Dreaming Change

Okay, so much is political again today here on the WWW. It’s okay. Gotta have the feels and causes, right?

Last night, there came another in a string of interesting dreams that’s been visiting me lately. Lucky for me, my dreams have become so much clearer, easier to translate this last decade since awakening has come.

So it was that an old teacher showed up with this map in my dream. My eyes scanned across it’s surface and I found that it had been written in a different language. The key to understanding it was understanding the language. I had assumed that if I were given a map in, say, Lithuanian, I’d still he able to read it. But not this one. I couldn’t tell what the scale was, what any of the words meant…it was more than just names for locations (which is easy enough to guess). But then, this was no ordinary map and this was no ordinary dream.

My teacher sat across from me, beaming in excitement over her discovery which she had unfolded in front of me. As this wordless exchange happened, I opened my mouth to ask her how to read it and I instantly returned to waking (and having overslept my alarm clock, too–sorry Hannah!).

Simply put, we cannot understand the new while using the old ways of thinking. We talk about how people don’t get us, how a political party or group of some kind is clueless about an issue, or how we repeat mistakes often with tragic results over and over. We keep doing things the same way, approaching a problem the same way all with no change in outcomes.

“Um…hello? Earth to human: the way to a new way of seeing the world is by changing the part of you that will allow for better comprehension: your mind.”

All the great teachers have taught this. Buddha did and so did Jesus (his were obfuscated by way of incorrect translation from Greek to Latin—check the word “metanoia” and how both Jesus and John the Baptist used it to better understand this one to get how they advocated “changing your mind”).

In helping to bring change in life, I have found that something always has to give in order to see things in a new way. You just can’t get there using the old map. Something that you take as belief, assumption, or that immovable pillar of understanding may in fact be blocking the way. It could be ANYTHING….a belief, a desire to stay rooted in being a victim (and cleverly not taking responsibility for ones’ feelings and subsequent actions) It might be how you think men should be treated, or how women should be treated. It might be a religious belief that was promulgated thousands of years in our past in tents by Bedouin-like tribes that still governs our behavior in the world in regards to each other. All of this can be shed through a simple act of radical willingness to bridge the gap, to understand by setting aside whatever is blocking our path.

It takes humility.

It removes our savage habit of retaliation against the “ignorant infidel” for their own lack of awareness. Blocked people at war with other’s own blocks or limitations. It’s rather hilarious when you think about it. And it would be a real belly laugh if it weren’t so incredibly serious. People will deny you, unfriend you, demonize, and even kill you over this. It’s hilarious for maybe three short seconds ’till the sh*t gets real. What I’m talking about are the principles involved in the forces that drive you, me, and everyone else here on the planet. Conditioning. Belief. Dogma. Go deeper and what drives us in a negative way is fear.

Curiously, the soul knows it’s contract with the multiverse and it’s implicit divinity, and it’s compass can be read when the way has been cleared of as much bias (conditioned belief) as possible….to read the maps that lead us into those new lands. Again, openess, ready for the memory banks to be wiped, the old programming scrapped, is required. And no, I don’t at all advocate ever following what another says is the way. Inquire, seek. It’s in us to know, to discover. Our past is littered with wrong belief.

Here in the U.S. we once believed that our colonizing North America was approved of by God. As we killed and marginalized the indigenous People here our ancestors actually believed God was on their side. I could cite hundreds more of these examples, but the point here is that no matter how good you think your model is, it is constrained and limited by the thinking in the past. In the sands of Ur, where Abraham lived, the concept of woman coming from a man’s rib was dreamed up. Talk about crafty! The moment someone protests the characterization of women as lesser, or an afterthought to the primary and blessed male of God, it is explained how sweet it is that men and women were once from the same flesh, joined as one and now forever seeking that union. You get the idea; mysoginistic bullshit out the yinyang. Still, in our day, it is a thing discussed as if it were real. We all have work to do. Let’s get to it, shall we?

Beyond your programmed beliefs about death penalties, life and death, homosexuality, dark or light-skinned people, or how the role of government, or ten thousand other things should be in our world, the pearl of truth will always emerge wordless but knowing. Our problem as Westerners is we havent a clue how to deal with truth neing a wordless knowing thing. We are so used to rational thought that the intuitive scares us, and when we are scared of something, we demonize it. We make jokes, we do anything to forestall actually trying to understand it. Part of reading that map is letting go of the fear that the new or different presents to us. I have known people who, awakened even, have lied and denied just as away to remain in their comfy place. Sadly, even in awakening there is the risk of becoming a comfortable place. It happened to me just months after the serpentine force rose in me, changing me. I had changed, hadn’t I? Relatively speaking, it was just a drop in the bucket. It seemed like a lot, but compared to the many summits above me, it was an important journey in the lowlands of a wild world.

To get anywhere I had to step outside of what everyone was saying in regards to the awakening experience in order for me to see it for what it is and then to make myself available to a whole new level. This changed me irrevocably, and I had an energetic force in me pushing the issue. I get it: it was easier to change with this gift by my side. But even those first six months spent in the tsunami waves did knock me apart, it was all relative. I had to keep asking questions of the world view I had in order to break on through to the other side (thank you Jim Morrison).

You don’t have to be awakened to begin changing your world view. You just begin by examining it. Just remember that to really see it, you will have to get out of your comfort zone.

Men have been quite comfortable aligning their desire to the beauty of women. This has led, along with paternalistic belief, to the objectification of women and rape culture. Now I ask you, how comfy is your desire now? How can you change how you see women so that your desire is not channeled on the way it once was? Or how about how as a woman you might view men as the stoic suck-it-up-no-nonsense kind of person, completely unaware how this map locks a man into an expectation of having no feeling, no sensitivity (because it’s being denied), resulting in male anger and rage. In both cases, these views of how we think things should be are dehumanizing to both women and men.

The way to change is to be aware they exist. Then, you observe honestly how they govern you and your outlook. Those outlooks master you. If you can be honest and listen to what others are saying, you can begin to catch the errors. Bear in mind that while you listen to others to catch where you might have gone wrong, each condition has it’s own layer of error or distortion, and you need to be able to see error and the right together at the same time. Every view will have its own distortions. An antiwar group could wind up advocating violence, for example, making them just as bad as the warring sides. A man can expect a rule to apply to everyone but himself. The same with a woman. These blocks keep us from seeing a new world. It is done with discernment and finesse. It’s probably not working if it doesn’t create a good deal of discomfort as one approaches being ready for the nuts and bolts of just letting the stuff go.

