This is a time of year for magic, a magic that brings us a deeper, stronger connection to all that dies, yet endures, somehow changed, but the same.  In our modern American culture, Halloween is full of "ghosts" and everything nightmares are made of.  I can't help but wonder how many of the displays we adults love so much give little, little ones nightmares!

What I love about Halloween, All Hallow's Eve, is that it celebrates a sacred duty to honor and thank our ancestors who came before us, preparing the way, best they could. This is the ancient Thanksgiving; a time to honor the land for the harvest and our ancestors for their efforts.  Gratitude is awareness that your particular ego shares the stage with others, some like you, some very different. Gratitude is acknowledging the benefit others have afforded us and also realizing the responsibility we have now as future ancestors to our children and their children.  Gratitude makes me stronger and more expansive; self-pity makes me feel weak and vulnerable.  I feel gratitude this time of the year, so full of ancient lore and ceremonies to honor the dying time of year,  the end of the harvest, the beginning of winter, and all who came before us.

Twenty first century medical research into NDEs, the phenomena that the great and lovely Dr. Raymond Moody first introduced in his 1975 best seller, Life After Life, has reached a tipping point for science and for medicine.  In the Netherlands, Dr. Pim van Lommel, a cardiologist now famous for his extensive research and ground-breaking book, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near Death Experience,  sums it up in a patient's words; "it turns out dead isn't dead, after all."  This is the time of year to take such knowledge to heart and maybe expand the way we view and celebrate this lovely season.

Dreams are the bridge to that which isn't material and to the places where we can meet our beloved dead, now whole and on their own new path.  In one visitation dream, my shy, reclusive mom was young, dark hair flowing, riding a beautiful black stallion, like a free wild woman.  What a gift to see her that way after all her suffering at the end.  

This is the time to strenghten the bonds we have with those we love on both sides of the veil.  As in dreams, time, past, present and future, is all the same. We can gather our best dreams of those we love as a way to honor both them and the dreaming that keeps them so close to us.

Ask And You Receive

     In his wonderful book, The Three Only Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination, Robert Moss offers a synchronicity game that he dreamed up, literally.  He calls it the Coincidence Card Game.  It's simple; every person in the circle gets an index card on which they are asked to write, legibly and on one side only, a saying, a line from a song, part of a dream, or absolutely anything that comes to mind.  The cards are collected and shuffled thoroughly, maintaining the blank side out at all times.  Each person gets to pick a card from this newly minted deck that they must put down without looking at the written message. Then, they must think of a question they would like to put to the universe, a question they don't mind sharing with the group.  One by one, each person states their question, turns their card over and reads the message they received out loud. I've played this Active Dreaming game in groups Robert Moss has led, as well as in my own dream groups; it never fails to bring laughter, but it also creates some undeniable synchronicities.   

The example I will share here happened in a group I led this past Saturday.  The CC Game is a great way to raise energy after some intense dream work, so before we wrapped up, I handed out the index cards, one to a person and kept one for myself to write on. I then put the rest of the cards away, so as not to confuse the deck.  Everyone wrote something and I collected those cards; I shuffled thoroughly and each person chose their response card from the deck I now held out to them, then put it down without looking at it.  We went around the circle with our questions and oracle answers and just about everyone felt that little pique of intrigue as they considered how the serendipitous message might answer their question. There was one wonderful synchronicity that I could not have anticipated.

At the beginning of our group, I gave a short introduction to Active Dreaming and the techniques of Lightning Dream Work and Dream Re-entry.  At one point, someone asked about dreams with departed loved ones and we talked about them briefly.  I made a comment like; "Well, we all have a physical body with an expiration date." as  a humorously intended aside.

In our Coincidence Card Game, the last participant, when it came her turn, said her card was blank, but that's okay, she was happy with that answer.  I was flummoxed; how did an extra card get into my deck?  I carefully handed a single card to each, took one myself and got rid of the rest.  I apologized and, realizing I was holding two written-on cards when I should have only one left for myself, I said; "Here, pick one of these", holding out the two cards.

