Category: Uncategorized

(Sunday, September 8, 2019) waning gibbous moon Capricorn / tarot Dreamer of Spirals (page of pentacles)

Vivid dream that feels like an alternate reality:

I am in a long, moving line of people. There is no end of the queue and no beginning of the queue. We are in single-file order, supportively embracing the humans ahead of us, resting our heads between their shoulders and curving our arms around their bellies. It reminds me a little of the string dance we often do at the dream conference costume ball.

Claudia has my back: we have been discussing nutrition, supplements, herbal remedies and energy healing. We are on the same page. We both have met the naturopath Dr. Michael Murray. The dream seems to be messaging that the supplement I have been taking for many years, formulated by Dr. Murray, is important to me. Time to refill my empty bottle of OsteoMove.

The person ahead of me that I am warmly hugging is someone I also know. It might be Bonnie. It might be Mary.

As a member of the queue I am simultaneously working on my design job. We are all walking and working. My working reality feels like a big, active cloud floating above my right eye. In my cloud I am watching a presentation of new ad designs by a wildly innovative, dark-haired young man. He formats his layouts like the animated television ads from a couple of years ago: actors would lie on their backs, surrounded by funny props, while thousands of still shots were taken. The still shots were fused into an active video, very much like the Peter Gabriel video I love made by the British creators of Wallace and Gromit.

I am inspired by this designer’s beautiful process but also by his clear lack of ego. The purity of creativity matters to him, not any kind of social recognition. His unusual genius for design work is like nothing I have ever seen in my profession.

Two full-page ads are on my project list. I decide to revamp them in a style motivated by the design genius. I delete a gold swoosh pattern and replace it with some ghosted Mayan pictograms. I lay a crystal goblet carved with elaborate Mayan images over the top of the printout of one of the ads and take a photograph with my phone.

Then, Claudia, Bonnie/Mary and I arrive at a retreat center. I put aside the printouts of the ads, placing them on a round wooden table like Chris’ Danish-modern that appeared in my Jacob Wetterling dream. I motion to my boss Louis that the ads are done, and that I am done. I am moving on.

Here’s where the dream becomes truly incredible: Claudia, Bonnie/Mary and I move to a mysterious dark room with a huge, burning red hearth. We have entered the void. A highly-spiritual presence from another reality is here to teach us serious, urgent stuff. The Master has no physical body, and our human forms have dissolved into the void. When I awake from the dream, my heart and third eye are still connected to the powerful dimension of the hearth-room. It’s a reality humans don’t ponder until they have passed on from this world.

(Thursday, July 3, 2014) I believe this dream is prescient of my 2017 trip to Glastonbury England for Jill Purce’s Red Tara Mandala.

I’m in the sacred Black Hills, driving out of Rapid City. My children are in the back seat: a boy and a girl. The boy is Cullan at the age of 6 or so, and the girl is Jamie (my sister in waking life who is 6 years younger than I). We are searching for my mother-in-law Kay, who has dementia. She has left her room and gone wandering. Walkabout. [I visit Glastonbury in 2017. It is considered one of the most sacred sites in England. I travel west from London. When Chris and I were in the Black Hills in early October of 2013 we experienced a very rare polar vortex.]

The road begins a gradual rise. It’s coated with a light layer of slippery snow. The car slides off the right side of the road, at the start of a low ramp that curves to the west (left), but I am able to regain control and steer my vehicle back onto the pavement. I decide to stop and park alongside a purple-red granite curb, walking down a gentle slope on the left side of the road into a large, open plaza made of white marble. At the (top) north end of the plaza there is a building made of the same stone. The structure is built into the hillside beneath the curved ramp, like a druid barrow or dolmen. [Dolmens are ancient structures in Britain, I think connected to the Druids. The Glastonbury Tor was visible from the retreat center where I stayed. The Tor sits on a large green mound.]

I enter the building, a conference center. An event is underway. I look to my left and see the registration desk. Two men are seated at the desk, their backs facing me. As I approach them, the man on the left turns around to greet me with an enormous grin and sparkling blue/grey eyes. He is wearing a blue star-studded gown and matching tall, pointed hat on top of his brilliant white hair. Wizard’s garb. Merlin. My dream uses the word “sorcerer.” [I attend Jill Purce’s Red Tara Mandala ceremony in Glastonbury. She has two sons named Merlin and Cosmo who look nearly like twins. Merlin and the Arthur legend are a story deeply connected to this region, also called Avalon. On the opening day of the retreat, we entered the main lodge and filled out paperwork at a registration desk.]

I feel a tremendous shock of electricity run through my body as our eyes meet. He is overjoyed to see me. “Hi, my name is Harry!” he says, as the other man now turns toward me and smiles. Both faces are beaming at me. The men seem to be identical twins, but in fact are one entity, split into two figures. This understanding sends another shock deep into my bones. The sorcerer’s energy envelopes me in a sensation of hyper-reality. This part of the dream takes place in a very magical dimension. I feel more awake than in waking life. [This seems to be a Harry Potter joke. Obviously this is Merlin.]

I think I am looking for Kay, but the sorcerer knows I have come to begin my apprenticeship. He takes me by my left elbow and leads me into the conference hall to my right. The conference is about lucid dreaming and much, much more. Jean Campbell and other characters from IASD are in attendance. [Working with Jill did indeed feel like an apprenticeship. I had highly shamanic experiences.]

