fly awake

Here are two dreams from this week from opposite ends of the spectrum. In the end they are both positive, which underlines the importance of how we react to situations.

7/3/10–Dream

I am at the crossroads near our house. I have been thinking about how Shannon and I have been looking for a quiet place to meet, a park or green. We have looked for a long time and found little. Now I see, it is right here. The crossroads are filled with lush green grass that is about a foot high. A bird with a long white neck–a swan?–is moving through the grass.

A car comes through the intersection, it is very loud and I worry about the bird’s safety. After the car passes the bird is still there, but there is still noise–coming from the man hole, I think. I see the bird bobbing about. Another car comes and goes. The bird is across the intersection now. It rises to standing position and I see it has a smaller grayish white body–maybe it is an egret. The bird has a crystal pendent hanging around its neck on a very long chain. As she stands, she turns into a beautiful woman with long curly brown hair. She is wearing a simple dress. She has a very feminine body, but thin rather than round. She crosses the street to me–walking through the grass slowly. I am in awe of her presence and beauty. She is holding the ends of the chain with her arms spread wide as if to present the necklace to me. As she comes close I open my hands up to receive all she has to offer (not the necklace–I want to receive her), and say, “what can I learn from you?” I want her to know that I am receptive and show her my awe. When she’s only a couple feet away my eyes close in response to her energy. I don’t actually feel the necklace going on. I feel her vibrations strongly for a bit, then I begin to see pictures. I see little metal containers, about the size of lighters. They are handmade with different symbols on them. Inside are sets of tiny vials filled with liquids. Now I am in the living room/our future shop space. There are tiny white shelves mounted on the walls. Each one has one of the little metal boxes on it. This is a great idea for oils. Someone is hanging out and reading in the front room. There are some lavender and pink piles that need to be sorted out. We have to leave to do some errands. I tell the woman we are not really open for business yet (it’ll be a couple months), and we set out.

Wake: I loved this dream. I felt so blessed. First of all I was excited about a place to meet my friend Shannon, who is moving in a couple blocks away from me. There has been some tension between us, but this dream made me feel at ease about things.  This dream brought up some new ideas about the dream shop my husband and I are hoping to open in the fall/winter. I have mostly been thinking about dream and sleep teas and snacks, herbs, books and other literature. I love the magical quality of the little tiny bottles inside the handmade metal boxes. It reminds me of the dream and sleep oils I like to smell before bed. Shannon gave me one of my favorite ones (one that I sniffed right before the dream below). Shannon also once told me that she was a duck–seeming calm above the waters, but paddling away underneath. I wonder if she is a bit more majestic than that.

7/9/10 Dream: Someone has been behaving like Hitler. He is not Hitler. But there is violent discrimination, people are being shuffled into the dark cellar room. They have their heads covered as they run. I think, “It is only natural that we would feel fear and get caught up in this drama.” As I think this, he turns to me and sees me. He puts his arm up and out and our palms meet as I put my hand in the ‘fear not’ mudra. I immediately begin saying the protection mantras I was taught by my teacher. I concentrate intensely. After about the fifth verse everyone vanishes into a pale golden light.

Wake: Another Hitler dream. This has become the symbol of evil in my dreams. I used to have a lot of dreams with killing, but they didn’t really worry me so much–it was easy enough to see it as a metaphor. Hitler is more stressful for me. I tried to think of something this could be related to in the waking time–Arizona’s new immigration law came up, but there are many others. Most importantly, in the dream I am secure in the protection that my Guru has given me. I have used the protection mantras in waking time and in dreamtime many times. In waking time the mantras dispell negative energy and provide physical protection. In dreamtime they usually break the spell of the dream. There is so much negativity in the world. Some of it is very compelling, drawing us into a nightmare. For me it is important to remember that I participate in manifesting reality, (it is a group project,) and that projecting the most positive energy possible will do more than being drawn into a nightmares and nightmarish situations. This doesn’t mean that I think such negative situations should be ignored. It is an alternate way to react to the negativity.

Shannon’s oil blend “Medievel Mix” is what I sniffed before I went to sleep and had this dream. The oil contains dream herbs: lavender, thyme and rosemary. Thyme is good for nightmares. It’s funny because it seems like I have a bad dream whenever I take it, but somehow I have a really great attitude about the nightmare and get a lot out of it. So…I guess it improves nightmares, or perhaps helps process nightmares. It is purported to be great for kids with terrors. Lavender is good for insomnia, especially for sensitive people. Rosemary is for remembering and protection.

