The Astral Bog, Continued

[kimberlysteele]

Dreams and sleep are supposed to be a respite from the daily grind, but the collective astral has become so bad, dreaming now fails to fully perform its intended cleansing function. Dreams are not the refuge they once were to our ancestors.

“Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.”

-Percy Shelley

Escape From Chicago, The Reboot

Wouldn’t it be nice to dream of blue seas and ancient mossy towers like a Romantic poet? Instead, my recurring dream is Escape from Chicago, a bad movie with infinite sequels where I rush through a terrifying, hostile, melancholic hellscape intent on catching a bus, train, or just a momentary break from being assaulted by a car. I haven’t been to Chicago in three years. Chicago is a hopelessly stuck-up, Woke, dirty, and expensive shooting gallery run by a mayor who looks and acts like a malevolent space alien, and for these reasons I have no intention of returning within the next 75 years… that is to say, EVER. Nevertheless, I dream of being in college again and commuting home. College was over 25 years ago and I have no plans on obtaining further degrees; try telling that to my dream-self.

There’s a theory that the more of an astral mess a person is, the more they are likely to have terrible dreams or not to remember their dreams at all. Not remembering dreams at all is a bad sign, and I become concerned when I cannot remember mine. Supposedly the further along one is upon the path, the less sleep and dream time one needs. Yogis have a reputation for needing only 3-4 hours per night. I find that since I started my serious foray onto the Path, I have gone from needing 8 hours or more to a steady diet of 7, but this could also be a regular side effect of aging.

The general state of the astral has become so clogged and septic, I don’t know if the lot of us sleeping 10 hours a night, including yogis, would help. In a goofy way I am grateful to drive a car, because the roads are an excellent litmus test of astral plane conditions. Lately, there’s more road rage than I have seen in my lifetime. One out of every five cars routinely blasts whiny rap music where a severely-autotuned voice belches profanity to a loop that sounds like an perpetual Nike commercial. The Wokester stands at the stoplight corner waiting to cross, his mask neatly covering most of his face despite the fact he is solo and the temperature is well upwards of 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Tonight I saw a person in a souped up muscle car revving and weaving a tight S-curve in heavy traffic because he was frustrated at not being able to fly past the car ahead of him at 80 miles per hour. The modern suburbs are a place where angels fear to tread and the city is worse. We are in the darkest, most disillusioned era in human history. To seek enlightenment right now is to attempt to float in a tsunami. No matter how far along on the Path one is right now, the astral is still a gray, forbidding place clogged with busybodies and busywork. I cannot control the milieu of my nightly dreams (my astral environment) any more than I can control the fact there are superhighways bisecting my state.

Astral Tourism

There are self-declared mentats who seek to control the dream environment and to turn sleep into a big lucid dreaming playground where everything is beautiful (or at least funny) and nothing hurts. In essence, they want to turn dreaming into a long episode of masturbation, be it mental or of the usual kind. I tend to think they are spinning their wheels until karma smacks the smugness out of them, but like I always say, I could be wrong. We are meant to learn from dreams. Those who refuse to do so remind me of the American tourist stereotype. Instead of offending the French while in Paris, the astral tourist lumbers around dreams slaughtering the language and missing subtle cues as he desperately tries to sop up “experience”, all the better to later inflict upon others with an optional slide show.

Where Did I Go?

I am not easily anesthetized. I cannot be put into a trance. Because of my weird propensity to fight off states of unconsciousness, my use of antidepressant drugs back in the day resulted in the ability to drop into lucid dreaming states. I was able to pull my etheric body away from my physical body from a young age before going on anti-depressants (I weaned myself off of them by force at age 22 against the orders of my psychiatrist at the time) and going on serotonin reuptake inhibitors enhanced this talent.  When I separated my bodies, I was able to clearly view the first layer of sleep which takes place in the lower astral. The lower astral is scary and attracts the sort of shady characters who cause poltergeist hauntings. It is also full of ghosts of people who either do not know they are dead or who committed suicide. Because it is the closest layer to Meat World, the lower astral can get physical very easily — this is why people plagued by hauntings end up with superficial scratches or bruises from angry spirits. The entities in the lower astral can mount an attack and use a mixture of their own force plus the human’s own psychological state to stigmata a wound into being. Hauntings on the material plane are the astral equivalent of bedbugs or mice infestations: they can have something to do with cleanliness but not always.

Lately, the lower astral and all of its nastiness has been bleeding, for lack of a better term. Anyone who isn’t doing protective banishing rituals or engaging in meaningful, thoughtful relationship with a deity via prayer is toast. The feeling right now reminds me of the heat waves we get here in the Upper Midwest. There is a several week buildup of hot, humid weather that is perfectly unbearable followed by a violent storm. The last storm we had brought tornadoes and was followed by a short break of cool weather, then the next spate of humid weather crept in over a period of days. The astral storms we face are anyone’s guess. Will they bring riots, like the times Antifa and BLM were allowed to run amok trashing businesses and ruining entire neighborhoods? Will they bring plagues, like the plague of fear that disguised the manufactured control mechanism of Covid-19? Will Wokesters bring a revolution that puts their own heads on pikes?  Only the gods know, and they're not giving away any spoilers.