Dreams in a Spiritual Dark Age

[kimberlysteele]

Everyone born into our current chunk of the Kali Yuga is born tired. I used to sleep so much as a baby, my parents report waking me up every few hours just to make sure I wasn't dead. The problem, I believe, was that I spent fewer than five years out of incarnation. I believe that my soul's previous incarnation ended in 1968. From what I can recall, she died of old age. Occultists say that in past eras, human souls would spend anywhere from 50 to 200 years out of incarnation between bodies. Nowadays we are lucky if we get a few months. This is the natural result of human population being at an all time peak. The wave has crested. We may hit ten billion but it won't last. The thing we occultists look forward to (and economists mourn) is longer breaks in-between human lives as humankind shrinks in number.

I was tired as a child despite not having any significant health problems. I was tired at my physical prime around age 21. I wasn't quite as tired when I went vegan at age 37; for about a year I had a physical and mental boost as my health improved. Menopause hit at 49 and now I'm tired again. I am tired right now, writing this essay.

If you are tired like me, know at least that you are not alone. The humans alive right now lack the abundant energy people took for granted in the pre-Industrial era. This is largely the product of etheric starvation, a condition that occurs when lakes are filled, rivers dammed and reversed, roads built over meadows, and paradise paved to put up a parking lot. Philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was born in 1872, often commented on how much greener everything was before the 20th century. Since his death in 1970, the un-greening of the world has hit a frantic pace, and with it, etheric starvation has become the de facto condition of the world.

Why Is It Like This?

Sleep is supposed to be nourishing. Because of etheric starvation, sleep does not satisfy and nourish as it did in Bertrand Russell's era and the ones before it. Just as we eat more food nowadays (and get fat in the process) while absorbing fewer nutrients and becoming sick instead of healthy, we require more sleep, but the sleep we manage to get fails to restore the etheric body. Sleep also lacks the ability to soothe emotional distress for the most part. Sleep and dreams often leave us more troubled than going the insomniac route. This problem is the direct result of the collective astral's current degraded state. To put it flatly, the collective astral is a house of horrors; a cosmic dumpster fire. The combination of mass etheric starvation and endemic spiritual ignorance has given us a perpetual collective astral s**tstorm. The astral plane is nothing more or less than the realm of the imagination. When the average imagination is a haunted, poisoned well, the collective result is a minefield of creepy things emerging from those wells like The Ring (2002) minus the haunted VHS tapes. Let's take the example of the imaginal world of a four year old girl named Cassie. Little Cassie's babyhood was spent entirely in Covid lockdown. For this reason, she knows the lyrics of Sexxy Red's Pound Town better than she knows her ABCs. Her mind is consumed by both Lyla in the Loop and lewder images of influencer types twerking in the club. She doesn't have the mental equipment to know what to make of the titillating images jamming her brain. She does however know how to drop the F bomb like a seasoned pro.

Now let's visit Alex, a fourteen year old suburban boy. Justifiably angry at being society's throwaway, Alex longs for rites of passage other than getting a driver's license. He escapes his hovering mother and a stifling school routine with online games. He has no practical skills and nobody to teach him how to be a man. His imagination is populated by the caricatures of women in anime form who speak in baby-talk to his subconscious, reassuring him that it is fine to be lazy, dependent, and weak.

Fast-forward to Alex, the female version. She is 28 and she wants to be an influencer of a slightly different kind than Sexxy Red. She has recently joined an MLM, convinced that it is her ticket out of poverty despite the credit debt she had to take on in order to gain the "opportunity" of selling herbal diet pills. Alex is possessed by a Wendigo that craves unearned wealth. Her dreams overflow with McMansions, spa weeks, and jet travel she will never experience.

Now on over to the hump of middle age... I know it well! We have Jason, a 52 year old man preaching assertive forms of religion mainly to people who don't want to hear it. His subconscious is as full of the desire to be gay as his feed is full of damnation against gays. His brief, drug-fueled experiences as a young twink haunt him, though he will never admit it. His uni-God purportedly hates gays, so deep down, he believes his God hates him as he cannot help being homosexual.

But wait, like a bad infomercial, there's more. Let's get on to Nora, a sixty-five year old divorcee who is addicted to shopping and romance novels. Nora's rich ex-husband shovels alimony money in her general direction, so finances are not an issue. Nora's dreams and imagination are dysmorphic. She's fond of making AI photos of herself that depict her as a romance novel heroine, her old, flabby body replaced by a young, busty avatar that somewhat resembles somebody she could have been.

