Kimberly Steele

I’ve believed various things about dreams during my near half century in this life, and my beliefs have run the gamut from atheist dismissal of dreams as insignificant make-believe to the polytheist’s view of dreams as interaction with other human souls, spirits, entities, and gods on a plane that connects to our material one called the astral plane.  At the time of this writing, I fall solidly into the latter category.

When I was sixteen, as a churchgoing Christian Protestant, I experienced an intense run of night terrors.  Almost every night, I would drop into a twilight, not-quite-sleep state where I would see things lurking in my bedroom through the red haze of my eyelids.  A feeling of pressure accosted me as if I had a heavy weight on my chest.  Breathing was difficult.  Dark shapes amassed in corners and huddled against walls.  If the sights were terrifying, the sounds were worse.  I heard low hums of chorused voices that would rise in response to the small movements of my body.  One of the worst ones featured two malicious teenaged girls whispering in the corner of my room, plotting to assault me with a hammer.  Since I already suffered with depression at the time, I figured I was going crazy.  I have never known much more than my ethnicity because I was adopted shortly after being born, so due to my genetic wild cards, I suspected my night terrors heralded an early descent into paranoid schizophrenia.  

The Protestant church that had granted me confirmation a few years earlier had zero answers; I would have been an idiot not to know this and did not bother asking.  My inadequate study of the occult at that time did not help because I was too incompetent a researcher to seek out the right study materials and mentors.  I had no comprehension of dreams and the astral body at the time I desperately needed exactly that form of cold, non-superstitious understanding.  What follows is that which I believe I needed to hear at sixteen years old:

“If each human’s existence is likened to the Everlasting Gobstopper/Jawbreaker, the material plane is the sour candy shell on the outside.  One layer in, there is a different flavor called the etheric plane.  This plane of energy is what Chinese people call “chi” and Indians call “prana” and is what feng shui, acupuncture, and Ayurveda works with.  The etheric is invisible to us humans while we are awake in our stodgy plane, but some sensitive people can see it and most can feel it whether they realize it or not.  The next candy layer in is the astral plane, which is most easily understood as the world of dreams you go to when you sleep.  The dream world is part your own brain and part collective, meaning, other peoples’ dreams are part of your world/vice a versa and you can interact with them and they with you.  Dreams are not what you choose them to be: just like other people’s emotions or the weather, they aren’t controlled by the dreamer.  There are rules and limits to them just as there are rules and limits on the physical plane.  Of course these rules and limits are different than the ones on the physical plane.  The next layer in is the mental plane, which is the plane of learning and mastery that separates humans from other animals.  For instance, being able to figure out how fast an object falls to the ground because of scientific laws falls under the mental plane category.   Another layer into the Gobstopper is the spiritual plane, which is the primary reason you were incarnated and is the core from which all of the other layers of the Gobstopper emanate and cannot exist without.  Take note that all the planes are the same Gobstopper, they are just different layers of a whole candy.”

I needed a tutorial on the subtle bodies divorced from all traces of woo.  I needed to be told that night terrors weren’t all in my imagination.  I needed to be told that I wasn’t crazy, only depressed.  Of course medical professionals told me I was crazy and medicated me accordingly, which is why I fired them long ago.  Though I offer no advice to anyone else taking psychiatric drugs, I personally chose to stop taking medications, especially since the ones I was on tended to exacerbate my night terrors instead of stopping them.  

The Astral Plane as Nouns: Persons, Places, and Things

Of course no two human’s dreams are identical, nor are their perceptions of the astral plane, which is the separate-but-connected layer of the Gobstopper where dreams take place.  Furthermore, if each dream is as large as the being’s imagination that perceives it, we can describe the astral plane as infinite as far as our tiny brains are concerned because it is a collective of all dreams ever dreamed by sentient beings.  Additionally, it is at least a billion years old, just like animal life on Planet Earth.  

One of the few dependable traits of dreams is that humans dream of other humans, and unless you’re a truly unusual human, you are probably dreaming of people you know as well as deceased relatives, celebrities, non-human animals, and perhaps a fictional character every now and then for spice.  If the astral plane is full of people, including yourself, the next logical question is “Who are these people in dreams?”  Atheists, who do not believe in an astral plane even though they have no choice but to go there every time they sleep, will answer, “Those people are figments of the dreamer’s imagination.”  On the other hand, a credulous true-believer type will answer, “Those people have nothing to do with the dreamer’s imagination: they are one hundred percent real.”  