New maps for a new world await each of us. But always, we believe our old ways are the good ones until we glimpse the brutality in us that those beliefs represent. Until then, political memes, social memes, religious ones. Everyone shouting, no one wanting real dialog…I sit and continue my meditation and inner inquiry to find out what is blocking me to see that map.

~Namasté

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In The Shadow Of The Light

In my last entry I described a meditation I got caught up in that resulted in strong light activity, a phenomenon often tied to awakening experiences. After what was a very productive session, I decided it would be a good idea to revisit the meditation again to see if I could continue with the work. This time was decidedly different, but was oddly similar to the movie about the after death experience “What Dreams May Come” starring Robin Williams. In a similar way, it was also a bit like the movie “Inception” too. This was due to the lucidity present throughout the experience, I think.

When I say my meditation was like a movie, it’s not lost on me that there was an undercurrent of drama, hinting at a subsumed emotional energy, like a great big question lying in hidden veils at the center of some great edifice that kept coming up and up, over and over. But this meditation took me deep while awake, and then took me into dream, while I alternated between lucidity and full-on dream state and forgetfulness of earthbound ego awareness. This time, instead of brilliance, I delved deep into the shadow.

I have tended to see awakening taking on this kind of cycle; a moment of brilliance followed by a deep dredge of the muck as though one serves to bring up the other. It isn’t perhaps why many people misunderstand the power that awakening contains. It’s not all rainbows. It is more about clearing, cleansing, and it can be hard on you to do this kind of delving. I know it’s not fun for me….but it always comes with a reward that is forever reaped, an inheritance that remains perennial.

I slipped into the deep state. This part is the easy part. It’s being able to remain lucid enough inside such a deep lovely swirling eddy of energy and not lose consciousness, especially when it’s at the end of the day and you are ready for bed. I remained neutral, not seeking to do anything since the intention was already placed. I just had to wait for the subconscious and higher self to do their part. I was along as a witness to what would unfold. My cat lay next to me, again, purring softly, a few snorts as she drifted either deep or up out of her own deep sleep. This time, she would project right into my lucid dream, acting as a reminder to remember why I was there.

I wound up inside a dream. It was night and I was walking around an old house that I remembered having dreamed of years before in another shadow work dream at an earlier stage in my progress. Nowadays, dream imagery and its meaning tends to be much more direct or understandable than it ever was before awakening. For me, a house represents the construct of human consciousness. It is an image that Jesus often used, too, and it has been a consistent image each time I dream of it. In one dream I might be in a house, in another, a warehouse, or in one, I stood on the streets of a city as I observed the roots of some massive tree or plant that was growing in a large building, revealing its roots as it emerged through cracks in a deep stairwell….an image that spoke to me of the work that remained to be done in the root chakra, the foundation.

Last night, it was that same old haunted house. It had the weight of ghosts, of lives and people who had lived inside of it and now it lay abandoned. A moment of lucidity began to build and I felt myself dream while kicking into meditation all awareness simultaneously. The last time I was here, the dream ended with me discovering that I could lift up into the air; a clear indication of my letting go and allowing the organic force flow through me. I lifted up into the treetops. This time, though, I was solidly grounded. I pondered what else was there to clear out, to resolve in this tumble of an old home? It was in its own slanted way, a great life, but it wasn’t my life today, but one lived a long time ago. All of this was emblematic of the work I had left incomplete in that previous life, and here I was, having to set it right, to give it that moment of forgiveness it so needed in order to be free.

The house lay in a depression, between two sloping meadows. It must have been a lovely sight in its heyday, but it was lying in moonlight and was ramshackle. The large wrapping porch had sunk in, taking a wing of the roof with it. You could see into its interior and as I made my way around it, I realized how much it lay in shadow. “If there is to be light here, I am the one who must bring it…” I realized.

Just as I thought this, I felt myself lift and the dream fall away from me. I was warm in bed, and only had a moment to ponder as, like a swimmer, I went right back in, grabbing a quick breath as the waves of sleep lapped over my head and everything went muffled and I lost ordinary waking consciousness, trusting that I would find myself again on the other side.

I was walking in yet another building, another old house, and this time I was inside it. There was no light, and windows down the hall and into a large outer room were painted over a kind of greenish color. Drapes hung in tatters, and there was a drip of water that made a smacking sound as each drop filled a puddle on the wooden floor, now a wash of sepia in the dark of the night. I remembered this house, too. This was one I didn’t like at all. It looked like it hadn’t been lived in in forty years. Nothing was bright about this place, it had a dank and decaying feeling to it. I kept walking though, wondering if I would find something that would mean I had broken through to something. I noticed kitty was with me. She has a name, but she knows kitty best. Sometimes she is monkey, sometimes Georgette. There she was, her tail flicking upwards. I could hear her thoughts, wondering why we were here, then immediately realizing that she was in my dream. She settled in after that and began following alongside me with less trepidation. She predicted that we wouldn’t be here long,and she was right. I surfaced yet another time out of sleep and felt my deep breathing. It was like being awake, but feeling the spell of dreaming still all around me.

The answers didn’t come in the usual fashion. So much of these places represented aspects of myself from the past, mostly distant, unresolved, lying unseen, needing badly to be seen. They had a surrealistic quality to them. I felt that edge of…fear, dread, and yuck about it. But that was exactly why I had to go back into these old haunts. I wasn’t there seeking to do what a guide once admonished me never to do, which was to try and drag it back into my life again. No, this was different. The idea that I had to carry the light into these darker corners was what this was all about.

Awakening is ruthless. You can’t bullshit yourself. Only when it’s completely clean, clear, forgiven, can things be forgotten. Until our inner compass is satisfied, we wind up going back to those places to sweep that little remaining bit of shadow away. I felt like I was ingesting it, taking it in so that I could metabolize it into light. Kitty stirred and looked at me through blinking eyes, sleepily, her head up, then back down, nonchalantly falling back in for another round of sleep. This felt like it was turning into a tag team wrestling match, dipping into lucid dreaming using meditation as the launching pad.

I kept at this all night in a marathon of visitations, never knowing where I would end up next, but in each case it was some long forgotten building, some old remnant that I have inherited in this go-round and am tasked with emptying of what is less than it’s best. Like  a big cleaning. You know how it is. You pull out the big stuff and haul it away, and with each time you go back, the particles get finer and finer until you go from sweeping up the last bits to wiping up the dust. This is all old business, an old self, a past life, and it’s now being brought forward.