The sorcerer begins to recite a poem, a spell, from a small piece of paper. The spell is about the chakras of the earth. An animal is associated with each chakra and each line of the poem. There is a line about bulls and one about lions. I think the sorcerer is going to mention eagles next but he surprises me with polar bears. White bears. He shows me the poem so I can read it for myself. (I try to bring it with me into waking life but of course I cannot.) He then expounds with tremendous scientific detail on climate change and the implications of the loss of the polar ice caps, which is changing the ocean currents. [Jill’s ceremony was at Earth Spirit Centre, an eco retreat. We were surrounded by white sheep. I had my first black wolf dream a few days into the mandala. We also celebrated Beltane, an ancient honoring of the earth.]

I am deeply sad and this reminds me of Kay. I remember, too, that I have left my children waiting in the car. They must be hungry by now.

I tell the sorcerer that it’s time for me to leave. He helps me scrounge some food for Cullan and Jamie. In our every moment together he is joyful and completely supportive. As I turn to go he holds me lightly, lovingly by my shoulders, looks directly into my eyes and says, “Hey, happy birthday!” I don’t think it’s my birthday but I smile at him anyway. Wondering what he means. [I attend the mandala ceremony on my sixtieth birthday, in late April of 2017. It did not even connect with me that this dream was prescient of my big birthday till months later. ]

I walk the short distance across the plaza to the edge of the road where my car is parked, my arms full of treats for the kids. As I open the driver’s door and tuck my head to slide into the car, I brush the top of my wizard’s hat. Only at this moment do I realize that the sorcerer has placed a cap on my head made from the leathery, dried bell of a flower. Foxglove? [A “wish” I worked on at the mandala was for Cullan to find a new love. A few months later he met Hillary. They moved in together, got married in July of 2018 and had baby Wyn Franklin in June of 2019. Jamie means love. In Tarot, 6 is the Lovers card.]

We drive to the hotel or residence where Kay has been staying. It’s a pretty white stucco building with ornate carvings on the silver frames of the large picture windows. Very baroque. I am immensely relieved to discover that Kay has returned to the safety of her room on her own.

Next door to the hotel is a clothing boutique. Kay and the kids and I decide to do some shopping. The walls of the boutique are lined with wooden shelves full of beautiful scarves and accessories. In the middle of the shop is an oval-shaped display stacked with fine linen blouses and dresses. I find a white blouse that I like but I am distracted by the many other exquisite, colorful pieces on display. It feels like every garment is designed exactly for me. At one point I pick up a small hand-tooled purse of brown leather. I’m tempted to buy it but all of my shoes are black so I would have to find new shoes to match the bag. I return to the spot where I left the white blouse. It’s gone, and some of the other dresses are gone too. It’s a popular shop, apparently, and I will need to make quick, firm decisions about my purchases. [I think the leather purse is a clue about Jill Purce. She always wears a white blouse. Purse/Purce puts me on a new path (brown shoes). Linen scarves were a part of the ceremony, which rotated in oval and circular formations. It was also required to shop for clothing in certain colors to bring to the retreat.]

I had the strongest possible feeling when I awoke from this dream that the sorcerer was a real entity. Not a dream character.

(Saturday, August 31, 2019)

In the last two days I have had a series of very lucid dreams, three to four per night that I remember upon awakening. My definition of lucid is a dream that feels like actual reality, full of intense visual and emotional details: a level of existence we experience in sleep. Hillman’s Underworld. I have been too busy with work and chores to be able to record them with the details that were still clear in my mind early in the morning.

(Friday)

1: I am moving in the dream from house to house, homes I have owned in my dream lifetime. There are many. One matches exactly the two-story house my Luther grandparents owned in Brewster, Minnesota. Another is a complex, flat-roof design that is undersized. My head touches the ceiling. It feels like the ancient pueblo dwellings in the mountains of the Southwest. Humans were much smaller then.

2: I am an East Indian woman of my current age, but my physical appearance is very, very old. My soiled teeth are nearly fully decayed. Those that remain are filled with black cavities. My skin is covered in dark, liver-colored age spots. My mood and persona, though, are energetic and extremely positive. I own a huge house occupied by many East Indian guests. We are working on a decorating project that seems to be part of a show on HGTV. We all group together for a team photo organized on multiple levels. I pose in the top row, nestled inside of a comfortable open box designed to keep people at the top safe from falling. The man standing at my left side is Brad, one of the men I met at Jill’s Healing the Ancestors retreat. His dream physical appearance is East Indian, like mine. Dream Brad is mildly surprised to see that I am at the same high spiritual level as he.

(Saturday)

1: I am writing my dream blog. Cullan is nestled next to me on my left side. In waking life, he just completed a software update for my WordPress blog. We texted back and forth last night for half an hour or so.

2: I dream that Chris has the angry, aggressive personality that appeared after his craniotomy. In the dream it is even worse (that anger has dissolved over the years). He is threatening to violently attack me. I travel with rapid stealth through the world to escape and be safe. I move into forests, vacant buildings, rivers, oceans. As I do, Lola is present in my mind. Who will feed her? Keep her safe?

3: I am standing with grade school children in a classroom, waiting for the first day of school to begin. There are quite a few empty desks and it seems the kids that enter the room will all find a place to sit. But more and more students continue to fill the room, including two bully boys. I head down the hall to the main office in order to grab more desks. I thought I was just another student, but I realize that I am the teacher. (Day notes: two male coworkers bullied me a bit on Friday. Irritating. I stood my ground.)