She smiled broadly and said; "This really is the perfect card for my question which was, "What is my expiration date?"

There is always magic when we play with our dreams together in a group.  C.G. Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist and dream explorer descrlibed this phenomenom succinctly as an acausal connecting principle, or meaningful coincidence.  In my experience, it often comes with goose bumps, as it did this time for the whole group.  I don't know how the blank card got in the final deck; it was probably stuck to another one, but without my knowing.  What more powerful answer could this dreamer have gotten to her intrepid question?  We don't know our expiration date, so we live our fullest life now, trusting that when the time comes, we'll be ready.  

Connecting to our dreams connects us to the deeper realities that are in harmony with our waking ones; they come through with a personalized assurance that we're not alone.  We just ask for what we want, and as the song says, we'll get what we need.

For God's Sake

 

Remember when we were all horrified at how the Iranian "Morality" police treated women?  Mahsa Amini was killed last September in Tehran for not wearing the proper attire the proper way.  Well, how about the white supremacist Christian police we're dealing with in the USA?  They are fucking bent on putting American women in equal position to the Iranian women. controlled, body and soul.  First, a stupid misogynist Mississippi law with God quoted as the source and authority, topples the hard-won protection of Roe v Wade. Now, an oral medication, mifepristone, that has been safely used by countless women for twenty years, FDA approved, with a better safety track record than Viagra, is being challenged inTexas, to be tried before a self-declared patriarchal judge. The ruling is a slam dunk, then it will be sent to the Supreme Court.  The morality police super judgies will again do what they were hired to do; subjugate women to patriarchal rule.

How dare these contemptuous men and the proverbial token woman of patriarchy  put American women in chains again?  Based on what?  What they say God the Father wants of us, to protect fetuses and treat women like cattle?  Breeding cows who have no moral or legal agency if they get pregnant and don't want to breed?  We need the calves, so the cows are expendable.  As long as we have enough calves, the cows outgrow their usefulness and can be fed on.  

 

Where do we see this?  In every religious autocracy around the globe.  Women have no agency under law, are considered spiritually inferior and culpable and some men get to decide, usually ugly, mean old ones masquerading as authority with not a spiritual bone in their bodies.

 

We need to stop this!  My dream of Mary Howling at the corruption of religion comes to me front and center.  This is stuff to howl about.  People and pundits are discussing a threat to our democracy.  Let's be clear, whether you call it white supremacy, which it is, or the ugliest misogyny, woman hating, which it is, it is totalitarian patriarchy.  It isn't the way it's always been, but it's been this way for far too long.  We, men, women and self-identifying persons, have the opportunity to change things up for good.

 

We can stand up to the brainwashing forces of these religious patriarchs who are trying to turn back women's freedom and fight for every American person's right, regardless of class or culture, to govern her/their own body.  It is corrupt beyond belief to use people's vulnerable need for a faith in what lies beyond death as a weapon of control and oppression over women.

 

Patriarchy is a corrupt nightmare; it has built male power over women around the world for about 6,000 years.  It has justified a hierarchical power system of class and privilege that destroys community; it breeds misogyny, racism and cruelty.  Do we realize what a brief respite women attained in the US from the moral and legal restrictions of patriarchal religions? Roe v Wade liberated us in 1973 from male intervention in choices we make about our bodies. Women have been legally independent of American state and church intervention in their reproductive lives for FIFTY YEARS!  And now, we're back; Christian patriarchal men and their women allies are gloating.  Eve is back under Adam's thumb, so God, who was pissed at both of them, is mollified.  

Thank goddess for Jesus, he's the strongest ancient Feminist I know; remember do as my momma says?  The macho code, then or now, doesn't allow for the obvious respect women so deserve and Jesus gave them.

 

Please don't think getting to where we got (which now we're not) was a matter of committees and meetings.  It was a tooth and nail struggle against the smug bastards who think God is swinging their dicks for them.    And guess who we're dealing with still?  Patriarchal men and women using religion to bind and burn women, once again.  