It is my opinion that the truth is somewhere in between the two extremes.  Some of the other people in dreams are absolutely only in your imagination and have absolutely nothing to do with any person, real or living, in the waking world.  Others are literally your dead relative who is trying to contact you to reassure you that it will all be fine and you needn’t tear your hair out over their death.  Others, and I suspect this is true of the majority, are a blend of your projections onto the screen of their essence, meaning a part of them that science has yet to understand is interacting with you and another part is all your perception of who they are.  If you have a particularly intense dream about someone, living or dead, my thoughts are that you should give it some deep self-analysis.  You might learn almost nothing about them by looking into why you dreamed about them, but you’ll learn almost everything about yourself.  

As for non-human characters, I dream about non-human animals all the time.  I know what they mean to me.  Animals frequently represent to me what children represent to parents.  Most of the animals I dream about are creatures of fantasy, for instance the giant wild dogs that populate my parents’ yard in dreams.  There are no wild dogs of that size in the Midwest.  If I dream of my cat, however, chances are she is part my imagination and part my actual cat projecting her astral presence from where she sleeps, which is usually on or near my legs.
 

When it comes to places that humans dream about, it begins to get truly interesting.  A simple online search will reveal entire communities talking about recurring dreams of a certain style of mall and a certain style of school.  Though malls and schools are part of the common waking experience, the uncanny part is that two or more dreamers from completely unrelated locations and backgrounds can describe the same layouts, store owners, and nitty gritty details about the astral plane mall as if it existed on the material plane.  Once again, the atheist chimes in with “oh come on, it’s all just a coincidence” yet the most cursory perusal of Jungian psychology would reveal an undeniable rabbit hole that would be positively un-scientific to ignore.  I too dream of the mall.  It’s a multi-story structure and it’s always in a state of closing; it is often only half lit because it is closing down.  It is often attached to a grocery store with a large apartment building nearby.  The school was once high school in my case and has now become perpetual college.  I’m never prepared and I have no class schedule, which I am instructed I must see a counselor on the first floor to obtain.  Meanwhile, I am missing one or more classes.  I often dream my parents have moved into a round or octagonal custom built open plan McMansion with far more seating areas and bedrooms than necessary for an old married couple.  This structure often has windows that view a shared wall with a conjoining building that is similarly deluxe.  I believe I dream of the mall because it exists in the collective consciousness of dreamers, especially dreamers in and from the US.  We are all going to the same mall, but unlike a physical mall, it is as huge as consciousness itself with inconceivable numbers of minute permutations.  When I dream of my parents’ house, I believe it’s mostly my emotional pictures of that place with a tiny bit of the “real” house and the spirits who dwell there mixed in.  

Speaking of spirits, I will now provide a trigger warning to any atheists still reading: if you are one of the many atheists who claims to be openminded but is actually no such thing, please surf away now and go back to your simple, comfortable blue pill world.  I was an atheist for a while and I am quite familiar with that world; it’s nice there and there are lots of select-a-size paper towels and neatly mowed lawns.  Nevertheless, magic does not require your belief in order to exist, and neither do angels, elementals, spirits of the dead, gods, or demons.  We wouldn’t want you to become frightened by things you are wholly determined not to believe in!  

Non-corporeal entities, otherwise known as spirits, are everywhere in all the planes, as are gods and demons.  Unlike on the material plane, we can see a great many more spirits on the astral plane, but the forms they take depend on our own perceptions.  Gods and angels can’t be understood by our primitive walking ape minds, so if they show themselves to us in dreams, it’s anyone’s guess what form they will take.  One ancient description of angels depicts them with four faces, for instance the Book of Ezekiel in the Bible which describes cherubim with the simultaneous faces of a man, eagle, ox, and lion.  For me, this description provides obvious representational symbolism of the four elements — man is water, eagle is air, ox is earth, and lion is fire — and not much else.  In The Exorcist’s Handbook, Josephine McCarthy hilariously describes angels as having autistic personalities: often excruciatingly literal.  Their appearance is whatever the human’s puny mind can handle.
 

Things in dreams, for instance, a window or an apple, are also maddeningly subjective.  To you, a window might represent an opportunity or a path to freedom.  For me, it might be an item made of glass and plastic that’s on sale at The Home Depot for $159 and nothing more.  For this reason, dream interpretation and books on that topic are pretty much useless.  Symbols and archetypes are deeply personal, and though we can talk about larger sociological trends to hint which ones are important, in the end it all comes down to the individual’s nature.  

