kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with dreams

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.

I dream about cars at least once a week. My latest car dream featured my husband. He wanted to go for a car ride with me in a white sedan on a pond with thin ice. I said "Absolutely not." He decided to go anyway. The car (predictably) sank. He was able to escape and lift the car out of the pond with one arm.

I know what my dream meant, and to a different woman with a different husband, the dream would mean something else entirely. In my dreams, the car is not a symbol for status or control as some dream "experts" would hypothesize. I know what cars mean to me because I have done a great deal of meditation on the meaning of cars.

Bad Faith

For me, the car symbolizes a continuing act of bad faith of driving a car. I have always feared the road. When I was a child, I was prone to becoming car-sick. I hate vomiting and have always avoided it at all costs -- no bulimia for me! -- but there were several times I barfed or had to swallow back vomit as a child as we were constantly traveling by car. The stale smell of a car was enough to make me at least slightly sick until I was twelve. I have extremely sensitive hearing. Loud traffic noises freak me out and always have. If I was queen of the world, I would immediately issue two hundred dollar noise violation tickets to anyone with a modded out car or truck who revved or screeched while in the vicinity of other people. My logic is that if they can afford to mod out their vehicle with noisemakers, they can afford the ticket for making noise.

At ten, an eighteen year old boy fell asleep at an intersection and plowed into my dad's station wagon. My family was returning from my grandma's apartment. My mom was nearly killed. I slammed face first into the back seat, which is why one of my front teeth is a veneer and is one of the main reasons I am almost never able to breathe out of my nose with ease.

At sixteen, I was nearly run down by a truck in a parking lot my friends and I were crossing on foot. It was far from the first or last time cars would pose mortal danger.

I have always known the danger of cars. I still have panic attacks when I drive sometimes. I have to pull over until it passes. I will make several right turns or snake slowly through suburban asphalt labyrinths avoid a single left turn onto a busy street. I avoid driving to new places for the most part. I avoid driving for long periods of time.

By the time I turned eighteen, I seriously considered moving to Europe so I could avoid driving for the rest of my life. Were it not for my close relationship with my parents, that is exactly what I would have done. The US is mostly built for cars, not people. The suburbs are especially terrible in this respect. When I started teaching piano in people's homes thirty years ago, my car was the lifeblood of my fledgling music teaching business. I did temp work to make ends meet, and I needed the car for that as well. A young adult can get along without a car in the Chicago suburbs, but it is far from easy. I do know a hippie guy who sometimes goes without a car. He's an avid biker and he has enough money to have his food delivered and to rent an Uber when he needs it.

Dreams are very personal. Now that you know how I feel about cars, you know what my dreams roughly mean. Books on dream symbols are largely meaningless. What does a car symbolize? It depends. Cars don't mean the same thing to me as they mean to someone else. I mostly hate cars and I look forward to future incarnations when the fastest moving vehicle in the world is a horse drawn buggy. I know plenty of people who love cars and driving in general. If you love cars and never once considered abandoning your family because you hate cars and car culture so much, a random car dream won't be a bad one for you. Maybe the car will symbolize genuine freedom or control. Who knows? That is why there is no reliable grimoire of omens and augurs. When a hawk appears overhead, it doesn't mean the same thing to me as it does to you or to the guy down on eleventh street. A symbol is only as meaningful as the brain that perceives it.

Born in the Wrong Millennium

I often dream I am on a busy corner in a bad neighborhood in the city. The sun is always setting. I am on foot, usually freshly out of my college class, and I must find the train depot and catch it to make the first leg of the journey home. Often I will have to walk along live train tracks or cross a six lane highway in order to get to the mysterious train depot.

Another scary dream features a town that is a couple of hours away. To get to it, I must drive up or down a terribly steep sixteen lane highway with no guard rails. I regularly careen off the edge of the road and wake up as I'm dying.

I have a recurring parking dream. I park the car to go to my college class. When I get out, though I made a mental note of where I parked, it is simply not there. I have no choice but to walk an interminable distance home down dangerous thoroughfares and through sleeping neighborhoods.

The car leitmotif for me is indicative of a larger "fish out of water" pattern, of feeling like I don't belong to this era and never will. I never would have signed on to the suburbs as a living arrangement. Sure, it could be worse, but it could be a hell of a lot better. I wouldn't pave paradise to put up a parking lot if I was paid handsomely to do so. I find the parking lot to be an obscenity and my dreams reflect it. For many of this modern era, I fear the parking lot is their paradise. That's why they go to Costco instead of the forest preserve and watch TV instead of closing their eyes and taking a nap. That's why they pay so much attention to their smartphones. They love the latest greatest i-doodad. Their best dreams represent an immersion in techno-fun, physical comfort, and gratification. Boredom is hell for them; to be alone with their own contemplative thoughts without distractions is to stare into the maw of a gaping abyss.

The Auto Body

The car is a vehicle but it is also a lesson. A car is a body we can change out when it dies. When we do change it, it does not carry the accompanying guilt of losing our actual body. For those who don't believe in reincarnation, or who don't take it seriously, the car is an ideal substitute body. People love buying new cars because it is a disposable substitute body. People who trash their own bodies often take good care of their cars. Though they would not go more than six months between oil changes or put non-premium gas in the tank, they happily gorge on Arby's and exercise only enough to ambulate into work or a doctor's appointment.

The car represents freedom to most but it is a trap. It is a trap too ubiquitous to our era to notice. Dmitri Orlov once commented that a car was part of the Iron Triangle required to live in a modern suburb. The car is needed to get to the job. The job is needed to afford the house. The house is needed as a place to keep the car. Those of us who cannot change the car at a whim or who don't want to own a car are the oddballs, the relics of another era where cars weren't a thing. Or perhaps we are the uncomfortable reminder that cars and car culture that goes along with them are going the way of cheaply available petroleum.