 

Yet, I am so grateful for the amazing women all over the world and in the US  today, leading the Feminist clarion call to get off our asses and refuse to let religion enslave us again.  

The incredible miracle of birth is all on women; we were asked to do this  humanitarian service through our physical bodies by Love, and apparently, we said yes.  There came a time that some men filled with jealousy and greed decided to topple women's power and subject them through cruelty and religion to their own wills and advantages.   That's when the shit began to go seriously downhill. Patriarchy was and is a failed experiment from the get go because of the utter imbalance in the natural order of things that it defies.  

 

Patriarchy is a cracking antique social paradigm that always polarizes and then raises one opposite against the other, male/female, white/colored, rich/poor.  Patriarchy is always a pyramid and He's on top, in the hereafter and in the here and now.  As much as patriarchy has succeeded in ruling the globe, it is desperately failing millions and millions of earthlings everywhere.  Wars and insatiable greed for material gains that will evaporate the minute death knocks, what absurdity; yet, here we are doing this insanity again and again. These war-god, woman-hating and slave making religions have brought us six thousand years of  unnecessary human misery, yet we want to cling to beliefs that don't serve us. The definition of insanity, don't we all know, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

 

Why don't we change god up a little?  Does divinity really have to be your daddy? Why not let divinity be bigger than that?  Why don't we examine our own being; are we our bodies?  Or do we exist, after death and in our dreams in spirit form?  Render unto the physical what belongs in the physical; divinity is an open book which we each get to read about in our own hearts, minds and dreams; and in Love.  Love is god; there's no room for all this ugliness.  It's purely patriarchal and we can change that because patriarchy is a system that abuses the majority of us, using young men as cannon fodder for insane wars or dehumanizing young women as sex toys and baby machines 24/7.  But it's about the way we think, which rules the way that we behave.

 

You don't have to leave anything good about your religion behind; just don't commit hate, misogyny and racism in the name of your god.  I am positive that divinity doesn't want women to suffer because of the gift they have; a woman is a whole autonomous spirit, just like a man, just like any person, regardless of how they identify in the physical.  Reproductive justice is for everyone.  It's easy to tell true Christians, Jesus lovers, from the bullshit ones.  Jesus loved, trusted and respected women and would never deny a woman her own authority.  He probably died for standing up for them in the bleak patriarchy in which he lived.  It's not about detaching from the core of your beliefs; it is about detaching from the money-making false prophets of patriarchy who want to control women and peoples of color or gender difference.  Men can be feminists, the way white people can not be racists, by continuously realizing what we've inherited from so much institutionalized indoctrination over the years and figuring out together how we fix this.

 

For one, we can change our own hearts, look within ourselves for what we truly know, from our own waking and dreaming lives, Love Is The Answer.  We are the channel for this universal truth to manifest.  We are all spiritual beings having a physical existence, which is temporary and material.  We are eternal, anyone who has experienced a lucid dream, an Out of Body Experience or a Near Death Experience knows what it is to be out of the physical and conscious of our existence still.  

 

Divinity does not demand that women suffer or allow man to "lord" it over her.  That was clearly some assholes' idea of how to have power over women. We don't need to return to any external worship of our own human projections; we can turn within to the divinity that dwells in our hearts and speaks to us in dreams.  

 

 

 

What Will It Take?

 A dear friend, in the midst of a political discussion recently, opined that he thought civil war might be a reality in the not distant future.  This chilled me to the bone for it’s potential to materialize. Unless?

Of course we were numb at the news of yet another flipped out male youth with the power of guns way bigger than any bit of consciousness he possesses, murdering little children in cold blood, like it was a video game.

 

Now comes the avalanche of opining by our “men” in charge about whether or not we should at last take responsibility as a society for our attitudes towards guns and the perpetual harm they do to us as a collective, a society.  In patriarchy, a gun is a symbol of manhood, no?  What would Freud say?