Finally, we have Clyde, an 80+ guy trapped in a nursing home who waits to die while watching cable news alone in his room. Anything is better than the constant onslaught of needles, experimental vaccines, and dialysis required to keep him in endless stasis. His family has forgotten about him and his friends are all dead. He cannot help his grumpiness with the young strangers who don't have time to discover his bed sores. He wishes they would just leave him alone so he could make his undramatic exit.

Even the most spiritually aware people -- present company excluded, I'm talking monks and nuns who actually live the Word, yogis, and kung fu masters -- have to put up with the collective astral morass. The more along the Path you are, the more sensitized you are to higher beings and the more exempt you are from astral assaults, but it does not save anyone from the mess the astral has become. Much of magical work in the Western tradition is to build a temple within the imagination that is a sanctuary from the collective astral. The collective astral is at its all-time worse at the moment but it has always been crappy, hence the need for astral temples.

The Dives

Sleep and dreams are a diving expedition. Sleep is a cycle of waves on the subtle planes that mimics patterns measured on the physical planes. To "drop off" into sleep is more like to "turn on". As the physical falls away, the dreamer wanders unfettered by the Meatworld body and Meatworld limits. For this reason, all sleep is astral travel. Like pit stops and break downs on a road trip, diving through the planes in sleep can be marred by halts and jerks. The first dive through the lower astral is like taking a car through a bad neighborhood. One pothole or excessively long traffic light can spell disaster. Hypnogogia and night terrors are pit stops in the lower astral, the imaginal realm of torment, passion, and conflict. If you vibrate to the lower astral because of your steady diet of Sexxy Red, Samus Aran, and Dawson's 20 Load Weekend, you'll be a virtual prisoner of it both in waking and dreaming life. Add that most of us don't sleep all that well or deeply, or that many of us are on serotonin drugs, and the chances of hanging out with the nasty creatures of the lower astral are virtually guaranteed. It's funny that bedwetting is feared and tabooed, because bedwetting is often the natural result of effective, deep sleep. The young and the old wet the bed because of 1. Not-so-great bladder control but also because of 2. Thoroughly detaching from the physical plane while sleeping. When you can still dive the higher astral plane during sleep because you are closer to non-Meatworld being than most (by virtue of being close to death or birth) it's hard to re-surface, wake up, and pee.

Dream Symbolism

Dream guides -- those books that attempt to catalogue what every dream symbol means -- are not worth the powder to blow them to hell because the real question is not "What does this symbol mean?" but "What does this symbol mean to me?" When my father was dying, I did not see his coming death in dreams, yet I was the only one who knew he was going to go near the time he did. My dreams are not prophetic. Nevertheless, my dreams have plenty of symbols that inform me about past, present, and future. For instance, when I dream of a certain large house, it symbolizes worry about money and security. When I dream about the city of Chicago, it symbolizes the Path itself, despite the fact I try to avoid traveling into Chicago whenever possible. When I dream of cults, it's a surefire symbol of American corporate culture. But if I dream of a bird, it's just a bird.

Controlling Dreams

There are people who can control their own dreams. One woman used her TED Talk platform to insist "anyone" can turn their dreams into a fantasy playground. Though I don't doubt she has fun times with her rainbows, talking fish, unicorns, or whatever, transforming one's dreams into free Disney World strikes me as a genuinely stupid idea that stands a decent chance of earning her a painful karmic retrogression. Dreams are a playground of sorts, but they are not as gossamer and silly as the term would imply. Instead, dreams are more of a sandbox that happens to temper the dreamer like fine steel. But Kimberly, you say, doesn't ritual magic and sacred homemaking involve the construction of imaginary shapes on the astral, and doesn't that take some playing around? Yes, but in the case of ritual magic, the whole point is to invoke and court Divine protection, which is not something one does when attempting to become She-Ra in the Land of Cotton Candy. So what I am saying is go ahead and curate your astral experience, including your dreams, but understand that dreams and the astral are the attempts of the Divine to teach us outside of the confines of Meatworld. For some, the use of the astral as a constant playground is not possible and thank goodness, because to use it as the TED retard suggested is to use one's night sleep like a junkie uses smack. Personally, I have avoided heroin because I don't want to learn that one the hard way, and the same is true with abusing dreams.