Last night I was designing and drawing images for some cards that I am making about lucid dreaming. The cards have images of different tools people use for lucid dreaming…like…light switches (Waking Life), hands (Teachings of Don Juan by Castaneda). As I was sketching and planning I kept saying “this is a dream” over and over again, which in itself is an excellent technique to achieve lucid dreaming. When my husband got home from work we had a conversation about various lucid dreaming tools and techniques. Well, not surprisingly my night was full of lucid dreams.  When things came up that were slightly suspicious, it immediately clicked that “this is a dream”. I didn’t go on any vision quests I just had fun trying new things and pushing my bounds. On one hand I feel like I could have used my lucid time better, since this was kind of accidental lucid dreaming–not a lot of intent behind it. On the other hand I had a great time exploring and having fun. Actually, I think that it was a great to just have some fun, for fun’s sake, and do things because you can do anything in dreams. So often I am committed to intention and purpose. It was nice to have a wild time being up to no good. It was an excellent reminder to me that our dreams are what we make of them. If we need to kick back and chill, dreams can be a great way to do that. If we want to explore the outer dimensions of space, they are great for that too.  Lucidity is always about having the perspective to break from our reactions and learn to move through the dream without our hindering ourselves.

May the force be with you!

Our dreams have different roles, and different ways to teach us. I find that my dreams often provide me the reassurance of protection, love and hope that I may not see, or allow myself to feel in the waking time. Somehow these messages are very easily received while asleep, and yet awake, my fears and insecurities, or ‘rational thought’, obscures them. Dreams such as these serve as a reminder of the benevolence and support that we are forgetting/ignoring. We may take a lesson to endeavor to cultivate deeper relationships with such forces of good in other waking dreams.

On the other hand dreams can sometimes be filled with horrible fantasies or, even worse, metaphors of the unpleasant side of waking time. I tend to look at these dreams one of two ways (well…three). Either they are a wake up call saying, “Hey, are you the dreamer or the dreamed? Time to be lucid and make some changes.” Alternately, bad things may happen in the dreamtime so that you don’t have to experience them in waking. “Well…three”, being that sometimes we have wretched dreams because we are out of balance physically, for example: extremely violent dreams often occur when people are overheated.  I find it best to consider the dreams from various perspectives. Such as, if this dream is a metaphor for my life, or warning, I might do such and such. Or taken on more literal level it might mean… For example: I dream that I need to eat a kidney soaked in dandelion. Well, on one hand it might be suggesting that I need to do some work on my kidneys (water processing system/grief organ) which may involve taking dandelion which is both a strong diuretic and great for deep inflammation/anger, not to mention investigating the role of that organ and plant in my life, and what it would mean for me to eat meat. Or, on an even more literal level: perhaps it would be good if I eat some kidneys saturated in dandelion–getting both the meat and the dandelion (I am a vegetarian, and at the time I had this dream I had had others about eating meat).  Dreams act on many different levels, and I find it very helpful to write your dreams down, you may get a great first impression of a dream, only to look back with a year’s perspective to say, “Oh my goodness–that dream was about that thing I was thinking about, but…it was also so obviously about the loss of my relationship with X”.

Just as we have beautiful moments and nightmares in dreamtime, we experience similar highs and lows in the waking time. We can learn a lot by looking at our waking dreams with similar analysis. When faced with a frustrating situation we might ask ourselves, how am I contributing to this ‘nightmare’. Is my pride preventing me from turning this disagreement into a truce? Am I not willing to let go of something bad, and just walk away? How am I limiting this area of my life?  We can take hold of the reigns in a scary situation by manifesting changes through our intent. Rather than allowing our patterned reactions to govern us, we can instead envision our preferred outcome and how it would feel to experience this.  This act can change our feelings about what we think is possible, it can affect the situation physically, and/or it can improve our emotional take on the situation.  By using our intent and imagination, we can ‘dream up’ a preferred waking reality. Because the waking dream is more of a “group project” it may not entirely change the situation, but you may still be surprised by how much your intent affects your environment.