 

I have many times here tried to put in perspective an understanding of patriarchy that underscores its basic structure as a thinking model, not a gender model. Not all men are patriarchal and not all women aren’t patriarchal.  We live in a 6 thousand year old repressive and abusive paradigm that is psychically fueled by religion.  Six thousand years may sound like a long time; it’s a small fraction of the time civilizations have existed on this planet.

 

When you believe in a male god, you call Him/He all the time, it gels an image in your mind that will guide your beliefs,  perceptions and your choices as a person. The patriarchal god is extremely controlling of his “children” the human race; his superiority warrants all sorts of cruelty and misogyny.  The stories told about this sky god in the patriarchal religious texts spin myriad tales of inflicting pain and suffering on humanity in the name of this god.  In the OT, Abraham barely misses having to slice his son’s throat to prove to this insane god his loyalty; in the NT, this insane god does it himself, sacrifices his only son to justify and meliorate his own petty peeve with humanity.

 

These are beliefs; there are ways to know that God/Goddess/Spirit is Love in your own daily/nightly experience.  Our world is desperate for a paradigm that isn’t greedy and unkind, like the patriarchal paradigms that are always demanding blood and sacrifice and elevating one gender and race above all others.  Because they are beliefs, however ingrained in us since baptism, they are not real.  When our hearts crack open and we love, not Hollywood or gender specific love, but the Love that is the real deity in our universe, the Love we can touch in each other and in our dreams, the Love that when we open to it, is our ultimate destiny, our ultimate bliss.  You don’t have to believe me or anyone else about this; it’s in you and you can experience it yourself, especially if you pay attention to your dreams.

 

I look to dreaming as a possible avenue to reshaping our paradigm enough for us to act, to save, our home, this beautiful planet, and ourselves here in the physical.  We have a sacred responsibility to pass on the most love and the most beauty we can to our children.  Instead, our patriarchal paradigms flay our souls from our bodies and demand we place the most precious aspect of our human existence in the hands of greedy, misogynist men who enforce what we shalt and shalt not do.

 

We need to be having a different human experience on the planet.  One that indigenous American teachers, like Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, speak of today.  Spirit is one energy we all experience, including animals and all that is life on this planet.  Patriarchal authoritarian pyramid models of “governance” are classic all over the world.  At the bottom of those global patriarchal pyramids are children, women and non-dominant patriarchal races.  At the moment, white males seem to be in charge, followed closely by other despotic male autocrats around the globe.

 

I have also many times described these rules as enforced by a frame of mind and a blind allegiance to shit that doesn’t make sense.  The most toxic enforcer of this patriarchal thinking is our so-called “religions” that propose to all and sundry that the supreme ultimate invisible deity is some old fart with a beard.  To him all men bow and in return, this super daddy bestows on men the right to do whatever they want to women, like deny them full personhood or health care under the law, the same as men.

 

I have many times said that this shit isn’t as old as you might think, given the scale of time that humanity has managed amazing civilizations on this planet that weren’t patriarchal.  We have been taught a very skewed history; we can’t see before the 6 thousand years of this patriarchal paradigm.  Our written history is not the whole story of humanity on this beautiful planet. Things are not, as many think, “always was and always will be”.

 

I have many times pointed to the facts taught to us by modern physics and metaphysics that reality isn’t matter, it’s energy, and that the “observer” (any conscious person) can influence the outcome of how this energy takes shape.  I think of “The Secret” and manifesting your ego driven needs as the McDonalds’ version of this universal law.  The version that counts, that you take with you beyond your physical death, is the evolution of your awareness.  Our divinity is part of who we are; we are not born defective and in need of patriarchal daddy intervention in order to qualify for social acceptability.  

 

Under the patriarchal paradigms we are asked to uphold, there is no room for trust in our own spiritual awareness.  It's simple.  We are spiritual beings having a physical existence.  We don’t need to believe in anything in particular, we need to be who we came here to be.  We have a spiritual connection to soul, self or however you name your connection to your eternal existence.  We live in two realities at once, the temporal physical and the eternal spiritual. We know this when we track our dreams frequently with respect and curiosity. Dreams are a bridge between our waking and spiritual selves.