I thought about that first house I dreamed of in the months before awakening came. It was all so much brighter, more optimistic. A road led up a hill with a creek running beside it. The creek grew stronger the closer I got to its headwaters, which revealed how this wasn’t an ordinary body of water. It was prana itself, filled with symbols and brilliant. How could water be so bright? Climbing the hill, on the right, was a beautiful arts and crafts meets Zen monastery. Built from large beams, the building interlocked, revealing its construction. Stone rose up through its middle, and when you walked inside you could clearly see two fountains inside, split down the middle, representing the Ida and Pengali currents with the Shushuma in the middle. That was my house, my temple, a place that was more than just home, but was who I was. It still is. But since that time, I have had to venture out into the past in order to heal it and cleanse it. Actually, I can’t even say it is I who does this; clearly my earthbound self isn’t up to this, but something deeply rooted in me is. It is this part of me that teaches, reveals, redeems, and ressurects. I wish dream could be brighter sometimes, but there are plenty of regular dreams that are, and besides, digging into shadow always resolves some deeper sense of feeling ill at ease in me.

It would be great if I could offer some grand finale, but an ending is itself a beginning, a new thread is discovered and it’s then followed through until something big is exposed from the rubble. Another chapter is begun even as additional chapters emerge. Over time, what I have found, is the gradient becomes finer and finer. It actually gets harder to keep the shoulder to the grind stone sometimes. It’s easier…the energy is less turbulent and it doesn’t stir me in the same way. But what I also find is that in some ways it’s a little easier simply because so many blocks have been removed. The blocks have gotten harder, but the level of confidence has been forged in the flame of awakening. As if that makes any kind of sense, right? The easy stuff came away first, and when I put myself into energy work like Chi Gong, material cascaded away, and this continued for years. Thousands of blocks, I figure, big and small, always burrowing down deeper and deeper.

For me, the hardest blocks lay deep down. For me, the root was where the hardest wounds lay. And despite all of this, I was able to manifest truly remarkable opportunities in my life, and when I was ready, events have simply fallen into place. When I was ready to fund the next phase of my life after a collapse of the markets, I waited, keeping my wealth in assets I could relate to, which was real estate. Even though I saw half the value of my property evaporate, it also came back during a confluence of events when I was ready to make my next step. Wanting in truth to sell directly to a buyer instead of a realtor, my soon-to-be realtor cancels when she gets too busy with a market which suddenly was going crazy. Deciding to sign papers for representation in another three days, I’m contacted by a family who heard through the grapevine that I was going to list my house soon. They asked if they could buy it directly from me, an outcome which I had wished for in my heart. While taking a nap hours before I would speak to them on the phone, I see them in a meditative state, not knowing that they would be talking to me later that day. Before I was set to sign papers with my realtor for representation, they brought a contract. I was able to sell to a family who had loved my house for years and were having trouble even seeing homes because of how hot the market had heated up within months.

Now it might be a big question what this has to do with my work. What I have found is that as each block is removed, so too are the blocks to manifesting the events in my life that support what needs to come next. This isn’t for me about chasing wealth, but finding my own inner abundance, which is less about money as it is about opportunity and helping to make others lives better. There is so much feeling of loss and lack, and for years I too fell for this feeling. But often, the things I chased after weren’t the things that would have been good for me. That was why they were hard. What is easy comes like magic. These things emerge in perfect timing. Life is increasingly different as the years roll, and as the air clears. Life is more a series of serendipitous events that have purpose and flow, pushing some old block to the surface, or leading to the next step. Something bigger is in control. That might sound superstitious, but it’s not. As division falls away, there is a marriage of the small self with something larger within. This is about bridging the gap and clearing the way for this to happen, and it’s not done halfway or half-assed. How’s that for mystical musing?

Whatever it will be for you, getting out from underneath the tangles holding you back, is what brings the change. For now, the work continues, and who knows what is around the corner.

Circle Of Healing

I am not an angel person.  I did, however, experience something many years ago in connection to my deceased father that I was told was a ring of angels.  I did not see them with wings.  I know that in some ways, what we point to as angels can be any number of things to us in terms of what we see and experience.  Messengers, those who are between lives, a class of consciousness that assists us here.  Later, I found that I had a recognition of things that were about to happen.  This “angel” kept me out of trouble.  It alerted me to problems on the highway and saved me from many speeding tickets.  That period of time was spent in a lot of reflection.  Now, during this awakening, a lot has changed.  My third eye was the first to be activated in a process that opened that center up much like a bud bursting open.  Since then, I see things more clearly using this inner sense.  Since then more has been shown to me about this angelic presence.  I have had my own life guide or angel minister to me, pulling out old material from my light body in a process, as it turns out, was nearly identical to an account made by St. Theresa of Avilla over 500 years ago.  I stumbled across the account after someone explained how she had written  a book about how she described the progression of awakening and the chakras.  I was told by this being that I need only call his name and he will be here.  Others have felt his presence, people unaware that I had him as a life guide.  One person said she dreamed of hearing someone outside my window.  That was funny, because that was where I always felt him.  Just over there, standing guard.

So recently, while brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed, I thought about what he had said on that first night when he visited to do the work he did on me.  This was something beyond belief, beyond anything that anyone could, or would, call normal.  It went beyond anything I have experienced, an opening of the heart directly to a flow of bliss energy so powerful so full of love that it simply cannot be described.  What he explained left me with no other conclusion except that this, for as other worldly as it might have seemed, is something that is native to us.  It is who we are.  It is the universe.

So upon sliding under the comforter and turning out the lights, I felt a hand on my abdomen.  Then I saw him lift his head and look to the side where there was a ring of Others.  He said something right then, and the healing began.  I laid quiet and still, thanking each of them as I slipped into a peaceful sleep.  So now, I call his name.  Looking back on it, I never called his name.  He said I could call anytime, anywhere.  It did not matter.  All the times when I dreamed and felt a presence beside me, that unseen guide, that was him.  All through these years, decades of them, he has been living along the edges of my life, present, but often not seen.  In some cases, I need to do it myself.  But now, this last step, I need to bring all the resources available.  And he is here.  Perhaps a gift which I have not fully honored, perhaps even resisted in some effort to do it on my own.  But in that, there is a certain resistance which is not good.  Something inside need to open even more deeply, for this last step is a doozie. It contains the oldest of the old, or the hardest of the hard.  But I am determined to break through it, to see it for what it is, to forgive it in me and thus release everyone who was drawn or attracted through a less than healed place in themselves.  In all of ourselves.  I do not know what tomorrow or even tonight will bring.  It seems it works best without building any sense of expectation around it, just a very simple intent and let it go.  This seems to give the best latitude for the right ones at the right time to arrive.  And so now they come as they did earlier on when I was in a different kind of place.  Helping me through this misnomer called ego death.  Ha!  Silly we even call it that.  Something moves in us, glacially, but certainly, and powerfully.  Ego turns nimble and learns how it can move out of the way. When that happens, we open to the mystery, not to the mind or reason or logic.  We are in mystery.  We are in the sacred circle of healing.  Nights are no longer just any night.