One thing I have seen more than my fair share of in dreams is demons, especially in the old days before I knew about the Sphere of Protection, hoodoo baths, and prayer.  What does a demon look like?  Well, to me, they often pose as people I know, except they are off and deformed.  I call this type of demon an Impersonator.  Other forms are typical to horror movies: the classic Hag, ogres, disembodied hands.  As far as I can tell, the astral plane is absolutely infested with demons and malicious entities at the moment and it’s only getting worse.  This infestation is due to the murky state of people’s imaginations as they become increasingly removed from nature and more heavily influenced/corrupted by the poisonous media machine.  Industrialism has not been good for human consciousness, and if demons need to be invited in order to make a home, the mechanization of our fragile biosphere has rolled out the red carpet.
 

I hope the above gives you a remote idea of what I think dreams are made of (cues song by The Eurythmics).  One thing that is certain is that dreaming isn’t studied enough.  Our culture is ill-equipped to study human dreams, as there is the stupid belief in the revelatory potency of EEGs and brain scans with fun rainbow colors.  In my opinion, a culture that denies the existence of the astral plane as ours does cannot have any understanding of dreams, because dreams ARE the astral plane.  So for now, it’s up to occultists to figure out the astral plane, unless science decides to get a clue.

Reading List:
The Astral Body and Other Astral Phenomena by A.E. Powell
The Exorcist's Handbook by Josephine McCarthy
Psychic Self-Defense by Dion Fortune

When I was sixteen, heartbroken from my first failed romantic relationship, I turned to witchcraft with desperate hopes that I would gain the coolness and perspective of a sage adult.  My relationship with religion had always been complicated despite having an average suburban upbringing and average attendance at the local church.  I was confirmed in the usual way.  Truth be told, I never much felt adoration for the Christian god except for when we sang his music.  The music wasn’t enough to hold my interest.  At sixteen, frightened of my increasing hypnogogia and suicidally depressed, I dived into Gardnerian Wicca. 

In my opinion, Gardner is the type of occultist who is like a broken clock: he’s right twice a day and wrong the rest of the time.  His version of Wicca is more empty pomp and circumstance than substance — his rituals weren’t all that user-friendly to the sole practitioner, his explanations of what magic is and does were completely obtuse, and his frantic need to grant authenticity to his brand of witchcraft undermined its intention as a revival religion, which I would presume to be reviving a religion, to state the obvious.  I got myself a Tarot deck and it was the Thoth deck.  I love the Thoth deck to this day and I’m grateful for my early study of it, however, because of it I jumped from the frying pan into the fire.  I started delving into the works of Aleister Crowley.  Crowley, like Gardner, had no practical advice for other occultists and, like a bad music teacher, assumed every student was starting out with a basic working knowledge of the field's principles.  Crowley also was simply an awful person.  He’s a man who started out with everything in life: good looks, wealth, intelligence.  He squandered all of it, most likely molested children, and died broke and friendless in a fleabag rent-a-room.  His reputation as the “evilest man in the world” is somewhat of a joke, because shouldn’t a thoroughly evil man have bottomless sources of wealth and power?  Nevertheless, to dismiss Crowley’s labors, especially his magnum opus (the Thoth tarot deck) is to skip over a secret key to a vast storehouse of knowledge.  I bumbled through my late teenage and early college years, gaining a reputation among Christian paranoids at my city university because I dared display my esoteric books on an open shelf.  Yes, a small but rabid Christian constituent in my dorm tried to stop me from displaying 777 and Tarot: Mirror of the Soul.  Christians can be real asshats, and they don’t do their waning religion any favors by acting in such a fashion.

By the time I was leaving my 20s and college behind, I came to a watershed.  I was on anti-depressants because at seventeen, I voluntarily started taking antidepressants so I would stop thinking so seriously about killing myself.  As an adult, I decided the drugs had done their job.  My psychiatrist, a vacuous, incompetent, rich, comfortably numb boob, insisted I was nuts and that I would have to be on tricyclic antidepressants for the rest of my life.  This conflicted directly with me becoming an adult, and at the time depression was considered a pre-existing condition which could prevent me from getting health insurance.  I fired my shrink and weaned myself off of antidepressants.  My hypnogogia waned along with my antidepressant dosage, and it felt natural to stop thinking so much about Crowley, Tarot, and magical rituals that didn’t seem to do much of anything, let alone improve my life.  

