Keys open spaces. They give us choices. And choices build our reality, they create our world. Keystones are necessary to bridge a gap. Masons use wedge-shaped stones at the top of an arch. That stone locks all the other stones in place. To walk across an arched bridge will take us from one side to the other, from the past into the future. What if life were like that and we could change the structure of time? Wouldn’t it be possible to change our future? That is the central question in “Judas Kiss”. Can an original betrayal be altered? Is there a way to change our future? Is it possible to re-enter our own life’s flow of events and choose a different outcome? If you could change your life, how would you do it? Is there a key to that magic realm?
In “Judas Kiss” the time traveler is a screenplay writer whose promising career disintegrated through his choices. At mid-life Zachary Wells has been in a series of recovery programs, is dependent upon his friend from college, and is re-enacting his early childhood traumas. He has problems with intimacy and his rage is lurking right beneath his beautiful physical exterior. He is looking for love. The story begins on Zach’s birthday. 
One of the gifts is to fill in for his friend and judge a film contest at their alma mater, Keystone University (“the key to your future”). When he arrives there, Zack is greeted by the gatekeeper, who says “you must have pissed somebody off. They put you in a freshman dorm instead of The Tower with the rest of the VIPs.” So the disgruntled guy from Hollywood settles into his dorm room, takes a shower, and goes downtown to his favorite college bar, which has a sign out front indicating it is “Gay Night”. This is where the present and the past intersect each other.
We are seeing the story from the perspective of Zach. In the bar he is attracted to a beautiful, sulky young college student, who follows him to his table and passionately kisses him. This leads to a sexual encounter in Zach’s room with Danny, the hot, young man who can’t keep his hands off of the “cute, older dude”. They merge momentarily in ecstacy and sleep together throughout the night. In the morning Danny leaves for his own room, evidently in the same building. The setting is Zach’s past and Danny’s present, the time of the scholarship contest when Daniel Reyes is presenting his short film “Judas Kiss”. This becomes compromisingly interesting when Zach discovers his one-night-stand is one of the contestants whose film is called “Judas Kiss”, the same as Zach’s, when he won the contest 15 years before. And of course, Zach Wells’ name back then was Danny Reyes. 
As the film progresses we see that Zach also has a future self in the story, the gatekeeper Zachary Welds, who tells him to change the story.
This film is an excellent dramatization of how the psychic process of integration takes place. First is awareness of the past trauma. In “Judas Kiss” there is no denial for the character. The events of the boy’s life occurred when his consciousness had congealed into what we call a self or “ego”. The character remembers the events surrounding the trauma. (This process is more difficult when the events occurred before the age of four.) The boy was caught in the tragedy of his mother’s first bout with cancer when his drunken, controlling father, raped and molested him. His father tells his son, “everything I have done is because I love you”. Danny lies and covers up his father’s behavior to protect his mother from the pain of her husband’s betrayal and because he wants to be loved, to be wanted by his dad. This is the Judas Kiss, with which his father betrays his wife, his son, and himself. This is the Vampire’s kiss which continues on for generations of human evolution. And it is the key to the character’s sexual orientation. Danny films his own story, claiming it is fiction, and enters it in the competition. Only he and his friend Abbey, the producer, know the script was written when Danny was in high school. This violates the rules for submission. We are in the realm of paradox, where time is not linear, and Danny as Zach, the “cute, older dude” from the future has to make a choice.
Zach knows what happened after he won the competition, how he moved in with Shane, who supplied him with drugs and money, who replicated the pattern of being used and controlled by an older lover, who was “worse than Dad”. He also knows he dropped out of college, moved to Hollywood and created the life he now hates. The young Daniel doesn’t know any of this and distrusts the man whom he “can’t get out of his head”, the man with whom he is sexually and emotionally enmeshed. This is exactly the way things are for all of us. Our inner child is always available in the world of imagination and dreams. He hasn’t changed. He’s just the way he was then, but now he’s affecting our present life with the patterns he chose in adapting to his life as a child. The inner child’s attempts to numb out the pain of his betrayal is the source and cause of our addictions. That’s his way of controlling the uncontrollable chaos of his environment, of his mother’s cancer and his father’s drunken sexual escapades. That’s why he is drawn to act out sexually with “cute, older dudes” like his dad. His sexual preference demonstrates his constant desire to please his Father and get his love. Life with an inner child like Zach’s is like riding a roller-coaster, lots of ups and downs, exciting rushes followed by hangovers, dizziness, and nausea. And how can all of this change?
When we enter the imaginal realm of Dreams and artistic Visions, time warps. There is no longer linear time. It now becomes a continuum of eternal present moments with memories blurred around the edges. Here the Dreamer, Zach in this case, is forced to interact with whom he was, with his inner child, Danny Reyes, the kid who cheated, who manipulated the environment to get what he wanted instead of what he needed. After all Danny doesn’t have a loving father to guide him with integrity. Danny senior is the pattern of manipulation and sexual gratification which has created Danny junior, the image of his father. Of course none of us want to admit that we become our fathers, especially when we are reacting to and revolting against our fathers. But that is precisely what happens. The good thing is that we can change the pattern. And that means interacting with the child whom we once were.
We have to find a way to meet and greet the inner child, to acknowledge and witness him, to stand beside him while he goes through his feelings of hurt, pain, abandonment, rejection, whatever he needs to feel to get through the grief. We can be his friend and his father. Paradox yes. But that’s how it is. We are our fathers and our children. This sounds like magic and it is. Carl Jung tried to make this process sound more like science than art by calling it the Transcendent Function, Active Imagination, and Individuation. It really doesn’t matter whether we call it Alchemy, Magic, or Psychotherapy. The mystery of how it transforms us can only be experienced by engaging the inner images in dialogue, interaction, and creative expression. Of course a journal helps as a place to describe and record the memorable events in this process. Surprisingly, the child will trust us, after we pass all his tests. It helps to have a Mentor in this process, someone who has been there himself and knows the territory of the psyche, of the imaginal realm. But as we see in “Judas Kiss” it is possible to drop into the Imaginal Realm, perhaps with the help of the sacred plant medicines, and do the work of transformation. We are the difference when we choose to integrate our personality and thus co-create a new reality. We initiate a paradigm shift.
We can change history’s impact upon our present. We hold the key to our future, we are the keystone of the rainbow bridge. We just have to believe in ourselves. When we acknowledge how it was for us in the past, we can change family patterns. By noticing that our behavior patterns are re-enactments of past traumas, and feeling the unfelt feelings of our inner child self, we can be free of those patterns and be at peace. This process has a time table of its own and can be evoked by something as common as a birthday anniversary. The work of the spirit is unexpected. It is filled with promise, growth, and love. If we choose, like Zach and Danny to cooperate and be friends, everything is transformed. We don’t know what that will look like, just that it is different, an alternate future, one where Danny doesn’t become the old gatekeeper, Zachary Welds, but a different self with a new attitude toward life.
Merlin and the White Eagle 