Anniversaries

It's February 21st, the 21st anniversary of my dad's death. Of course I went to bed last night asking for word from him. My dad was the BEST. I always say to my brother, he was a Buddha.

My dream:
I'm traveling in a bus, sitting at the window, when I see Celia Cruz crossing the street, right by my window. I know she is celebrating her birthday. I open the window, lean out and say; "Happy Birthday, Celia. You're the best." I proceed to heap my accolades on her. She is gracious, attentive, sweet and responsive. (Just like my dad would be). I know in the dream that she dies just a short time after this encounter, but I don't feel the need to say anything about that; this is before she dies. The feeling is of amazing opportunity and privilege, celebrity encounter.

In waking life, when Celia died, I meditated and asked her to be my godmother. A dream teacher I respect said she was too high up to pay any attention to me; I don't think she feels that way. This isn't the first Celia dream for me. I am so grateful for her blessing and for my dad's.

To me the correlations are evident. I ask for an anniversary message from my dad, (what we all want from our departed loved ones); "Dad help me and are you OK? " Celia is the quintessential cool Cuban and the ultimate message is; "If I love you baby, how can you go wrong?"

That's the message I think my dad would want me to hear. I wish he were here to say it plain; he would but he's not. This dream is such a gift from him.

Synchronistically, when I spoke with my brother, he told me a dream about encountering a woman celebrity he had just had that has striking and wonderful similarities to mine. I love when that happens; I figure we each got a present from my dad. That doesn't surprise me either; he loves us both the same:-)

That's why this is how I feel about the dream dimension: OMG! THANK YOU!

Feel free to comment. I'm sending this idea into cyberspace via blog to see what I get back in this dimension.

Dream School

Last night I had a wonderful dream; one of those that I feel is worth risking losing sleep over by writing it down right away, even at 3:26 AM.

I'm in a class. I love this class; we've got a great teacher. He's passionate, learned and resourceful in his teaching. We're reading from erotica magazines he's ordered for the class. He's a maverick, risks upsetting the authorities by choosing such a risque curriculum; I admire him. He loves to teach and cares for his students. He asks 3 different women to read the same sentence on page 3, to give their dramatic interpretation of the reading. I'm ready with my reading but he doesn't call on me, which doesn't diminish what I learn from hearing the other women read. As I walk out of class I hear him sigh as he moves to his lectern by the window at the left front of the class; "Oh, the dependence of women."

I have another class with a young woman teacher next; also at the end of class I hear her sigh the same thing to herself. I turn and tell her how amazingly synchronistic her saying that is and why.

I wake up delighted to have a synchronicity experience in a dream and to hear such a loud and clear message. I title the dream "Oh the dependence of women". Dream schools are one of my favorite dream locations. They alert me to the fact that there's something I have to learn or something I am learning. I've also met some amazing teachers in dreaming that have helped me learn big lessons for my waking life. I recognize many lessons in this dream and many keys that may help me open doors that are blocking me in waking life. This is a very good dream and I'm grateful for it.

Also relevant is that yesterday I received one of those fowarded emails from a friend who thinks differently than I do; it was about how feminism has ruined life for women and reminiscing about the good old days when a woman was pampered and kept by her husband and had it made without going out in the world to work, the way our grandmothers had it made. Well, I don't know about her grandmothers, but one of mine died very young, poor, dependent on family and ill, leaving her children to fend for themselves at an early age, and the other died relatively young, maybe in her fifties, years before my grandfather, after 18 pregnancies, 13 children.

Obviously my dream source agrees with me. Yet, it touched so perfectly on my own dependency, giving me so much to think about, that I thought I'd share it with you. Any thoughts?

Some Dream Games and Meet My Cat

When I'm going through a dream dry spell, I turn to my journals from years past and play some dream games; this way I don't obsess about not remembering my dreams. Plus, the perspective that time gives me about the meaning of past dreams is one of the major marvels of working with my dreams.

For instance, I'll go through past journals and make note of the images in the dreams of a particular month. I write summaries of each under the dream dates on a new page which I then install at the beginning of that month. When I go back to that journal the next time, each month's summary page sparks more understanding for me of my life journeys. I recognize personal struggles with love and fear, my health and my spiritual development; they're tremendously relevant to me now. Often an image makes me laugh while, at the same time, it's opening my eyes to something difficult for me. This is a convincing proof to me that dream messages come from some divine source of Love.

For instance, today while perusing my 2001 journal, I opened at random to the summary page for the month of September. The first summary describes a dream where pairs of my shoes are scattered across the bedroom floor; my note reads, 'The many different paths I've walked.' I also note that one pair is 'baby shit brown' and I wrote, 'very old shit'. I think that's a wonderfully funny way to point me to childhood wounds which might still be holding me back.

As I write this I realize that I chose September, 2001, a time that shook our collective world. I remember that I had several dreams dating from July 4 of 2001 up through September featuring terrorists. Robert Moss has written about how many people from around the world reported precognitive dreams with elements of the fateful 9/11 catastrophe in them. I'll take a closer look at mine; perhaps it will give me something to share with you in a future post.

Back to dream games, though, this illustrates how re-reading old journals often uncovers dreams of the future which weren't recognized as precognitive at the time. That's just what happened with the arrival of my wonderful cat Sunny.