By 30, I was atheist.  I still had hypnogogia and encountered odd things while in that state; I just chalked it up to the undiscovered scientific truth of inter dimensional bleed.  I still did magic, meaning, I threw my intentions in certain directions and uncanny stuff happened as a result.  Like any good atheist, I was a solipsist, trusting that I was God of my own mind and no other forces could possibly be at work there.  I condemned all forms of belief in God as various manifestations of the fear of death.  I ignored any and all beings who tried to talk to me; hidden deep down was the fear that my shrink was right, that I was crazy and soon enough the voices would prove I was insane.  I was gleefully nihilistic in my atheism.  Though I suppose it bothers some atheists that death is a one-way trip into a permanent void, that didn’t bother me at all.  In fact, I wrote my first novel, Forever Fifteen, as a look into the horror of being forced to exist in the flesh for a thousand years or more.  The protagonist, Lucy, longs for the black, permanent void of death, as boring as that may seem.  I have always loved tedium and the atheist version of what happens after death is about as tedious and boring as can be.  

Oddly, my atheist self also wrote a decidedly non-atheist music album, the Dream of Flight, which is an entire, programmatic album about what I only now belatedly understand to be the astral plane.  Occultists see human existence as the simultaneous manifestation of the soul or Individuality on approximately seven planes ranging from the lightest, the spiritual plane, to the densest, the material plane.  The astral plane, otherwise known as the plane of emotions and daily and nightly dreams, is somewhere in the middle.  Despite having written an album about dreams that talked about “bringing a whole world to life” via the dream world, I puttered on, quoting Christopher Hitchens and Bertrand Russell and not believing there was any such thing as a disembodied spirit, non-corporeal being, or god. 

Fast forward to around age thirty-seven, when I went vegan for the animals.  Veganism gets accused of being a religion for good reasons, one of which is that it takes tremendous will power and dedication to ignore opposing forces who would have you conform to their animal-eating and abusing ways. People in our anti-religious culture believe that sort of dedication can only come from belief in a higher power, but I would argue that humans are naturally religious and if the Christian god cannot fill spiritual needs, actually living ones values as a vegan rushes into that spiritual void.  Most vegans I know are atheists who suffer from the binary delusion of either having to have one God (usually the Christian god) or no god at all (atheism).  Most are not willing to hear (at least in my opinion) they’re both wrong.  When I went vegan, suddenly all that bilge I used to spew as an ova-lacto vegetarian about not wanting to take on the energy of suffering and sad animals by eating them actually made sense.  When you go vegan, the weight you lose is mainly spiritual.  I was one of the lucky people whose health benefitted from going vegan — it helped that I already cooked most of my own meals and didn’t subsist on junk food — however, the feeling of clarity and purity that happened when I stopped eating animals and their secretions was one I wouldn’t trade even if being vegan gave me cancer, so there’s that.  

Around the same time, my absolute hatred of the suburbs and car obsession led me to an author-blogger named James Howard Kunstler.  Kunstler is devastatingly witty and because of this, I became a constant fan of his podcast and writings.  Every now and then, he featured a guy on his podcast named John Michael Greer.  I began to read John Michael Greer’s blog The Archdruid Report, which ostensibly was not about Druids or their religion but about the same subjects as Kunstler wrote about: peak oil, people, and politics.  I quietly ignored Greer’s “other” blog, The Well of Galabes, which was about magic.  As an atheist, I hardly cared about woo-woo interests I had abandoned along with antidepressant drugs and childhood.  I’m not sure at what point I decided to read Greer’s other blog or the many books he had written at that time about magic, but I did.  Unlike so many religious people, Greer was high on the reliability meter and low on the hypocrisy and narcissism meters.  I read the Well of Galabes and just like the Archdruid Report, it contained pragmatic, well-rounded perspectives about the world, and it made its points about religion with no obvious or subversive aims to convert the reader.  When Greer brought Archdruid Report and Well of Galabes to an end, he began a new blog called Ecosophia, I followed it eagerly.  Comments on Greer’s blogs were always lively and fun, with many smart people throwing around provocative and intriguing ideas.  The Greer essays that gave me the most to think about were The Next Ten Billion Years, which over time got me to rethink my belief in short term human extinction: yes, that’s what Extinction Rebellion is blathering on about.  I no longer believe the human race is going to cause the end of a livable climate in the next 300 years, and I think the reasons why I used to believe that would happen is because the thought allowed me the luxury of thinking nothing I do matters.  Once he was on Ecosophia, Greer wrote an essay people had been asking for about reincarnation.  If there is a such thing as a life-changing essay, I believe Greer’s A Few Notes on Reincarnation was it for me.  That particular essay explained mysteries about my own experience and also helped me to understand the chaotic world around me.  I started considering the possibility that I was the reincarnation of a chain of people behind me and that I had many more human lifetimes to go.  I became nascently aware of realities I had considered impossible as an atheist.  