When enriching/spiritual moments occur, it is good to take note: how did my actions contribute to this happening and how can I encourage more moments like these to occur? Regardless of whether the dreams seem positive or negative they are filled with information, in a language written for the dreamer, that can help us to live a better life.  I have learned so many things from the guidance of my dreams: To ask questions of my environment, to interact more freely with animals, crystals, and herbs. To interact with things that scare me too. That it is possible to deeply connect with time and space. That these interactions grow oneness. We can use our intent to encourage these positive experiences as well. This is a way that we can practice lucidity in the waking time.

A bit piecemeal, but here goes:

Dream (12/30/09):  I’m sitting in some sparse, wintery woods with a couple other people. We’re hiding. Some people are coming through the woods to get us. I am sewing poetry along the collar of a dress I designed (rusty red thread on a cream collar). It’s the start of a poem I’ve been working on. “Like as…” it begins.  I sense the people are getting closer. One of my comrades and I run away through the woods. We get round to the other side and I jump off the path into the thick just before they shoot him with a rifle. The enemies back off, and I step onto the path to see him. He’s dead, but a wolf with a hunchback comes to me from his body. I say, “Oh, good, you can help lead me to safety.”  The wolf seems uncertain of this. He’s thinking about going back to the place where I was sewing. I don’t think that’s safe. We run back on the path that led us to the shooting.  The poem keeps running though my mind. I keep thinking of it and working on it. Going all the way back doesn’t feel safe. At one point on the edge of the the woods  the path meets up with the back of someone’s dirty gold ranch house with chain link fence and dog. I think we can get through without the dog hearing us and attacking. I look at the wolf and scoot through the fence and make it through the driveway into the town. The town is old. All the architecture is 1800’s. I touch the curvy molding on a shop, it’s freshly painted–red and white. We run through the streets. My running is fast, but on some level I know I am dreaming and could just be gliding through the air. I run and run and run until I cross the train tracks and get to a motel. I go inside my room, still afraid that someone is after me. I crash on the polyester covered bed.  I wake after hours and am surprised to see the door ajar (not very safe of me). I go and close it and turn around to see that David has slipped through the door and is sitting in a chair in the middle of the room. He’s a bit hunched over. He reminds me of the wolf in his expression.

Wake: Here I am hiding in the woods from all the people I think are after me, crafting clothing and writing poetry. In the place I love doing all the things I love, only problem is that there are too many people and not enough woods. The poem reminds me of Shakespeare’s sonnet 118–starts off, “Like as, to make our appetites more keen…”–confession and getting sick off of preventative medicine (cathartic purging that seems downright sick). The wolf comes when my friend dies.  I think of him as a guide, but he doesn’t really guide me; we do go together. The gold house is very like a house in my childhood neighborhood. The kind of house that has been neglected for 20 years, and has a sketchy/dangerous vibe, bull dogs, etc. I associate the era of the old town with simpler times, which is appealing, although in the dream there wasn’t much feeling about it, just relief at so many fewer things to interface with maybe–no cars, computers, no people on the streets, etc. A motel is the logical place to hide. David…well, I just found out that my friend’s husband, David, joined the circus when he was younger. This changed the way I think about him. The circus reminds me of wolf people (loners in a pack). The expression of the wolf and David don’t really remind me of David. The woods remind me of the woods in Iowa that we used to live by. David and Dee are in Iowa. It’s almost like seeing this side of David makes me think twice about going back to Iowa. I am running from people and memories from Iowa in the waking time, though I yearn to be back in Hickory Hill Park. Dee sent me a Hickory Hill Calendar along with this exciting info about David. I look forward to hear the circus story some day.

Dream (1/1/10): I’m in a dark hall, with a bunch of people, we’re in line to see my Guru–Shri Dhyanyogi. When I am in front of the Guru, he tells me to draw an Om on my third eye. I am surprised that I remember how to do it–it’s in reddish orange ink. I go into a very deep meditation. I can hardly will myself to move. Guruji talks to the crowd, while I am sitting in front of him in my state. I am aware enough that I am blocking traffic, even though I really shouldn’t worry, just meditate. I eventually move to the side, which breaks my meditation. I think of poetry. I hear, “just write the Truth“. I also wonder about my meditations being not so great, and I hear, “soon”.