 

Our “after” life depends on our choices now. Christianity, Islam and Judaism espouse choices that warp our organic spirituality into twisted shame, penitence and servitude and can be especially lethal for women. By the way, as I’ve said so many times, Jesus, did not put up with patriarchal bullshit and it got him killed.  The fact that patriarchs decided to take his story and run with the Messiah angle is a continuing source of irritation to him, I’ll bet.

 

A paradigm like the toxic one we are seeing disintegrate before us is not invincible; at least not in the ways that matter.  Each person that calls bullshit and starts to educate themselves in ways to be more loving to others and to themselves tears a thread from this malicious web that has frozen us in such discord.

 

No one person, of any gender, will turn this tide of destruction, but each person that refuses to participate in it, each person who opens to new, unimagined possibilities for our survival, each person who learns how to love, each person who participates in any way towards a collective solution, is saving not only themselves, but others, too.

 

On a time line of human reality, “you are here”.  The expansion of our experience can draw on what was before this disaster of a paradigm, but it is up to each of us, however we identify sexually, to help create a paradigm that is fueled by the energy of the universe, Love, which, to materialize, we ourselves must embody.

 

This means daring to embody the energy of divinity, of Love, in any way you can.  Sing, dance, play music, laugh a lot, be kind, patient, giving; all those great things and do them in a way that brings joy to your life.

 

I don’t know what will happen.  What will it take to turn this tide of hate and division that so many patriarchal zombies are manifesting around the world, including, in the USA.  I do know that however grisly it gets, we still survive this consciousness beyond the physical body, as proven by dream research, to name one avenue you can explore.

 

Taking this into consideration, it’s important for each of us to ask ourselves what we are here to learn and what we are here to do.  Anything each of the 7 billion of us does in Love for others and for ourselves will help tip these crazy scales.  Also, if we are to give up the psychic poison of patriarchal religions, we need an alternative.  Any time we make a connection to spirit dreaming or meditating or walking in nature with heart open, we are experiencing our soul selves. There are so many ways to experience the reality of Love. We can let go of the fear-based paradigm and embrace the one that is with us always, our organic spiritual connection so evident in life.  We have nothing to prove and plenty to do.  Each person’s contribution is important.  

 

May it be so.

 

 

King Kong and Soul Recovery

I recently wrote here about my encounter with King Kong in my dreaming. I was talking about how amazing dream symbols are, how they morph and dance in our dreams, sometimes thrilling, sometimes terrorizing us into attention.

When we trust our dreams to be out for our own good, we know that even the most unwelcome dreams might hold healing for our battered souls.  Why are our souls battered; soul's run on pure love energy and in our might-makes-right patriarchal world, some souls find love energy too scarce for their survival.  Psychiatry calls it dissociation, when overwhelming trauma causes some aspect of ourselves to split from our awareness; many ancient and indigenous cultures call it soul loss.  As we are often unconscious of this happening, perhaps because it was in our childhood, we don't realize that actions we take from the habit of protecting ourselves the only way we could in the trauma moment, are now not so effective in serving us well.

When my partner was hit by a car many years ago, in the moments before impact, he saw it coming and told me he heard a voice in his head say, "I don't want to be here for this"; that caused him to rise up on the balls of his feet, as if to jump. That movement probably saved his life; he was thrown and battered instead of crushed under the heavy car.  He's worse for wear, but mostly fine now.  That story illustrates for me what is common in crisis and trauma, we seek any escape we can, if not in a physical realm, then in a psychic one.

Dreams have the power to give us healing symbols.  A friend of mine asked me after my last King Kong post what this symbol teaches me?  I told her I'd let her know when I found out.  Using a dream symbol begins with recording the dream so you can return to it to refresh the story in your mind.  Dream Re-entry, as Robert Moss teaches it or Active Imagination, as Jung conceived it, are valuable ways to fathom a dream.