So You Have a Dream?

Keeping a dream diary is a good idea. Everyone dreams regardless of whether or not you remember it. My dreams are often difficult to remember, and I don't remember 90 percent of them within a few hours of waking up. So write them down, by all means. No matter what, discursive meditation is the key to getting anything out of dream analysis: that means sitting down with a single symbol, name, or impression from a dream and unpacking that item for anywhere from 5-15 uninterrupted minutes.

Don't forget practical, natural magic to fight the nasties on the etheric and astral planes: in the bedroom, place one or more symmetrical patterns. They act as demon traps on the astral plane. This is a kind of magic that has been used since time immemorial to confuse evil entities: African wedding baskets, Islamic mosaics, Amish hex signs and quilts, Native American dream catchers... all are designed with symmetrical, repeating patterns that act like Kryptonite to a demon's Superman. Furthermore, don't forget a bowl of vinegar, saltwater, or salt (or all three) at the bedside, as these scramble evil entities on the etheric plane, making them sorry they ever traipsed near your corner of the etheric. I'll make my best attempt to explain all of this crazy jazz in my upcoming book, Sacred Homemaking. In the meantime, sweet dreams.

Comments

MLM

[(Anonymous)]

I have seen MLMs approached in two ways. The first is as you describe. The second way is even ickier and, I believe, the way they are actually intended to work. They act as a ready made business for the salary class to take advantage of small business tax right offs.

If you take a couple Amway Xs drinks to your niece in Florida, well then you can count the plane tickets and at least the first night at the hotel as an expense. If you keep product in your garage and use your office to order more then you as an individual can rent your business that space, same goes for your car.

Every state has different rules and I'm not a CPA, but from some of the people I've seen involved in these it's clear moving product is not the goal.

-MF

Re: MLM

[kimberlysteele]

Oh my gosh, that is so gross. I am an independent business owner and rarely if ever do I come up with enough expenses to justify not taking the standard deduction. MLMs work great if you are one of the first people into the upline. They're a sleazy way of gaining unearned wealth. Of course I could be wrong, but I think anyone who makes money from an MLM will end up paying it all back later, and that includes in future lives.

[(Anonymous)]

Loads of friends, relatives and acquaintances have reported sleeping very poorly of late and are very tired. One of my close friends, with whom I can discuss the paranormal candidly, told me he's had terrible night terrors and sleep paralysis entities for the last week. Shadow figures all standing around his bed, watching him. I've suggested salt, etc, and gave him a bottle of Florida water a while ago, I don't know if he ever used it.

The voxed seem to be having particular trouble getting to/staying asleep as well, which is concerning, as that can be a sign of prion disease (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_insomnia).

My synchronicity-meter has gone haywire again, which I've learned is an indicator that there's the equivalent of an astral storm coming in, but I've been sleeping ok recently. I have been getting lots of "late for the airport/train" dreams though, which mean I'm running out of time for something. I used to get lots of "chased by an unseen horror" dreams, but these seem to have stopped ever since I started banishing. From brief experiments, they come back if I skip a day, so I assume something actually is after me in my dreams. Interestingly, I got a mystery 24-hour illness the other week which had me in bed all day and I had lots of chasing dreams, even with banishing (or as much as I could do from bed), giving further evidence to the theory that it's a genuine psychic assault.

I don't know if you saw my post on Magic Monday last week, but I had a very interesting dream where I think I may have met a Fae queen. This isn't the first eerily-realistic Fae dream I've had, and I have a feeling they have an interest in me for some reason. Hopefully I don't get spirited away...

I also asked JMG about it a few weeks ago, but I seem to have a 'skill' for putting images into people's dreams. If I describe things, people dream about them. I assume it's because I can generate very detailed mental imagery, and by describing it, I can show people the same mental image. I've unintentionally given friends nightmares by telling them about the idea I had for the plot of a horror movie.

Mr. Crow

[kimberlysteele]

I used to have lots of "chased by unseen horror" dreams. Interestingly, they went away after about a year of daily banishing rituals. As for your friend, if he can stand to print out a bedside geometric https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/26916.html it would do a world of good. You know that old saying about leading a horse to water though...