After the death of my cat, Lucy, in 2005 I decided I didn't want any more pets, I wanted to be free to travel, etc. My husband kindly accepted my wishes, though he'd always rather have animals around him. One early morning in August of 2007, I opened my back door on a glorious day to find a beautiful gray and white Maine Coon under my lilac bush, skinny as a rail. He looked up at me and MEOWED! I knew he was saying, "Feed me; I'm hungry," so I put out a can of tuna and he let me pet him while he ate. It's a very long story, but it was love at first sight. Now he's installed as the grand pasha of our home and we're both very happy to serve him.

What I couldn't figure out is why I didn't dream about him ahead of time; with my past cats, a dream had foretold their coming. I went back in that year's journal and, sure enough, in June I found a dream entry telling how a dear friend (who in waking life was always threatening to drop off a cat for us) had brought us a Maine Coon kitten. The last line of that dream report is, 'And I couldn't believe how much I love him.'

I often tell people this; we dream the future all the time, we just don't pay attention. If we write dreams down, we learn to pay attention. Using dream journals for self-reflection, meditation and personal growth is not only rewarding, it's fun. I hope these ideas are of some service; I'd love to hear yours.

Reality, What a Concept.

Once you get into playing with your dreams, in my experience and that of many others who count on dreams for awareness, the concept of "real" vs. "just dreaming" tends to blur. Popular usage sees reality as conscious experience and dreaming as little better than fantasy; nothing a rational individual need attend to.

Of course, bread on the table and a roof over your head is a bottom line necessity; the material world does exact it's energy and attention. Care of body is a waking task to achieve; care of soul is also a life task, running parallel, perhaps manifesting most clearly in sleep states.

Different realities form our whole reality; waking reality and sleeping or dream reality. Another way of saying we are physical and we are spiritual. I'm an advocate for paying attention to both.

People say of death, "Well, you can't take it with you." They're talking about all one can achieve materially on this waking plane we typically call "reality." So, from birth to finish, you can do and achieve, etc, etc, etc, but what can you take with you?

I think the one thing you can take with you is the sum of what your soul has become because of what you've chosen to do. Simply put, for me, if I learn to love, if what I take away from these years on this material plane is transferable to a non-embodied state, because it's not material, so much the better.

Winter proves one thing; die we must. There is a natural cycle of birth, life and maturing until you fall off the tree and rot back to the earth. What's left?

If winter and death are the grim realities of waking life; what are the parallel dream realities?

These holidays are about hope. Whether you're pagan, Christian, or Jew; hope and deliverance prevail. What is the hope?

If that is something we must each answer, my hope is in my dream source and in my dream reality. I've received the comfort of knowing that I'm not alone and that this isn't all there is through dreams. I hope my holiday post, previous to this, says this much more eloquently and speaks for me.

May you never feel alone. Every blessing for the new year.

Holiday Greetings Dear Readers

Music:
"I Can Hear the Angels"
Shapeshifter
Podsafe Audio

The Shadow Knows

In Carl Jung's paradigm on dreams, facing the shadow is the first significant bit of dream work a body can do on the road to individuation. Individuation is his term for enlightenment, self-awareness and union with the Self, or so I believe. Saying hello to your shadow is I imagine what Jesus meant when he said to take the beam out of your own eye before you endeavor to remove the mote from your neighbor's.

You meet your shadow when you catch yourself criticizing someone's faults and honestly ask yourself, do I do that, as well? Am I that way, too, sometimes?

If you haven't arrived at that much self-awareness, your dreams might prod you on this road.

One of my favorite shadow dreams is from over 20 years ago - I'm in a coffee shop with a friend, sitting at a booth. She's much more attractive than I am and the handsome Greek man behind the counter of pastries is flirting with her.

I often do dream drawings because they are such delightful surprises. This one is extraordinary in that I never intended to draw myself as a cat. I practice a technique in which I work very fast, broad strokes, no forethought; I lay my materials out and go to work spontaneously.

I had to laugh when I saw it for the pun it is; catty. I'm able to picture this image any time I feel jealousy. This helped me understand that jealousy is really a feeling of boredom, lack of engagement and isolation that can easily be remedied by taking positive action to entertain oneself, something that cats also do well.

Surprised by Joy

Another wonderful reason to follow dreams is that they can open the door to our truest spiritual metaphors, the most direct roads to the Center, the God/Goddess we may each yearn for.

"Surprised by Joy" is actually a title by the renowned Christian writer, C.S.Lewis. To me, it describes the spiritual moments in my life and ("gracias a la vida") they have been many. Among my most powerful spiritual experiences are some big dreams that have sustained me for decades.

One such dream was "Howling Mary". I'll share the whole dream with you sometime, but the image that I take from it is of Mother Mary coming to life, howling with pain and rage. I was 21, about to graduate from university. I was in pre-feminist consciousness then; but that dream was the door to so much that followed; it's still one of the most holy dream gifts I've received.

Another was a very Zen dream series at the beginning of this decade that, in my mind, was like an instant course in enlightenment and nirvana. I came back from one dream with the questions; "Can the Ego be dissolved? What is the role of the Observer?" I had a follow-up dream of such blissful experience of Oneness that I came back saying to myself - I am I, but not I, and I'll never be able to explain this, not even to myself."

As you can imagine, that's given me a lot to think about.