The Power Of Dream

As a young teen I embarked on keeping a dream journal.  I did so partly because a friend of my sister who was into all sorts of interesting things to me said it had helped him to become more aware of his dreams.  The other reason was because my life had been littered with the most unusual dreams.  It seemed like a good idea to keep track of them, maybe learn something from this world I spent so much time in each night.  Dreams were a release from the mundane, permission to enter into improbable realms of possibility. I also had noticed that some of my dreams would come true.  I had them about births and deaths and even world events.  I was curious about this other world right under my nose.  So I began my dream journaling, trying to be as devoted to jotting down anything I dreamed no matter how unusual or different or hard to explain or relate in the written word.

So for about fifteen years I kept a dream journal.  From seventh grade all the way through college and a few years beyond I did this.  Along the way I found I had a complete history of all the dreams that had come true and was able to find some interesting correlations that these dreams had with the lunar cycle (of all things).  I also found that some dreams that seemed entirely fantastical may have had a rooting in things I did not at the time know too much about.

Like the dream about the Orca.  In the early 90’s while on my own and fresh out of college, I had this dream that was itself delightful and magical.  It had, though, some elements that would take about two decades to realize may have been tied to something that I did not at the time know anything about.  You will see as I explain the dream….In it, I am standing on the shores of a lake in what seems like an alpine setting.  I say this because that is how it all struck me.  The trees that were near the shore of this “lake” were all fir trees.  No deciduous trees at all.  There were these large rounded black stones that came down to the water and turned into smaller stones, all round.  This was a cove and it was at night.  I was standing at the shore looking off into the distance when I noticed I could hear something in the distance.  I was hearing the sound of some kind of cetacean coming up for air.  You could hear the powerful explosion of the animals blowing air and water up into a spout as they cleared their blow holes and took in large lungfulls of air.  This was the first sign that something was coming my way.

I didn’t see much for a bit, but a pod of Orca were coming my way and as they entered into the cove, I could see their bodies beneath the surface of the water.  they were rubbing agains tthe stones and swimming around in what I took to be play.  I found myself stepping into the water.  As I moved into the water, I felt the Orca all around me.  I felt no fear near these massive creatures and in an instant I found that I had submerged into the water completely and had gone off with them, an Orca myself.  It was a dream that I often thought about as one of “those” dreams that stand out.  For years.

Now fast forward into the internet era and a friend has been telling me about the San Juan Islands off the Coast of Washington.  The next day a client comes into the studio and begins telling me about her trip to an island called Orcas which was near the San Juan islands.  Too spooky.  I look into video of this area to see what it is like and I find a video taken in a cover just like in my dream on the island of Orcas and what I found was that it was exactly like the scene in my dream right down to the fir trees, the stones, and the effect that the water had of looking like it was a lake, not the ocean.  Orcas, you see, is a horseshoe-shaped island whose shape counters the normal effects the ocean has of sending in waves.  There are many coves like this on Orcas and this effect gives the shoreline the look of a lake instead of an ocean.

Many years later I saw an identical image from a dream many years previous that had me wondering why on earth I would dream of Orcas living in fresh water.  this never made sense to me….that is until I saw the videos taken on Orcas.

Two years after this dream my daughter told me that she had a dream about how someone had walked up to her and explained that I should always wear the belt buckle that I so often wear that is a cropped image of an Orca whale done up in the style of the Kwakiutl.  I have worn this for a number of years after finding it at a craft fair.  I bought it because it reminded me of the dream I had had many years before.  My daughter had seen the buckle many times but didn’t know what it meant.  I had not told her about my dream about the Orca.  I smiled and turned to her and said “You know, that’s really interesting that you should say that….” and I went on to tell her the story of the Orca in my dream and about having seen Orcas island from afar on Youtube.

I convey this story because I think it helps to underline how our dreams can be more than what some have tried to make them out to be, which is more like the ramblings of the mind as it just creates chaotically.  I have always felt that dream time was always so much more.  After you have a few very specific dreams come true, it is enough to pique your interest and suggest that there is something more to all of this night-time activity.  At least in my life, this is so.  And in dreams, I think that as you become more aware of your dreams, you will tend to remember your dream more often.  Sometimes, by writing them down over long time periods you can begin to see pattern emerge and you can see what kinds of things you have been dealing with from a different perspective.  Dreams can be more than just the mind out for a rambling stroll.  Sometimes I think they can tie us into larger issues that we seem to be aware of even if we are not consciously aware of them.

For me, water has always been important.  I was born under its sign as a Pisces.  I grew up in Florida where I had access to rivers and ocean and the Gulf.  Water was for me and my siblings, a form of freedom.  You could hop in a boat and go on an adventure.  When I moved to the mountains of Virginia, we lived just a few miles from the most magical stretch of river you could imagine. People used to come and comment on how wonderful it was.  As an adolescent, I traveled the creeks and scrambled over the small tree-sheltered springs in my mountain home which bore frogs and creyfish and salamanders. I suppose if I were to choose how I were to come back, it would be not as a human but as a dolphin or whale.  Perhaps, better yet, an Orca.

Dream

I don’t often write about my dreams, so much of it seems so personal somehow, an upclose process I am not always ready to come out with.  It seems more that as I gain some distance with them that I can talk about them.  But last night I had one of those epic dreams where I was all over the place…..many places, many things, many ideas, many issues all happening almost at once.  In one scene I observed how I looked into a house and up on an upper floor a door opened out into a room that was outdoors.  Within this room was a woman draped in this large and billowing colorful cloth.  It moved and flowed in the wind in this most wondrous way; it verged on art.  As I watched I realized she was the same woman I had dreamed early in my awakening process, a woman I knew to be an archetype figure.  In that dream, I was being birthed and in the dream it helped to signal a shift in my awakening into a new dimension of issues and healing. This feminine archetype, the Goddess, was dark-haired with dark brown eyes.  I have had a number of encounters with this woman in dream as well as waking experiences.  Almost instantly I am aware of suddenly being an an auditorium sitting next to my father.  I am not myself but someone else entirely, a man of dark skin, perhaps Mexican, perhaps Mediterranean.  I am slightly younger than I am now in this life.  In this dream version of me, I turn to my father, who bears no resemblance to my father in this life and say “Why don’t you get us some Mahita….”  As I dreamed this and heard his words (I watched this all as a spectator in the seats next to the father and son, I wondered what a mahita was.  I thought perhaps this was something like fajita, that it was some kind of food, but was curious about what kind of food this might be.