Wake: Poetry again, I think of my the falcon poem that I wrote for my Guru, but also of my Fly Awake installation that was meant to be poem-like in its construction. A poem you could walk into and feel, between the text and imagery I created. The dream seems like a reminder to organize my art in this way, while working aligned to the highest Truth. Also gives reassurance that my meditations, which haven’t been the best, will become infused with light again. A Day or so before these dreams, I smoked some Calea and asked for help with my art. With Calea I am not surprised to find dreams coming up long after the physical interaction.

Dream: I am flying like an owl! I lift up my arms in waves like owls do and my head points forward. I am not an owl, but my arms move like an owl moves its wings. I am outside above some green, flying at shoulder height around a few people. I waver a couple times, but manage to remember how to stay aloft and keep going. I fly a short distance and see a large owl feather about 20 feet in front of me, near a woman’s head. It is huge and I am very excited that I have only just started flying like an owl and already this feather has popped into my life.

I fly closer. A man is standing next to the woman, and her boyfriend is across from her closer to me (as I fly by him). The two men are positioned across from each other like you would be to play catch. They are somehow using the feather as a lure for hunting or something. I stand in front of the woman and see that this approximately 16 inch long feather is attached to her right ear.

I tell her I like the feather. She says something like, “Yeah, thanks, it’s cool isn’t it?” I say, “Let me be more clear: What do I need to do to get you to give me that feather?” She thinks for a moment and says, “Make me a scout troop 023 hat.” “Oh, 23,” I’m thinking, “that’s a good number.”

I get right on it. I’m home at my desk making the scout hat. It’s an old army green cap.  I’ve already printed out the patches for the numbers from the internet. Still I have a few more finishing touches to do.

Wake: I am so excited to be flying that I forget that it is a dream. Everything is very good–the flying, the feather, the number 23 (my fav), that I can attain what I desire. This dream was such a relief, the last week I have been over heated and stressed and have had more than my share of nightmares and stress dreams–oy vey! Finally a dream that was uplifting so to speak. There are a couple things that intrigue me: 1) men using the feather (attached to girlfriend) as a lure and 2.) owl, which I love, but can also signal deception. I’ll have to be watching, in an owl way, to see what’s going on under the surface. The silent killers are my friends.

I have published Dreamtime Pamphlet vol. 3: A Pocket Guide to Inner Time and Space. It is available in my etsy shop. The booklet gives varied ideas and exercises for getting more in touch with time and space on a personal and bodily level. I hope you like it.

I also just added some blank dream journals that I have been working on.  I bound the books, printed the titling with letterpress, and collaged the covers with dream imagery.

Meditation: Focusing on grounding and my deer legs come back. I am sitting with deer legs. I’ve got rusty fur that’s a bit course and black hooves. I sit with my legs like that and feel the deer in my head, my forehead is elongated and flat and I have antlers at times. I feel the movement of the dancing leg energy/the deer dance. I feel connected to astral information by the antenna-like antlers.

Wake: Deer is such sexy energy. I am thinking, “what to wear?” and I hear: “something to show off your deer legs.” Tee hee, so I put on a short skirt and start dancing around on the balls of my feet, doing deer dance. I think about sex, but in a magical, elevated way. I think this is a gift from deer–tuning in to the animal nature in a more elevated way.

Walking down the street later, and still feeling the deer legs. This way of walking, on the balls of the feet, is so much more precise, delicate, and energized.  When I walk on my heels I feel like a neanderthal or a sasquatch! It’s funny how the way you walk changes your energy. Wahoo. Then, since it was my birthday, I celebrated with a giant piece of cake. That also changed my energy. Tee hee, again.

It has been a long time since my last post–time has slipped away from me, I guess. The time in between has been filled with some intense changes. Here is a story about lots of herbs, especially Agrimony, pregnancy and dolphins.

A year or so ago I read about agrimony in Matthew Wood’s Book of Herbal Wisdom I thought it might be a good remedy for me. Among other things it’s a good remedy for people who feeling trapped in a situation, or people feel tortured (physically or otherwise), but hide behind a cheery face. It is particularly helpful in work situations that meet the above description.  Agrimony tends to cause changes, for example, losing your job if it’s not the right one for you. Because I felt so trapped in a job that didn’t feel right for me, I was afraid to take agrimony! I needed my job and was afraid of changes that agrimony might bring.

