Sage Dreams

I was going to start this by telling you when I began keeping my dream journal, but I honestly can’t remember when it was. Most of the other woo-woo stuff in my life started around 1967, when I was fourteen years old, so that’s probably a reasonable starting point. As I am writing this in 2013, it’s obvious I’ve been doing dream work for quite awhile.

Sometimes my dreams are simply (!) dreams. They either reflect what is going on in my waking life or they offer a means of escape from the mundane by soaring off into fantastic, Neverland-ish types of adventures. Recording the former is useful because the reflections of daily life show me repeating patterns that I may need to eliminate. Writing down the latter is just lovely fun.

Journaling my dreams has taught me about my outer and my inner lives, and made me very well acquainted with the language my subconscious mind uses to convey important messages. Lucid dreaming was a goal from the very first, and it’s become a common part of my dreamwork.

For the sake of brevity in this blog, I’m going to assume the reader is familiar with the concept of lucid dreaming: knowing you are dreaming while you are dreaming. You can search for it on the web and find an infinite number of references.

Experienced lucid dreamers can learn to control their dreams (up to a point). I’ve done this many times, usually when I feel that the dream is taking far too long to get to its point. I love dream flying, so when one of my dreams is just meandering along aimlessly sometimes I’ll throw in a segment of flying over my hometown. Sometimes this turns into astral projection – which is a whole other topic to blog about, so I won’t. Not now, anyway.

With all my years of dreamworking and my experiences in lucid dreaming and astral projection, something new has come into the picture within the last few months. My development group places high value on meditation, visualization and shamanic journeying. We practice these daily. Seriously practice them. So it’s not surprising that we are frequently able to observe ourselves within the dreams and even take note during the dream that we will remember the entire working the next day when we  (a) drink a glass of water , or  (b) make a circle with thumb and forefinger.

What’s new, at least for me, is that I’ve started interacting with my dreams by asking questions of them and commenting on what they are showing me. That may sound psychotic. If you have a regular meditation practice though, you’ll find the idea completely reasonable.

Here is an example: a few nights ago I was dreaming about driving on a narrow road that wound up the side of a very steep mountain with scary drop-offs on the side. That’s not an unusual dream for anyone to have, but the road kept going and going and the drive was getting more and more dangerous, and at last I said, “C’mon, what’s going on here? What are you trying to tell me?”

Immediately, the terrain of the dreamscape changed and I saw a parking lot up ahead. I drove the car into the lot and parked, got out of it and went into a huge hotel where I soon spotted some deceased family members. That was when the point of the dream became clear to me. (No, I’m not going to tell you what the point was, that’s private.)

In the dream, I put my thumb and forefinger together and said, “I’ll remember all this tomorrow when I make this circle again.”  And it was so. Very useful, to be able to direct your dream.

Last night, as is always the case when Moon is almost full, I had such active dreams that I didn’t feel at all rested when they were finished. My Guides were working overtime with me on several subjects, and there was one in particular that Crystal was discussing and trying to make me understand the infinitesimal edge that I kept missing – she picked up a large (head sized) light green leaf on a long green stalk and was showing it to me and I said, “Hurry up, Crystal, we don’t have much time left.”

She waved the leaf in a circle around her head and told me it was a plant from Africa and then she waited expectantly for me to intuit the message.

“You took too long,” I told her. The next second, my alarm clock was going off beside my head. I turned off the alarm and sat up on the side of the bed. Crystal poofed out and it was time to start my work day.

I said a thank you to Crystal and the guys. They are working hard to help me consciously be aware of my subconscious mind and I’m working hard to make it easier for them. We seem to be a pretty good team.

Now I just need to identify that African plant.