Upon awakening, I began to recall parts of the dreams that I had the night before and decided to look up mahita online.  Curiously, I could not find any food references, but instead discovered a word that was the same that was an old word in sanskrit which meant regeneration.  Huh.  If this is indeed on the mark and my higher self was seeking to return this to my conscious self, the meaning of this becomes very interesting….!

In Dreams…

This idea of dreaming is near and dear to me.  It is near and dear to me because along with a spiritual journey since age nine, I have been fascinated with dreaming and what this very significant amount of time we spend each day is used for.  I have also been fascinated with dreaming because I have had what I consider to be quite fascinating events take place within my dreams and I am also brave enough to simply tell you what I have found and also what I think as part of a CONSIDERED opinion (which stands apart from an opinion that may not be based on significant evaluation of ones own dreaming).  I also like dreaming because its MINE. It is my own landscape, my own stuff. I get to go into the temple of my OWN dreaming and no one else’s.  I can explore and discover and learn.  I have spent years studying my own dreams, by the way, so I know a few things about it that are not in the mainstream and bear mentioning….

The thing I think that is so great about understanding dreams is that we each have the opportunity to be experts with our own dreamscapes.  Since we each dream, just as we live a life, we ourselves can learn a lot from our dreams. I did this by keeping a dream journal starting in high school until I was married, which was a period of approximately ten years.  We want, though, to wait on what others have had to say about dreams in order to understand them, but even the supposed experts haven’t been that great at coming up with a theory that works for how and why we dream.  Freud said dreams were unfulfilled wishes.  Excuse me, but my dreams have had healing elements, points of resolution, I have had what appear to be out of body experiences, and I have also had dreams that have clearly shown the future.  So if the supposed “experts” can be so off on all of this, it stands to reason that our own observations might well be a little more helpful in helping to progress our understanding of dreaming.  Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of fascinating information out there from REM being a way to nourish the cornea with oxygen, to dreams being an expression of unexpressed wishes and desires (thanks Sigmund). It is all sounds very nice, I just think it is woefully incomplete.

It’s probably a problem of clarity, though, why we have so much trouble being able to figure out what dreaming is….. for the simple reason, most likely, that WHY we dream is so broad that any one theory will have trouble containing it all in a neat tidy way that will make a scientist feel good about his or her work and reason for being. It is a bit like asking me what the purpose of LIFE is.  Do you have a few days to have a seat and talk about it?  really, I don’t think you can sum it up in a few sentences, and if you do, it will probably be so hopelessly simplified as to bear very little meaning.   So having said that, I am going to tell you a few things about my own experience in the same way that a tourist might come back and show you a few pictures of a trip, say, to Tuscany, or Greece, or Neptune, or somewhere near the Dog star….

One thing I can tell you is that dreams can be precognitive.  Not maybe, but certainly.  Not only that, but my dreams have not only been clearly precognitive, they have also shown a most interesting phenomenon that an old friend named Rodney called “periodicity” when I walked into my Wednesday night jam session and explained how I had uncovered something incredible about my precognitive dreams. What you should first know is that I have had these precognitive dreams my whole life and second that they have been very detailed so as to eliminate any guesswork over whether they were just a lucky guess or actually seeing “remotely” the events that would take place later.  What I had uncovered in my journal work was a very distinct pattern in my dreams that all showed precognitive elements.  This phenomenon showed that my precognitive dreams all took place on very specific days, and this was tied to the lunar cycle.  Now for some, this might sound a little crazy, but to a scientist, this suggests other forces at work.  What those are, I don’t know, but in the same way that the moon has an effect on tides, it apparently has an effect on seeing the future as well….and as a result may well help us to better understand HOW to bridge the gap between now and the future.  For those who aren’t sure what precognition is, it’s simply being able to anticipate future events. Now I know that for some, such a thing seem preposterous and flies in the face of everything we think we know about time and space.  Well, clearly, we don’t know everything there is to know about time and space or else I would not be going around having these dreams about the future!

But so you can appreciate what I am talking about, let me give you a few examples of my precognitive dreams.  When I was a pre-teen I dreamed that my neighbor was pregnant with twins and that these twins were born and had blonde hair.  The twins were a boy and a girl in the dream. Now the thing to realize is that the mom and dad were both very dark-haired people.  The father had this jet black hair without a hint of gray in it and the mother had chestnut colored hair.  At the time of the dream, there had been no talk about their having children.  They were without children at the time of the dream that I had.  In just a few months, I did find out that the mother was expecting and while I did not pay much heed to the dream, I found that she gave birth to twins who grew up to be blonde, both of them, which was itself a bit odd since there was so much dark hair in the family.  Skip forward in time to 1985 when I have a dream that I am floating above the earth and witness an explosion at a facility in Russia.  I hear the voice of a t.v. anchor narrating the events taking place. He says that there was an explosion over Russia that sent a plume of radioactive gasses into the atmosphere.  I watch as I see a white cloud rise and spread.  This cloud spread to Europe and rained down as radioactive snow.  I watched as people were herded onto freight trains in order to get them out of the area quickly. I saw an odometer type device that was showing the current count of the number of people who had been evacuated from the area.  At the time of the dream I saw a number around 80,000 as it continued to climb.

At the time of this dream, I was more focused on the out of body aspects of the experience, which involved me flying over the earth and walking across a bridge that floated in the sky.  The experience with the  news broadcast began after I observed that the entire scene turned to snow or static and was replaced by a new scene.    At the time, though, I described the entire dream to my roommate, Joe, who in three weeks called me into the living room to watch a news broadcast about an explosion over Russia in the area now known by the world as Chernobyl.  Each element in the dream was exactly as the Chernobyl event several weeks later.  There was a radioactive explosion (not a leak—this was an explosion that sent a cloud up into the atmosphere). This cloud menaced Europe in the dream, which did happen in the Chernobyl event.  People were herded quickly onto freight cars both in the dream and in real life as a way to get them quickly out of the area.  The count I had seen was over 80,000 had been evacuated, which suggested this was a city or town area.  When Joe called me in as he sat amazed at the news report, they said during that report that as many as 80,000 people had already been evacuated from the area.