I don't know about queens or kings, but I have met a few fairies (astral plane ones, not gay guys) and they can be frightening. You have to be very careful with them. There are good reasons why they have a reputation for glamours and trickery. Fairies (faeries, fae, whatever) often impersonate other incorporeal beings and other incorporeal beings impersonate faeries. Impersonation is one of the primary issues I've dealt with since waking up to my own abilities where the perception of the incorporeal ecosystem is concerned. From my limited observations, fairies mostly don't like humans yet are attracted and enchanted by them. It's definitely love/hate.

I know what you mean about being able to put images into people's heads. It's more of a gift than a curse though -- take it as a positive omen for your own writing!

Testimonials

[denebalgedi777]

The "born tired" phenomenon is something I suspect a lot of esoteric types will have a strong feeling for, since as JMG says, if you are interested in spiritual practices you've probably been around for a while. I had it as a youth and it didn't make much sense, as I was also physically quite healthy. But this is probably a feature of spiritual dark ages and the restless wandering souls that frequent them -- a similar feeling was described by Hesiod during the Greek Dark Ages following the collapse of the Hellenes' Age of Bronze. I combated it in my youth with caffeinated soda pop and hyperactivity. Intermittent insomnia has been a struggle for me as well.

My first past life memories that I was aware of came to me in dreams about 3 years ago. It seems that I was a German whose family fled the Reich between the two World Wars and ended up in London. I have no recollection of fighting in WWII and so I must have either been a peacenik or had some disability that prevented me from being drafted. I was a professional musician who liked both classical and jazz and I was involved in a dysfunctional relationship with a pretty Bohemian German expat girl for much of my life. Like many Germans I liked booze too much and this, along with being a jerk and making bad decisions too many times, led to an early demise. And I was also not long out of incarnation, though probably more than 5 years.

I have no way of knowing whether this all happened, but it seems strange for my mind to have made this up in such detail, even to the point of knowing what my old name was. And if it is true, it would explain an awful lot: Why I had talent for music but did not pursue it much in this life, why I have had relationship troubles, why I early on had to confront drug/alcohol addiction, why I had an aversion to cities (I spent most of my last incarnation in a big one), why I had a strange affinity for German culture, and why despite being born in America I never quite felt at home there. And just as JMG said often happens, the memories that surfaced first were ones that were not my finest moments, perhaps as a cautionary tale and a command not to repeat.

Anyway, the world of dreams does vary like a wave in my experience. Sometimes I feel very viscerally the nastiness of the collective astral. Especially in the past when I was less careful about my own environment. Now I am much more careful about what astral influences I let in, and my dreams have gotten more tranquil. But I also occasionally stumble into some pretty nasty parts of the lower astral and having developed my subtle senses from spiritual practices makes them even more vivid than they used to be. There's no getting away from it completely. What I do notice though is that there are still some pretty uninhabited parts of the inner planes and sometimes I find large wildernesses (of the kind that have mostly disappeared in the waking world) to wander in and get away from it all. Unfortunately, this is probably a situation we're stuck with for the rest of the time we're incarnated, since the ages of Aquarius and Capricorn have thousands of years left, and we'll probably have moved on by the time they come to an end.

Re: Testimonials

[kimberlysteele]

Fascinating... thank you for sharing this. I too believe I remember my most recent past life's name, first and last. I can vouch for the first memories to surface being bad ones: that seems to be a survival mechanism of the sort I talked about in my Pollyanna essay. What's odd is I tend to bring up the wildernesses of which you speak during the Sphere of Protection. They are powerful places that exorcise and expel negative forces by their mere invocation. I imagine that if everything goes right, at the end of my life, I will be able to converse with my guides about these places. The same ones tend to pop up over and over. I believe that some of them are vignettes from my future lives. I've had a few from past lives. The past life ones show up in dreams more often than the future ones -- for me, the future life vistas must be invoked on purpose.

Re: Testimonials

[(Anonymous)]

I also suspect that people who read JMG are much more likely to be old souls, because he is himself and so I suspect that quite a few of us have been guided to him because he can show us how to redeem ourselves (I think I was); and that we're likely a lot more tired than the usual person who pursues esotericism. Most of us have had a lot of negative karma to deal with; and most of us have been very bad at it, because you can't be an old soul otherwise.

