the tail, for a moment, left with eagle feathers between his fingers.

Nor is it enough to find one’s own well in the geography of our metaphysical viscera, not in a place with terrestrial coordinates, hills that have hosted nests of machine guns or woods where grotesque but wise sylvans drink. To descend into oneself, into that inner bowel, from esophagus to rectum, vertical like a literary erection by Henry Miller, in Montparnasse or Big Sur, one must first come to terms with the guardians, the two oblique cards in the upper part of the Well Path spread, who watch the rim of the well.
I cannot say who yours are, these psychological minotaurs, but I can tell you of mine, when I faced them on the balcony of my old house in Marseille, in the port district, among rapacious seagulls and rats with super-powers who collected the toes of drunken or exhausted immigrants, and that intermittent line of the sea, down there on the right, a Morse code between the buildings, paying the rent of my hunger for wonder, for things resilient to everything, even to man.

The first to show himself had been the golden guardian, whom I imagine as an anthropomorphic being in oriental garments, a Malik from the Mamluk cards, the fertile Nile of the tarot I will speak of in a future post, with scimitar and arabesques for eyes, flamboyant as he appears in the mind, with the geometric yellow and gold fields of his elegant jacket, but without features.

It was he who prevented me from approaching the well, for months, with the disproportionate blade that sliced the air in whirlwinds of forged steel, small cyclones that forced me three steps back, every time: it was my arrogance, that of a thousand books, and then another thousand still, studying the cultural gravity of the world, the quintessence of East and West, but not oneself; I thought I already had the passport for all Edens and Nirvanas, of that same Borges’ Tlön, of Jerusalem, Calcutta and a second Qumran, ten thousand caves inhabited by Essenes who had resurrected Pythagoras, who as king sat upon a throne of jars containing geometric and existential knowledge, an Alexandria library of clay and raw ceramics.

The golden guardian finally one afternoon lowered his scimitar, letting me draw near the well, when I whispered in his ear that I could pay him with a special coin: the death of the ego fattened by erudition, a toothless pasha who swallows without chewing. I showed him the severed head of my ego — that is, the three of the human Cerberus that lived inside me: Henry Miller, Truman Capote and Joyce — and I used the pages of the apocryphal Gospel of Mary to polish his golden boots.

I no longer knew anything and I knew everything. I was allowed two steps forward, and the well was near, with its arcane inscriptions on the circumference, I already thought of entering the esophagus of myself and then quickly arriving halfway, to the small intestine, already in the section of the future, but the red guardian pushed me back, then opened his robe as a shadow-traveler and showed me two perfect, young breasts. Two oysters for eyes, no swords or other weapons, his empty hands let dust fall to the ground, yet I could not advance anyway, because this psychopomp touched the mind and set it ablaze with impulses, with odalisques whose atoms were round and perfect as Ingres knew them.

Flesh so beautiful that it counts the hours, depending whether you find yourself before it in the morning or in the evening, flesh that then macerates in the vinegar of time until it becomes dust, which the red demon kept pouring onto the ground from his hourglass hands. He had finally formed a desert with that human sand, and it now reached my calves. Each time the same scene, from Marseille, from the inner silence that sealed the traffic and the fish market, to that mental Rub’ al Khali, the Empty Quarter, immense dunes, a horizontal abyss.
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The well could no longer be seen, the red guardian knew how to deceive the senses, with his infinite deserts, and that was precisely the point: the senses domesticated by pleasure, lust, the triumph of the unstable. I passed the red guardian without saying anything, only letting go of the metaphorical hand of one of the Salomes dancing inside me, persistent in their burnished secret that fused with mine, and fixing my mind upon myself in the mirror, old and grey, a conscious animal, my body as short destiny, like a painting by Lucian Freud in the splendor of the perception of the limit, but with stars tattooed on the naked skull, painted blue.
​At last my well was again there before me, and the two guardians suspended, oblique, at the sides of my mind, disarmed, not exactly pleased at no longer being able to bite me.

Some structures do not begin in theory. They appear first as images whose meaning cannot yet be explained but whose form refuses to dissolve.
The Well Path — the seven-card interpretive descent used in Lucian Morel readings — began in this way.

In the middle of an ordinary night, a well opened inside a dream and refused to close. It did not offer revelation. It revealed structure.
What followed was not a story in the conventional sense but a movement through architecture: rings tightening around memory, mirrors fracturing the present, migrations repeating themselves in the future. At the deepest level the well ceased to be water. It thickened into earth. Identity loosened its edges.
The image persisted.

Over time it returned in fragments — not as explanation but as insistence. Gradually the geometry suggested by that dream condensed into what would later become The Well Path, a method designed not to extract meaning from symbols but to descend through them until their structure becomes visible.
The Dream of the Well is a short text that returns to that origin.

It does not attempt to teach the method formally. Instead, it explores the symbolic landscape in which the idea first appeared — a space where personal memory intersects with literary echoes, where opera houses revolve slowly through darkness, where manuscripts scatter into wind, and where the same tarot card returns with quiet persistence: The Star.
Across seven movements — threshold, guardians, descent, past, present, future, emergence — the dream unfolds as an architecture of resistance and return.
This book does not explain a method.
It exposes the structure from which the method emerged.

The Dream of the Well is now available on Amazon.
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