Dreams are the right brain's domain; imagination is the engine of our creativity.  When we approach dreams with creativity and imagination instead of logic and analysis, ("what does it mean?) we get results that benefit our healing.  

Re-entry is often incredibly healing; it's also greatly entertaining. (I like to re-enter a dream I choose before I go to sleep or when I wake up in the middle of the night; for me it's a great way to fall asleep already dreaming.) I let my imagination spin the story my dream began into one where I am able to feel safe and capable of using the myriad options dreams allow to save myself in the dream story and gain the gifts this dream offers.  I can fly to safety, talk to any character or object and bring into the story whomever, whatever I choose to assist me, to help me feel safe or keep me good company.

My quest to understand Kong's part in my dreams begins with me re-entering the dream with the help of new characters I create to support me. My plan is to get Kong to a huge wild life sanctuary and the freedom he deserves and to begin developing our friendship. Over many re-entries over many days, I befriend Kong and find him a willing guardian and protector of not just me, but of the little kid me who suffered trauma and could now use some love and understanding from her big sister, me.

In dreams time is literally immaterial so I can readily get back to that little sad, confused girl and help her gain a sense of safety, support and guidance that my sincerely loving parents didn't know how to provide.  How?  By creating a story with her in it where she feels safe and she gets to do things that make her wildly happy, which in turn reminds me of what makes me happy now.  It's a win-win.  Whatever confidence and self-love she gains in the process is a transfusion of soul for me now.

Robert Moss developed the practice of soul recovery in Active Dreaming; it differs from the shamanic tradition of soul retrieval in that it doesn't necessitate a shaman's help; the dreamer has the power of being both the healer and the healed, as Robert puts it, to be their own shaman. It also doesn't presume a cultural cosmology; it uses a dream as a gateway to where, when and what must be done for the good of the dreamer. 

I've found this practice to work at a profound level, not just for my soul healing, but for many dreamers with whom I've shared these wonderfully creative ways of doing dream play.  I suggest that a person who has suffered severe trauma and is experiencing terrifying nightmares not attempt to go it alone; I hope they can find a compassionate professional  counselor to hold the physical space with them and guide them while they bravely work to heal. Many others of us have been knocked around in ways that damage but don't cripple us.  Unfortunately, we sometimes push the wounds out of consciousness and don't face the pain in our day to day, busy waking ego lives. Dreams seem to know when we need a particular aspect of our personal unconscious to heal if we're to live our best lives.  They are not above using monsters to get our attention, but if we pay attention, they can become gentler and often, extremely funny. If we take the time to get to know our dreams through the stories and symbols they offer us, we develop ways to heal spiritually, at our soul level.  

My initial way of honoring this dream was to look up the story of the making of King Kong with all its subsequent cinematic iterations.  The original story is so obviously a white male's fantasy, where women exist with a defined sexualized role in the margins of the action, usually as victims to be saved, and people of different race and culture can be caricatured and equally marginalized.  Of course, Nature can also be conquered by man, and Kong must die to prove the white male hero's power. The height of irony is delivered at the end: Kong has been catapulted off the Empire State Building by military planes and lies dead in the street.  The big shot producer whose hubris is responsible for the mayhem, destruction and unnecessary death of Kong, intones sadly,  "Beauty killed the Beast."

Yeah, and Eve ate the apple.

So it behooves Beauty, the archetypal feminine, to also free herself from whatever chains this bullshit patriarchal paradigm has inflicted on her psyche and rescue Beast from the insanity that motivates patriarchal thinkers and leads them to bring us all to the brink of physical extinction.  We will all continue existence in other forms, of course, but I sure hope the misogynist racist folk in the world don't get any more beautiful planets to fuck up.

As for me, I see great promise for us in embracing our dream experiences and wisdom.  Once we discover that some things can be addressed on the inside, in our inner worlds, and that our inner worlds that we travel in dreams are as real as are our waking physical worlds, perhaps we'll gain the resource, the magic key, that tips the scales back into balance. If we must die trying, then at least we can live somewhere, after this physical life, away from ignorant racist misogynists. We get to choose. 