At this point, I started looking into Druidry, because as a long time writer of Celtic-sounding music and long haired tree-hugger, I figured, why not?  Druidry (and other magical paths) required three things on a daily basis:

1. Discursive meditation, which is not the mind-emptying Eastern kind but rather a disciplined form of rational thinking invented in the ancient West. 

2. Divination, which I already had some experience in via Tarot cards. 

3. The Sphere of Protection, an approximately 20 minute bit of solo performance that involved memorizing a script of invoking and banishing elemental forces (once you’ve got the elements down, you graduate and assign a pantheon of existing gods to each part of the ritual) designed to shape and master one’s thoughts and actions via unseen forms of energy.

I have no problem committing to a daily routine — as a highly-functioning autistic, routines are my bread and butter.  I began the Sphere of Protection on January 1, 2018 and did it every day without fail. The SoP has always felt helpful even when I was bumbling through it, barely memorized and doing it without a pantheon.  By about six months in, I chose to assign the Druid god pantheon because for me, John Michael Greer’s system outlined in The Druid Magic Handbook was the appropriate fit.  I would often be so overcome with emotion during certain elements that I would cry.  After the SoP would be discursive meditation, which I prefer to do while writing in a journal as it allows me to jot down thoughts as they occur.  I first started doing a daily three card Tarot divination, which gave me much insight into the old Thoth deck, however, I changed to Ogham as it is part of the Druid Magic Handbook course of study.  

The last two years have been the oddest and best of my entire life.  I now consider myself deeply religious.  I pray every day and I highly believe I am in near constant communication with deities and spirits.  Furthermore, I believe I may have always been talking to the non-corporeal entities without realizing it.  I think many people who talk to themselves don’t understand they’re actually not talking to themselves but a non-corporeal entity.  All I know is that the interactions I have with non-corporeal entities are of a far higher quality than they were when I was first experimenting with Wicca, and that’s due to the SoP and the discernment that accompanies discursive meditation. 

I’m not sure what we are to the gods we are working with.  As far as I can tell, they are super-beings who were wisely worshipped by the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Indians, and Chinese and if you’re sensitive and kind to them, and if you ask them politely and respectfully, they just might mentor you and give you their excellent advice.  However, if you’re disrespectful and you do stupid human things like:

A. Arrogantly presume they can’t possibly exist because Jesus/Allah says you’ll burn in hell

B. Use and wear their name for a pair of overpriced sneakers

C. Curse them for not helping your lazy, regressive butt to win the Lotto 

You can expect to have a bad time, or at the very least, you can expect the gods not to care about you.  If an annoying hamster was biting my ankles, shouting at me in a high, squeaky voice to make it King of Hamsterland, I’d probably ignore it too, despite my soft spot for hamsters.  

In my two years of becoming religious, I became calmer, stronger, and more sanguine about everything in my life.  I have begun to understand that limits are the key to a happy life and that our culture has an insane disregard for them, most likely because of the absurd amount of petroleum wealth we have enjoyed for the last 200 odd years.  I became far more detached from money, that is to say, I began to look at it as valuable in terms of keeping me clothed and fed, and as far as having loads more than that, I have seen the benefits of rejecting the infinite perversions and complications that come of having too much.  I have come to understand why throwing your unexamined bad intentions around inevitably drags you into being a crappy person with rotten luck, no matter how much you insist you are one of the Blessed & Good People.  I have made the affirmation that I am a better person tomorrow than I was today, if only by the slightest amount.  

In this strange dialogue with gods, I have apologized for my pathological fondness for dad jokes (I simply must be reincarnated as a father, because I have WAY too many dad jokes to work out of my system) and I have heard birds singing in the middle of the night in winter, which is also known as clairaudience.  I have had conversations with dead people before they moved on to the next cycle of reincarnation.  I have discovered my past life as a traveling musician in an era of bards and my past life as an alcoholic Scottish laird.  I have felt my tensions drain away as I walked through a forest where the beings patiently wait for me to visit.  I had the privilege of talking to a few Greek gods (they seem to be the same as the Roman ones, for what it’s worth) as I arrange melodies and harmonies I’ve composed to flesh out the Orphic Hymns. What a fantastic journey it has been.  I certainly look forward to the remainder.