The combination of being here a lot longer than normal, and having a harder time with it than most too seems like a good way to become quite tired, so I suspect it's one of the common features of most, if not all, old souls.

Re: Testimonials

[kimberlysteele]

Materialism and a very big problem (ongoing) with anger slowed my soul's progression quite a bit. I have yet to know when I was first incarnated as a human. I believe it was in the Middle Ages -- of course I could be wrong. Unfortunately, etheric starvation and astral sepsis has ensured that everyone, including souls who were within non-human animal incarnation all of 0-100 years ago, are tired as hell.

Mean Mr. Caffeine

[mr_nobody1967]

That we're "born tired" would explain why so many people fall into the trap of caffeine-addiction the way I did as a socially-maladjusted young man. The good news of the moment is that I am succeeding in reducing my daily caffeine consumption by twenty-five percent.

Re: Mean Mr. Caffeine

[kimberlysteele]

Good job! Caffeine addiction is a vicious cycle. My goal at some point will be to switch to mostly green tea. At this point, I drink black tea as much or more as I drink green. Both have lots of benefits but green tends to have the most extreme ones.

[(Anonymous)]

The "born tired" thing really resonates with me. I too have been tired my whole life.

I thought maybe it was just me, and that it was due to my childhood. My mother was a narcissist, and growing up with a narcissist certainly will drain the energy out of anyone. But maybe there was another reason - or maybe it's both.

One of the reasons I decided not to have children in this incarnation is because I frankly just don't have the energy. Our current culture is not a nice one for children, and while I'm sure it's possible to raise healthy, well-adjusted children in the modern world, I think it takes an ENORMOUS amount of effort to stay grounded and raise kids while protecting them from a toxic culture. It can be done, but to me the mere thought of what it would take was just utterly exhausting. I knew I couldn't do it this time around - I was too tired from the get-go. In this incarnation I've had only enough energy to escape the toxic home and care for myself.

Raising children

[(Anonymous)]

Exactly! I also chose not to have children due to lack of energy to be able to raise them well. I also never wanted to be a single parent and figured I had a better than even chance of being divorced at some point. Being a parent was just more resource intensive than I could imagine coping with.

Re: Raising children

[kimberlysteele]

I had wonderful parents yet I chose not to have kids this time around. It was absolutely the best option for me... I have never regretted my choice for a second. I would have been a good mother -- I was an excellent mom in my most recent past life before this one. I wasn't willing to do it as long as I have a choice. My hat is off to people who become good parents in this era. So many decks are stacked against them and their kids: world and local economies in decline, car-centric landscapes, the influence of the internet, and the constant war against them waged via vaccines and PMC indoctrination.

[(Anonymous)]

"One woman used her TED Talk platform to insist "anyone" can turn their dreams into a fantasy playground. Though I don't doubt she has fun times with her rainbows, talking fish, unicorns, or whatever, transforming one's dreams into free Disney World strikes me as a genuinely stupid idea that stands a decent chance of earning her a painful karmic retrogression."
I LOLed so much at that! When I was learning dream control as a means of protection against the worst aspects of the suffocation nightmares I had a few things I came across regarding this idea of just making every dream all shiny happy people all the time by doing x, y and z. Uh no thanks. I view my dreams as a conduit to broader human experiences, some perhaps from things picked up only by my subconscious mind, some perhaps from other astral planes or beings, some perhaps from dead loved ones, communications from God/source et cetera. Some might contain omens or warnings that I need to heed or they might otherwise allow me to make a more informed choice about a difficult matter. Why in God's name would I want to lose the signal by trying to turn them all into happyland fantasies? If bad stuff is going on in the world so be it. I can deal with that. It takes black white and all colors to paint a masterpiece.
I did write regarding my dreams and other commentary here: https://sukwan.substack.com/p/what-do-you-dream-about I'll be perusing your blog posts nice to make your acquaintance Kimberly!

[kimberlysteele]

Thanks for this! Yes, the urge to paper over one's own dreams with false transcendence and toxic positivity is aptly symbolized in this metaphor: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/09/20/161466361/woman-who-ruined-fresco-of-jesus-now-wants-to-be-paid

It's sheer arrogance and hubris, but it's all the worse to do it and insist that "everyone" can and should micromanage their dreams.

I finally have some time off so I will look forward to leaving a comment on your most recent Substack.