I love the dramatic cards. This card is one that turns up for me rather a lot. I have found that most people see this as a terrible card. But I quite like it.

The swords - of the air: representing thoughts / ideas / the mind - weigh heavy. They are hanging above the protagonist of the card who has just woken up from a dream. The protagonist is not, perhaps, aware of these many heavy, dominant thoughts. They certainly do not have control of them and are not using them to take action of any kind (as in the 2 of swords, where she holds the swords in her hands and is ready to use them to fight people) - so this tells me that these swords are metaphorical. The 9 swords are overwhelming, as they hang horizontally over the bed, they are causing this person anxiety and worry - perhaps to the extreme. But the person is not acknowledging or dealing with these swords/thoughts/ideas. So, they continue to hang heavy in the dark.

The number 9 is also significant. It is 1 before 10 and 10 is completion: the end. Sometimes, in the moments, or the time before finishing something, the idea of it can become totally overwhelming. And of course the 10 of swords is a pretty heavy card too (I got it on Saturday and didn't write very much because I was in a rush!) and perhaps this 9 contains that feeling too, that that is what could happen next - absolute destruction - but that card's full of melodrama too, as I already said.

Think about waking from a nightmare and those moments when you are totally alone, lonely, without comfort from another human - the topics of your bad dream going round and round in your head and you clutch it because you can't think of anything else to do. This card is that feeling. However, think about the moment after that, or perhaps, when the sun has come up and you feel a little silly for allowing yourself to be so overwhelmed by what was essentially just a bad dream - it is not as bad as it seemed. It was just a dream and most of the anxieties that woke you were dramatised by the night, over-the-top and nothing to worry about now that your conscious mind has been able to untangle them and work out what it's all about.

While this card is about anxiety, worry and feelings of alone-ness, it is a temporary state that will lift. That's not to say that these feelings are not overwhelming and sometimes even crippling at the time, it's just to say that things are not as bad as they seem.

HdT