3/30 Dream

There are two blue plastic dolls that are meant to be together. I rub them together like sex. From the female doll’s plastic slit, I pull a lotto scratch ticket.  I am disappointed that I am not pulling a baby out, but I am intrigued by this ticket. The ticket has dolphin stickers on it and, depending on the way that you scratch the ticket, determines your new job. The dolphins make me wonder if the job is in Orlando.

4/22 Wake

I discover that I am pregnant. This is totally awesome, because I have we’ve been trying to get pregnant for so long. At the same time I am deathly afraid/tortured by the thought that it might not work out. My husband and I had been trying to get pregnant for 4-5 years. I start craving raspberries and red raspberry leaf tea like crazy, but I’m tired and I can’t seem to get my hands on either. I’d been taking sumac, cooked rehmannia root and lady’s mantle, all of which really seemed to be improving my health.

4/29 Wake

I see an interesting posting on Craigslist for a job at a clinic that promote a healthy plant based diet lifestyle. Very intrigue, I apply.

4/30 Wake

At only 6 weeks I get tests back from the doctor showing that the pregnancy is not progressing well and I might miscarry.

5/1 Wake

I come to my herb class with Matthew Wood and ask him for his help. One of the herbs he recommends is agrimony. This seems so appropriate and ironic, seeing how I had shied away from this herb for so long. I feeling tortured by the way Western medicine often gives you knowledge of what is wrong with you, but no way to help the problem. Oy vey! While agrimony might have seemed to Wood to be a solution to the an acute problem, I knew that it would be quite transformative. With the pregnancy, and at work, I had been hiding what I was going through, my fears and discomfort were hidden behind cheery smiles.

I went home that night and immediately started bleeding, but instead of normal blood, it is a small amount of blood with lots of clear secretions.

5/1 Dream

Everyone thinks I bled on the pillow, but it came from the soaked cooked rehmannia root I’m holding onto. I try to tell them. But they don’t seem to understand.

5/2 Wake

Cooked rehmannia was something that I had been taking for my anemia. It helps anemia by increasing progesterone. When you prepare the root as a tea, you pull the root out of the water and it drips like old reddish brown blood.  I talked to Matthew Wood about the dream and he thought that perhaps my progesterone was too high and that was in part responsible for the pending miscarriage.

I am not bleeding enough yet that I am totally hopeless, so I look into ways to prevent miscarriage. Turns out that, just like my body wanted, red raspberry leaf is an excellent miscarriage preventative, (as well as a great general women’s tonic), and is also good for excess clear secretions (more often related to running fluids in colds, but in my case it applied to my bleeding). Lady’s Mantle has also stopped early miscarriages. I actually had some Lady’s Mantle, so I did as the success story I had heard told. I prepared a very strong tea and placed the wet leaves on my foreams. I meditated on the plant and my situation.

5/2 Meditation (Lady’s Mantle)

The dose of Lady’s Mantle is so strong, I immediately hear a list of female situations that alchemilla helps with. I ask about my pregnancy though, and response is not hopeful. I feel very soothed and comforted, as lady’s mantle is so good at doing for women. In the end I get the same response to my pregnancy question a couple times: Take St. John’s Wort.

While this was not good news it was practical. In the end I miscarried, but with the help of St. John’s Wort and the comfort of Lady’s Mantle I felt it went as best as it possibly could. I rode the emotional roller coaster that would be expected, but I was able to recognize that a lot of the suffering was chemical.

Back to agrimony and my dream at the beginning, there is a silver lining to this story.

5/10 Dream–Mother’s Day and my late grandmother’s birthday (she was my most comforting relation)

Mistletoe. I’ve been wanting to learn more about it, a guest lecturer comes to talk on the subject. She’s staying with Scott, or she know’s him best. She’ll give an exclusive lecture. She might have some to sell too. She will not tell how to gather the plant. She wants to the knowledge kept secret. The event is expensive and may be sold out. I see the baskets of necrotic looking mistletoe berries that she’s gathered, but I don’t want them–I want to gather my own. This all takes place in a bookstore like Barnes and Noble.

She leaves Scott’s house on the edge of town. I can tell because he’s setting her six rolled-up acrylic carpets carpets out in the middle of the road, near where she’ll wait for her ride. The are set in a row, at a slight angle to the yellow lines. At first I think they will leave together. But Scott’s not going. I ask him for information about the Mistletoe. Scott and I have gone inside and are on the couch now. He starts to tell me a little but he’s holding back.