The more of us can use our dreams to heal ourselves and help others to heal, the more the scales tip on the side of hope.  When we know that spirituality doesn't have to be earned because it's organic to us and that we are connected to soul/spirit through dreaming, we are free to explore both waking and dreaming realities with more awareness, compassion and courage. 

May it be so.

Photo 4887362 / King © Han Cheng Tan | Dreamstime.com

A Perspective on Time That Dreaming and Age Has Taught Me

My mom had the best Cuban sayings that she would pepper in the wisdom she gave us. One of my all time favorites is, “Mas sabe el diablo por viejo que por ser diablo.” The devil knows more because he’s old than because he’s the devil. 

I was talking with a dear friend about young people contemplating suicide in our country and how it is epidemic.  It’s so distressing to witness, let alone to live that sad reality as a parent or guardian. When we’re very young, perhaps we don’t see time as changing all things as easily as we do when we’re older.  Our passion for whatever we deem to be our sorrows is overwhelming.  We can’t speak it and it seems it will never go away or get better.

 

What is causing our youth to suffer so poignantly?  We need to listen to them and then do something to alleviate that suffering. How can we better open our hearts to the young?  How can we open our ears and hearts and help?

 

Listening is a tremendous skill to develop.  One way to develop your listening skills is to listen to your dreams.   You would think something so simple and so beneficial would be taught in every home and school to our children, that we’d be telling them, here’s a simple way to connect with your inner life, your organic spirituality. Here’s what you do to understand what you’re doing in your dreams and what indeed, you can do.  Your wildest dreams, your most passionate desires can come true in dreams and perhaps, as they do, so they will in your waking reality. Fear is power in your dreams; you can learn to do much to create what you want in dreaming, despite the obstacles.

 

However, we aren’t “in control” in dreaming, we are hyper aware spirit beings with super powers, but those powers come from powers greater than ourselves.  Above all, dreaming has taught me that Love is the greatest power in the dream worlds.  That it should also reign in our hearts here on this beautiful struggling planet, I can only dream.

 

Why don’t we teach our children to dream well now?  Dreaming can help them rely on themselves as eternal spiritual beings, living for a purpose unique to each of them.  Since it wasn’t taught to us, we adults need to learn how to dream first and how to live our best dreams, as Robert Moss puts it.  Doing so can help us get our creativity back and change the things that need to be changed so that our kids don’t have to feel so overwhelmed. 

 

Only Love guides without asking for anything but love back.  God is not a man or a woman; that’s how we may manifest in the physical, but we are energy connected in every way to the source, Love.   All the confusion and constraints are man-made, literally.  Patriarchy has truly set a barrier to people feeling good about themselves and their sexual expression, an iron curtain in the psyche.   Sexuality belongs to the physical; spirituality is formless.  There are no genitals in the afterlife unless you want them, of course. It’s not God the Father or God the Mother.  It’s Love. Simple.  Love.

 

Living a spiritual life has nothing to do with joining some denomination of patriarchal religion and goose-stepping to whatever they tell you to do.  Living a spiritual life is paying attention to your constant connection to spirit, to Love.  Participating in your dream life is a way of participating in your spiritual life while living your physical one, as best you can.

 

What is the perspective on time that dreaming has taught me?  There is no “time” in my dreaming experience; dreams can take me back, spotlight the present or fly me forward to what’s coming on the river of temporal events in the physical.  

 

"Old" is another construct of the physical world.  Living a long life of dream exploration and waking experience can lend much needed perspective to any life; especially, the perspective that the end is a new beginning, one in which we can be intentional about creating.  Once I die, I will continue my work in the service of expanding dream awareness, in myself and in others.  Perhaps, I'll volunteer for dream bringer duties, part time.

 

I also plan to surf the tunnel of an amazing ocean wave unafraid and many other things, as well.  I once had a beautiful dream that presented itself as a gateway through death’s transition, if I should want it.  Yes, I want it and am gifted to have it. If I can, I will enter that landscape and be guided as I was in my dream.   