These are the kinds of dreams that I have had over my life.  They have been specific enough in the ways I have explained to you to be more than merely plucking a good guess out of the air.  The level of corollaries between the dream and the events usually within a month of the dream, have been extraordinarily good in my view.

Now I know what some people have said to me about this in the past, which have been along the lines of “Well, Parker, its easy for YOU to have dreams like this, but you aren’t LIKE other people…”  and to this I have to carefully explain that in each person’s life there is some evidence for unexplained phenomenon.  Maybe you don’t have dreams that came true, but perhaps you find yourself thinking about someone and find that they were mentioning you at the exact same time, or perhaps you get a feeling of foreboding only to find that at the same time a loved one was involved in an accident.  Perhaps you experience this in dream, or waking, or both.  You see, to my mind, dream and waking are all part of life and both serve important roles in our lives. Me, I just don’t ascribe to dreams just being random firings of the brain as it sifts through the days’ material.  I know that dreams are therapeutic, quite literally releasing trauma from the past, working through issues within the emotional landscape as well as deeper soulful issues.  I also know that dreams are a kind of window into other dimensions, dimensions we travel to by traveling not through space but through our own awareness.  You see, we ARE the window to other worlds and that window CAN be found by expanding consciousness.  It is curious that in dream we do the same things as those who meditate and are able to let the ego go in order to experience cosmic consciousness.  The cool thing is that ego is dispensed with the same way you take off a pair of socks or pants as you get ready to go to bed.  In fact, you can’t really do most of your dreaming with ego still all around you.  But when you let go of ego, some quite remarkable things begin to happen.

Now as an aside I will explain why I am talking about ego. I mean, how on earth do I KNOW that we let go of ego when we dream?  My work during my awakening of kundalini has shown me quite clearly that the concept of “ego death” (a term I absolutely dislike for how incorrect it is) goes hand in hand with being able to experience similar KINDS of things while still awake that the mind does -normally- when asleep.  I have also observed how ego has been lain aside while awake in order for certain dream-like phenomenon to arise much like what some people do in meditation or in shamanic practice.  The main feature of doing this is that you are more free to tap larger portions of awareness that naturally get filtered out by the controlling agent called ego.  To show what I mean, perhaps you can remember starting to dream and then realizing that you are dreaming.  What happens when you do this?  In my experience I always stop dreaming.  I have become self conscious.  I have suddenly taken on ego as “I” identifies that “I” am dreaming.  Ego and dreaming don’t work together.  You need to have a loosening of the ego in order for the part of you that can create those dreams to operate properly.  Part of it has to constructing a kind of creative scaffolding where your imagery can spread out and play. This play, though can be mulling feelings over, venting, thinking, hallucinating, seeing the future, and traveling out of body (OOBE) somewhere quite interesting.

The ego can be quite the wet blanket, you see.  It’s a very useful thing, but you have to learn how to put ego aside so you can begin to experience the broader realm of your being.  I promise you that ego limits you absolutely.  And this is, of course, why I LOVED dream so much.  It let me go ego-less during a time when I was simply not yet ready for this thing called ego death (which I experienced during my awakening process).

But this isn’t about seeing the future.  Not really.  I am using seeing the future as an example of what CAN be done.  I figure if I can show you some rather fantastic examples of what has happened to me, you might just realize that you too have the same opportunities.  (Jesus said something about others doing even greater things than he did….) Granted, you might not be so keen about time travel.  Maybe for you its something else, like experiencing the effects of shifting from one brain state to another while “awake” in the dream state.  Clearly the static I saw in the dream of Chernobyl where once scene shifted into another was itself the shifting from one brain state to another.  I have actually been able to fool my brain into thinking I am asleep when I am actually awake and the exact same thing will happen, and I am able to observe it while I am awake and it is VERY much like a wall of static filling the view and my body and I simply vibrate into a different state and scene. It is, I do think, a way for the brain to travel dimensionally by changing its own energetic signature via its brainwaves. it turns out that this technique has been used for thousands of years by Tibetan monks and is a way for them to dream awake, or to have lucid dreams while being fully awake instead of asleep. You might think that dream and waking are fundamentally different, but I am telling you that you can and will break down the barriers between waking and sleeping when you begin to become more inclusive or broader in your awareness of these different states of being.  And don’t worry; all will not be chaos.  Instead, what will emerge is a sense of unity of awareness.  You simply wont see dream as some strange land anymore.  It will be understood as a very useful tool for relaxing, sleeping, as well as having all sorts of adventures both fictional and nonfictional.

Dreaming can be a way to expand your own energetic signature and mobility of consciousness.  The more aware you are of what you do in dreams and HOW you FEEL in dreams can lead to being able to relate to certain energetic states that correspond to deep shifts in consciousness within those dreams.  If you can learn how to FEEL the way you FEEL in a dream, you are actually that much closer to being able to experience an expanded state of awareness while awake.  You don’t need mantras, you simply have to remember.  The more you do, the more likely you are to see the phenomenon in a dream begin to make its entrance into waking.

I recently read a comment someone made about dreaming and meditation and the person described meditating as a form of self-hypnosis.  The sense I got from the commenter was that this was somehow bad or not desirable.  But really, the vast amount of self-improvement that we do, whether in meditation or in the therapists office is actually attributed to hypnosis.  What many people don’t fully realize is that MOST hypnosis today is done while the subjects are completely awake. Hypnosis might work at deeper levels of the self if you are put into a deep state of relaxation (the “trance” as it is called) but everyone in the psychiatric field knows that this is by no means a requirement. So anytime you want to change, you simply make he suggestion to yourself that you want the change.  That is the nature of suggestion.  You can go into a deep state of relaxation, you can even make hypnotic suggestions as you lie down to sleep that you will use the dream state to do lucid work in that dream.  This is much like I did when I experienced Quetzalcoatl in dream work from the same year that I had the Chernobyl dream (1985).  In THAT dream, I was attempting to use the dream state as a way to springboard into an OOBE. The technique I used worked really well, and that technique was as simple as a suggestion I made prior to falling asleep.  You can read that entry HERE.