I wake up and try to tell the dream and what I’ve learned about Mistletoe to everyone I see. I also repeat it to myself, trying to remember.

Wake

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of mistletoe is that it is an abortifacient.  Even though I just finished miscarrying, I thought perhaps there are some lingering products of conception. I don’t really feel this to be the case. Still I feel there is a message I need to receive from mistletoe. It takes a couple days but I manage to track some down. When I took it, I immediately felt soothed and comforted. I felt like I could release. I read about mistletoe and discover, that in addition to it’s rep as an abortifacient, (maybe the nastier side of the plant), it is also used for loss of a loved one (human or pet), emotional pain, nervous tension, and accepting defeat. This is such a sweet side of the plant, I really felt healed after this experience.

Meanwhile, I had a couple interviews with this awesome veggie health clinic job. The whole thing seemed almost surreal, everything was going really well and just seemed like it had to work out. I recognized this feeling from other areas of my life, but not jobs interviews which have never been something I excelled at. I had been feeling the influence of Agrimony strongly over the last couple weeks. It had become difficult and undesirable for me to hide my feelings. In some situations this was unwelcome, like situation where I normally poured all my energy into protecting and supporting others. But, in the case of this job it was very helpful to have a side of myself that I normally keep separate from my work self come through–my creative/dreamy side. One big unknown, was pay. It hadn’t been discussed. Finally, the night before my third interview I had the following dream.

5/26 Dream

I see a series of big block numbers on large cards, the numbers go up like a calender would go down, in rows, climbing to about 30. Some numbers have pics, or someone holding them. But my eyes are moved quickly upwards as I hear, “Pay attention the last question”. My eyes stop right before the numbers run out. Here we have a monkey in a shriner hat holding a big card with a bold “28″ and dolphin on it.

5/26 Wake

I had been trying to figure out this pay thing, what was too much, too little, etc. But basically my mind had been too busy with this and everything else going on in my life to receive an answer to my query. Finally something clear enough I could understand. I also immediately remembered the dolphin in my dream from March, and was very excited about that.

I go to the interview, armed with my best weapon against any possibility that things could go awry: vegan cupcakes. They discuss many things with me, making sure I really know what the job is about. Finally she says, “I just have one last question…” (and it sounds so dreamlike) …and the question is pay. Well it’s kind of an uncomfortable topic, but I am prepared with the answer, so after some brief hesitation, I get it out: 28?

My interviewers breath a collective sigh of relief as they look at each other. “Good because that is what we wanted to offer you.” I love it when everyone’s happy.

Tee hee. How nice to be part of a dream that ends well. While I didn’t get my baby wish yet, I did get my silver lining new job/dolphin/lotto ticket.

Terry, looking “bleh”, for lack of a better word. It’s tough going, but at least I am now confident in my decision to totally dismantle Terry. The trailer is very rotten, but the metal frame isn’t. Funny thing about metal, very rot-resistant.

Actually we are picking up speed on the project and, more importantly, the dream of the trailer is getting clearer. Both the interior and exterior of Terry’s future are congealing in my mind.

Haven’t had many flying dreams lately, but a few, and as always, tricking myself into thinking that I am awake. On a brighter note, my friend came over for group meditation for the first time. Afterwards, she told us that she had had her first flying dream since she was eight that night. When she had trouble during medition she recalled the dream and it helped her meditation.

Last night, right before I fell asleep, I caught my mind wandering around. I stopped and thought to myself, “Rather than all this random brain activity, what would I like to dream about tonight?” After some thought, I decided I didn’t really care about my dreams, but rather had some ideas about how waking time could be improved. I dreamed up the following for waking time: My dreams manifest more easily in waking time through my maps and through the dream trailer–my two current Fly Awake projects.

I had been having issues in general getting things going with my maps, (i.e. inertia,) and specifically with PhotoShop. The second I thought up ‘things are going along easily with the maps’, an idea came into my mind about how to do what had been vexing me in photoshop.

I went to sleep and had a mish mash of dreams. Then I spent the day working (successfully/easily) on the map that had been giving me the most grief. Finally! It is so important to pause and redirect the mind when things aren’t going so well.