Once we really listen to the way dreams speak to us and what they consider important (it’s rarely our egos), we can let go of the self torture we’ve been taught or terrorized into making our belief system. We can begin to experience our spirituality organically, not on a merit system.  As William Buhlman, master teacher of the OBE experience says, the first thing we need to let go of in order to experience our authentic dream/energy bodies is to examine our conscious and unconscious learned beliefs and let go of them in favor of direct, experiential exploration of our uber-real inner worlds.

May we listen and learn from our dreams so that we can help our wonderful young people survive the fake world and find strength in their spirits to do what they were called to do in the physical.

The Power of a Dream Symbol

 

In a previous post, I told you about a delightful gorilla dream as an example of how fun and funny animal dreams can be.  I didn’t fear that gorilla, but when he came back as King Kong, well then; it’s time to take stock.

When we have a dream practice, which means we pay attention to our dreams, record them, at least some of the time, and ponder them often, we recognize the power of a dream symbol. 

 

If my dream symbol grows from personal dream energy to the archetypal size of King Kong, it is an important story my dream is telling me.  This means I go on the trail of this symbol, what Robert Moss refers to as "dream archeology." First I search through my own dream recollections and written records.  In King Kong's case, this is the third instance of this energy in my dreams in the past decade.  I print out each dream and add it to my journal now because whatever this dream is signaling with this symbol, it holds healing energy available to me now.  

 

The challenge is to ponder the symbol a dream has presented for quite a while and in many ways until I have a felt sense of what the dream is saying, if not an intellectual explanation of its meaning. It’s not that dreams are never obvious. I’ve had many dreams that were decidedly unsubtle and quite verbally direct, but that’s not the way of dreams generally.  Understanding them can be like playing charades or Pictionary. 

 

Given the fact that many of the great Aesclepian temples of ancient Greece had amphitheaters for performance of plays and that the temples were places where people seeking healing came to petition the god, Aesclapius, for a healing dream, perhaps those ancient actors in Greece performed people’s dreams.  Was dream theater the catalyst for modern theater?

 

Dream language is definitely the language of pictures not of words. According to an early pioneer of modern dream studies, Dr. Ann Faraday, it’s no coincidence that our earliest ancestors communicated through drawings, some of which are magically still extant on cave walls like those of Lascaux, in France.  She also points out how most all of us, as children, loved to draw and tell stories from our drawings.  Pictorial, symbolic language is inborn in us; perhaps because it’s the language of our dreams and we are never apart from our dreaming selves.

 

To honor this dream symbol that has so forcefully called on my attention, I begin by asking various questions. What is the context of each dream adventure?  Is the location familiar, unfamiliar? What is my dream self doing and feeling; am I happy about where she’s at?  Who else is in my dream? What is my relationship to each character in the dream, and in waking life, if I know them?  

 

Another step to open the gift a dream is offering me is sharing my dream with other trusted dreamers.  A dream friend is one who honors the dream as yours but can also put her/himself in your dream shoes and give you their associations and feeling responses.  In Active Dreaming's Lightning Dreaming process, that feedback is always offered without personal projection onto the dreamer by using the preface, "If this were my dream..." 

 

Whether I share my dream in that way or not, I’m going to have fun exploring what I can find on the internet.  I’m not looking for the “meaning” of gorilla or King Kong in my searches.  I’m letting serendipity lead and just checking out various references like the King Kong movies and movie reviews for starters.

 

Wow, what an archetypal patriarchal white man shadow King Kong turns out to be!  Far out! My dreams are not playing; they are posing an important challenge for me and I am excited to give it my best effort.

 

In another post, I’ll share what this symbol teaches me, but for now, I want to share with you this understanding of the vitality of dream symbols for personal and spiritual growth, as well as for good fun.  May your dreams shine a path through the darkness. May we become strong enough dreamers to bring about a healing future for all and for our Earth.

 

May it be so.