As an aside, my observation about out of body experiences (OOBE’s) is that they can allow you to experience broader states of awareness than you might otherwise.  In some ways, it can be a catalyst for greater change because it seems to me that once free from the body to a great degree, the experience of energy is so much larger, or broader.  The reason for this, I sense, is that the consciousness is not so tied to the body.  The body itself, not just the brain, is a series of blocks of an emotional nature that inhibit the flow of prana or universal consciousness.  When these channels are cleared sufficiently, there can be a powerful flow of energy released which the Hindu call Kundalini and what we often simply call “awakening.”

To some, this is kind of the holy grail of inner work since kundalini acts as an accelerating catalyst for inner change. This is nothing more than life force now flowing in abundance, but the effect this prana or life force has on you is that it stirs every inch of you and if you surrender you feel freedom and bliss and if you hold on, you feel paranoia and pain.  The stirring, though, is the stirring of the old blocks that reside in your body.  When these blocks are cleared, you experience the moment differently than before. Think of it as a kind of cosmic tune up that involves releasing lifetimes of pent up karma that has been recorded in your light body and is stored in your physical body.  It is itself a powerful process and can be akin to riding a roller coaster; you get on and there is no getting off until the ride is through.  But I suspect based on my own experience is that OOBE’s can provide the same unlimited flow of energy as in awakening without bringing it into the body.  This could have some advantages.  It COULD be used to gradually acquaint you with what its like to have this kind of energy flowing through you, to overcome what seems to be some anxiety or fear of such incredible flows of energy coming in and learn how to cope with it.  Now I say this based on my own experience with the out of body state, which was nothing short of a grand face to face experience with significant amounts of energy.  And where there is energy, there is consciousness.  That means your consciousness will expand. That sounds a bit like some of the goals of meditation, right? Find out who you are, what you are, what you are capable of?  Your birthright, right?

There are many ways to reach what it is you are looking for.  We are all in some way looking for it, even when it seems dysfunctional.  The thing we seek is what this prana force is.  It is love. I will just tell you now and get it over with because in time, if you clear the way, you will feel it so utterly that it will be entirely obvious.  But when that day comes, you will know this love less as a thing you feel for someone as it is a force as gravity and the wind are forces in nature.  It might be hard to imagine how love might be a force like that, but it is.  When you clear the way then you will feel love in all of its different dimensions or aspects.  And this is good because in doing meditation work based on curiosity about what you are, you discover the most beautiful thing about yourself. And that is a whole lot of good!

The Dream Process In Awakening

When I awoke I did so with a corresponding increase in the vividness and intensity of my dreamscape.  Before awakening occurred in total, I was already having dreams that were pointing to the fact that awakening was upon me.  Most of my dreaming is a rather intense experience, but is one that now seems much more purposeful and I am more aware of the fact that my dream world is very much a place for me to process my feelings about a host of things.

Just as awakening was getting under way I had an dream that lasted all through the night.  It was one giant dream that stretched from one end of the night to the early morning.  It was like a marathon in which I examined all of the major material present in my life at the time.  It was like taking an inventory.  In the end I was shown my own personal demon.  This was a revelatory process of digging as deeply as possible into the psyche using all the tools available.  Only in doing this, only in digging deep to examine the unexamined do we ever manage, I think, to come to a different place in ourselves.

My observation is that we are amazingly unexamined beings.  We live in the soup of our feelings and memories, and yet we shove so much material down into ourselves, and this place in ourselves, the subconscious, becomes a kind of dumping ground for things we would rather not examine very closely.  So out of the way, these things slip into the night and they wind up coming back later, as Jung and Freud observed, in  far worse shape than when they were when they were originally buried in the backyards of our minds and hearts. In our case, we bury different things in different parts of our energy bodies based on the vibration of the energy.  Then, as we begin to dredge the depths, these things start to release from certain areas of the Light Body, and we find that we have some clearing of an old block in the root, or sacral, or solar plexus, heart, throat or third eye or crown.  All of this has levels, layers, and what was cleared on the first pass in the heart can be cleared again at another layer in the same spot but with different things entirely.  It turns out that this observation was also made by the Hindus and they call this the “etheric sheaths” which sets up a layering effect to our energy body.  You don’t JUST clear the energy body or the chakras by having kundalini rise and pierce each center.  It seems, at least in my experience, that kundalini cleanses the chakras with this libidinous energy that bring awareness but it also does so in a deeper and deeper way with each “pass” through the center.  There are a number of very good methods for assisting in the release of blockages of an energetic type, but for now, I am going to focus on dreams.

Since 2006, my dreams have taken a sudden change, that is for sure.  And yet, I find that they still serve to help me in identifying old material I thought I had dealt with.  Just last night I had another round of these dreams where I was going through to very old relationships and coming face to face with people I had known decades ago.  I pay attention to my dreams.  I used to keep journals all through my college days up until about fifteen years ago when I stopped recording them. But paying attention to the harder dreams are key because they most often are involved in helping me to dissolve some fear issue.  Sometimes you can just FEEL it in your body as it happens.  Then, in facing the fear, it can actually be transformed.  Its a wonderful process, but always fees like a cliffhanger as its happening!

One thing that kundalini has done for me is it has dissolved some of the veils between waking and dreaming.  I can, while awake, utilize the symbolic imagery of dream by using my third eye to drum up images from the subconscious to help me to understand better what it is that is taking place in the here and now.  When I first awoke, I found that I could talk to this energy and it would respond.  I could ask it to rise and it would rise and become stronger (oops!) or I could ask it things and it would offer me up images in my third eye or as some people say their “mind’s eye.”

When I asked this energetic presence in me why it was here and what its purpose was, I was shown the inside of a very large warehouse building with pallets of material stacked high.  As I looked at it, the images contained all this information.  I understood; I saw myself going through each box, each pallet, identifying all of this forgotten warehoused material that was the ancient backlog of karma.  But the curious thing about this process was that whenever kundalini led me to a place where there was a block or old inventory of material, all I ahd to do was to acknowledge it in order to feel the block clear up.  I could then feel the energy rush through that center into the next center.  It was like going through a vast fiber optic network and cleaning off the sheaths of fiber so the signal could get through more clearly.  It seemed so simple, so straight forward.  I found that the more I identified, through ego, with a given knot, the harder it was to let it go.  The ego was holding on.  It was far better to not even LOOK at whatever it was the kundalini presence was trying to show me.  I would just pick it up like a rock and kiss it and toss it aside.  After a while, the fire of kundalini which had burned down the stubble of this vast prairie of my soul, had revealed all these stones peeking up our of the fresh grass.  Each one we picked up, blessed, and moved on.  this process worked very well in the beginning.  the early work was in many ways the easiest even though I knew the least about what was happening.  As I dived deeper, it has seemed that the deeper material is more central to ego and is thus much harder to dig out and let go of.

