I don’t remember the first time I heard the story of Sleeping Beauty. Some fairytales enter your lexicon and mind before you’re aware of it, and feel like they’ve always been there. 
I do remember, though, when the fairytale pulled me in to let me see its deeper aspects and meaning.
One day in the early 80s, as I rocked my youngest son to sleep for his afternoon nap, his warm body tucked into mine while I crooned one nursery rhyme after another, my mind discovered itself inside Sleeping Beauty’s castle. I was deep in the Prince’s point of view. I could hear the measured breathing of the sleeping servants and nobility, echoed by the feeling of the castle walls breathing with them.
Slowly, quietly, the Prince paces through the rooms and halls, looking for the mysterious figure of the sleeping princess he’d heard about since he was a young boy. Finally, finally, he climbs those tower steps, pushes open a door and there… There she lies in some enchantment that creates a glow around her that neither darkness nor dust can penetrate. The Prince feels a tug, an inexorable pull to this sweet, enchanted beauty that he has sought month after month, risking life and limb, even in that unholy tangle of thorns outside the castle.
But he halts, unwilling to go farther now that he has reached his goal. Because if he kisses her (but how can he not), his life will be changed forever. And, after all, is he really worthy of her? Who is he to think he is the one to release her from whatever spell holds her there?
A sigh, a slump, and my infant son is now soundly asleep. I stand and lay him in his crib and tiptoe out of his room, hurrying to grab paper and pen to record my dream, my vision of this familiar yet new story.
That scene played in my mind for days then was put away…until one day, attending a writer’s conference, it resurfaced. Eventually, it morphed into a fantasy novel manuscript with the heroine being not Sleeping Beauty but her bastard sister. It made the rounds of agents and editors but returned to sleep in a file drawer.
Still the fairytale resonated within me. And so one summer, at that same annual writer’s conference, I used the Sleeping Beauty story as a metaphor for teaching women the power of dreaming for self-discovery and creativity. Because I’d come to a new understanding of what Sleeping Beauty was doing on that bed day after day, night after night, while Mother Earth guarded her. She was NOT lying there helpless, waiting for her Prince to come.
She was dreaming.
She was doing deep, shamanic soul work in dreamtime. Moving from young girl to woman. Being initiated into the Mysteries. Even the figures of fairy godmothers who cast and re-cast the spell seemed to me to be more psychopomps and guides than wicked witches.
I also began to see how the fairytale served as an effective metaphor for the creative process and developed a workshop around it. The story was an example of the integration of the feminine, intuitive, receptive aspects of creativity coming together with the masculine, practical, active aspects in that Kiss, leading to an awakening to creative power.
Fairytales, even in their original and often violent form, are much like dreams, where animals speak, we encounter guides and helpers, and often have to do battle with the things frighten us the most. And, like dreams, they have layers upon layers to them, which is why I love them.
To me, Sleeping Beauty has moved from that tale of childlike magic to a woman’s tale of magical power that comes from within, the transforming power of love and creativity.
I know I am not yet done with this tale, that there are ripples of resonance still reaching me.
What about you? How has Sleeping Beauty filtered into your life? How does it resonate with you and your Muse?