The phenomenon of ego death (a term I do not like because it is misleading) does help considerably in allowing one to let go of this material.  WIth ego so centrally positioned within ourselves, it naturally is far more active than it needs to be.  For me, this “death” was itself a collapse of the old arrangement and the creation of a new one.  It was in may ways like rearranging the furniture or transplanting a flower from the center of the garden out to the edges.  Ego just gets in the way for a variety of reasons and is not all that we are.  But ego is important and if we think we have killed it off, we are fooling ourselves.  We need it for survival purposes, and it seems that ego corresponds with some cognitive functions in the left hemisphere that allow us to identify individual objects and to make decisions in a linear, rather than nonlinear way.  These tasks are important, yes, and may have been much more important in our past then they are today.  As a result we have more freedom now to shift into the goddess mind, into the right brain more, which is what I think is helping to drive such incredible and peaceful change in awakening and the world.

In dream, ego is safely asleep and out of the way.  We can see things more for what they are, albeit dressed in the symbology or imagery of dreaming.  These dreams can help to dissolve the emotional blocks that keep the flow of energy at bay or from reaching into other portions of the light body.

For me, the energy was relentless.  I would dissolve a block, would feel elated at managing to do this, would spend about a day in celebratory jubilation only to find that the energy had moved to the next position, to the next place that needed to be cleared.  the energy would move on to the next spot, would begin to work around the blocked area and my awareness seemed critical in going there and recognizing it.  As a result of this I developed a kind of process that is very easy in some cases, for some blocks where all you need to do is be present and do this one thing that makes the entire process so much easier.

I think we feel as though we have to solve something when it comes to clearing blocks, but really, if you are honest with yourself, I think you will find its much more about recognizing something and making peace with it.  However you do this is your own way of relating to it, but ultimately it means you let go of it. It then loses all power over you, over your energy, over how you feel and how you react in all kinds of situations. For me, it has meant no longer focusing on what OTHER PEOPLE THINK.  Somehow, that seems a pretty mighty distraction for me, and is much of what I was writing about in my previous post about vulnerability.  Energetically, when we can do things like forgive ourselves, or seek forgiveness from some authority figure (a stand in for our own inner god-dess authority), we often can trigger just the right kind of feeling within us that releases this material.  It is like a kind of reset button gets pushed and POOF!  It is gone.  Just gone. Nada.  No more.  Let me tell you, the sense of freedom that is felt in that moment is amazing and perfect.

Then, the energy just flows in such a beautiful way.  Until kundalini raises its hand and gets your attention to come back to the back forty of your awareness to find this old dead body you buried there.  The body is actually YOU…..and as you look at it….what might have been shame or hurt slowly slips away and you realize “it is gone….that was in the past….I cannot change it….so I need not hold onto it…I can let it go…..and sin no more….”  And just so you know, after having to take a two-semester course in religion in college years ago, I was fortunate to have learned from people who were not teaching faith but teaching facts.  My teacher explained “the concept of sin was very different from the one we have now….sin was anything that caused harm to your soul…anger, jealousy….pain, envy…..it didn’t have the objectified sense of judgement attached.”  It seemed that we can cause hurt to our very tender circuitry if we aren’t careful.  I noted that as I awoke I became incredibly sensitive to all kinds of stimuli.  I could look at things and be overcome with bliss and wonder or incredible hurt.  I stopped watching t.v., I stopped watching news and all the rest.  I was jut so open and its circuitry was just so vibrant and alive in me.  I had to be careful what I looked at, what I felt.  It was like all my senses were sharper and more alive.  What was a whisper could be heard as a scream.  This was what all of this cleaning of the circuitry was doing to me, for me.  As ego stepped back, so much just slipped and fell away.

To understand this, I am reminded of this dream that was told to me once.  this guy had this recurring dream that was a bit of a nightmare.  In it, he was pursued by a pack of angry werewolves.  What is more scary than werewolves?  Zombies?  Well anyway, he was menaced by these dreams.  Over and over they would plague him.  Then, one night, as he found himself cornered by a pack of these werewolves, the alpha male walked up to him with this grimacing look on his face.  He moved closer and closer to the guy and as he did this, he noticed that he could see his reflection in the eyes of the werewolf.  What he found so peculiar was that HE looked like a werewolf too!  Then, quite suddenly, the dream changed.  The grimaces on the wolves turned into smiles as the man relaxed and took off hooting and howling with his mates as they took off through the forest.  What he realized was that the thing that he feared most, he WAS.  By just letting himself BE this thing, he gave up all resistance to is and it took on an entirely different gloss.  So okay, maybe he was a wild animal deep down, but once he realized this and embraced it, it wasn’t nearly so bad as what was happening when he was resisting it.  It was in resisting it that he was getting scary dreams, fear, and anxiety.  He integrated the shadow into himself and then realized there really wasn’t anything to fear.  So it seems we embrace and accept at a deep level so that the nature of whatever it is we feel has the opportunity to change.  And after all, isn’t is ALL just energy?  Isn’t it all in how we mold and shape it?  For me at least, kundalini is the opportunity to change how I feel about what it was I have created in the PAST.  This is all about dissolving the PAST so that I can have a more vibrant PRESENT.  By doing that, I am not affected in big and small ways by that back log of material silently and perhaps subconsciously playing like a loop or program in the backs of my mind or heart, or sacral, or root, or solar plexus, or throat chakra.

But don’t get me wrong; there is more work to do.  More more more.  And the thing is, I am back to it, learning more than ever the things that will absolutely hang me up and cause me hurt and pain and that NOW is the time for letting all of that simply go and live a radically different life.  So in dream, I get the wonderful opportunity to be reminded of the old material that remains and instead of feeling defeated over something remaining from two decades ago, I feel like a librarian who finds some dusty old novel in the back stacks, smiles and holds the book for a few moments while whispering, “you were such a great story weren’t you?  We thought you were the cat’s pajamas, and now look at you…..” and with that, it gets put on the cart and taken to the curb.  Yes, its a good little book, and perhaps someone else might like it, but there is just no more room for it in this library.  The process in all of this is changing how we feel about things.  If I am afraid of something in a dream, I know that I have to conquer that fear somehow.  I have to know it is not something to fear anymore because that very fear blocks energy.  As I change my perceptions of something, it also correspondingly changes some small aspect of my life.  Piece by piece, the events in my life take on a very different quality.