Stephen King's Rose Red

When I was a kid, Dungeons & Dragons was all the rage. I didn't play it, but I was friends with kids who did play it. I believed that D&D was a kind of gate-opening for me despite not being a player. The structure of the role playing game (as far as I know) involves traipsing down hallways and opening doors to rooms where various monsters are found. I became aware of D&D and my own recurring dreams about hallways filled with monsters at approximately the same time. My young mind jumped towards a causal relationship between the two events, though now I believe it to be a matter of coincidence.

Recently I had a dream about leading a small group of people through a labyrinth of haunted rooms in an old, decrepit building. I cannot remember a time in my life when I have not dreamed of hallways punctuated by shabby hotel rooms, mammoth apartment buildings, endless warehouses, haunted mansions, and cavernous schools. These collections of rooms are often presented in dreams as a puzzle or a game, and not an easy one. They are full of dead ends. I frequently find myself digging out layers of drywall, plaster, and lathe in an effort to escape from one room to another. One particularly amusing dream featured a monster who I distracted by enticing her to use her big, pointy teeth to eat through a wall I was trying to demolish. Rooms in my dreams have cupboard sized escape doors. I am the only person competent enough in the dreams to find or excavate the doors. Every now and then I get lucky and they lead to a true escape to the open sky outside.

A random scene from one of the many Resident Evil video games.

I believe that the labyrinths I dream about are real insofar as they are actual places in the astral plane. For this reason, many others have dreams about similar labyrinths of endless rooms. The Jim Henson cult classic movie Labyrinth is a lighthearted spin on the theme, with an actual labyrinth made of hedges and a castle instead of a series of dingy buildings. Monsters are present but they are child-friendly and comical. Stephen King constantly returns to scenes of hallways and escape rooms in his fiction -- The Shining and Rose Red spring to mind, among others. Resident Evil is a zombie franchise with modernized, electronically booby-trapped hallways and the undead playing the part of monster. The Cube is another booby-trap/monster hallway movie, and in it the maze is presented as a deadly game. Silent Hill is about a haunted town with a haunted school. Of all the horror movies out there, Silent Hill resembles my dreams the most with its gray ash rain, its use of time intervals to terrorize its characters, and its faceless monsters who chase characters into dead end rooms. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is a stellar example of the labyrinth trope. Edgar Allan Poe may be credited with the invention of haunted mansions as a fiction genre, but H.P. Lovecraft deserves equal recognition for his contributions.

Dreams as Reality

A dream place such as a haunted hotel is real in its way, but it is also symbolic. The symbol precedes the place and gives rise to it. Mortality is fraught with dead ends and failed investments, and mortality during this particular era is especially full of both. I live in the far western suburbs of Chicago. All around me, I see failure and bad investment. A brief walk will take me to a forbidding, car-dominated landscape of half-empty retail complexes. If I get in my car, it's only a few minutes drive to a huge array of useless and under-occupied office parks and malls. In the "good" neighborhood twenty minutes away, there are hideous McMansions that stand as obscene edifices to mindless consumerism. A sensitive such as myself has a hard time shutting out the vacuous mental chatter bubbling from inside those unholy places, where Progressian believers wear their masks indoors while alone and deny-deny-DENY that their banquet of newly arrived health problems has anything to do with the MRNA shots they took at the advice of their doctor.

A scene from the Silent Hill 2 video game.

We are all trapped, horribly trapped, by the bad decisions of other people as well as our own guilt in having to participate in the mess we've made. How appropriate that I wander through ugly, badly lit and nonsensically built warehouses, schools, and hotels at night when by day I drive through streets filled with the same sort of collective mistake. When I have to run into a room because a monster is chasing me down the hall in a dream, it is a symbol for being forced down a path I would rather not take yet I have to because it is the lesser of two evils. I went to musical college when in truth I only wanted to compose and record music. Musical college was remarkably unproductive for those purposes and though the skills I gained there helped me later, I had precious little time for composition and even less for recording while in college.

Dreaming Their Own LARP

Lucid dreamers piss me off because dreams are not an escape for me. Lucid dreamers, in my opinion, tend to frame dreaming as a sort of mental vacation where they can play their dreams much like a virtual reality video game. Dreams are anything but a vacation in my case. I'm always facing off with darkness in my dreams, both the darkness of others and my own. Those who have fun lucid dreaming strike me as control freaks who are practicing avoidance which only leads to a pile of karmic hurt. To me, lucid dreamers are on the level of idiots who consort with demons evoked from the Goetia. Those who commandeer their own dreams to be universally pleasant or entertaining make a subconscious agreement to be tricked into believing the world is whatever they want it to be. The price may not arrive until later, but it is costly to the tune of several lifetimes. I suspect I may have made that deal myself a few lifetimes ago, and maybe that's why I wander endless halls during this one.

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.

To dream is to sort. Dreaming is a process not unlike sorting the laundry before it is washed.

In dream-sorting, the bad stuff goes first. The initial phase of sleep plunges us into the lowest part of the astral plane to which we vibrate. The lower astral plane is the level of passions, urges, and strong emotions. To be caught in the lower astral feels like hell. When I used to suffer regular night terrors in my teens, it was so scary that my experiences made me horror-movie proof. I cannot be frightened by a horror book or film. Because I have a fairly decent memory of the lower astral, I find light sleep unpleasant. I try to avoid naps if possible: they are anything but refreshing. If dreams are a day swimming at the pool, then for me naps are being splashed with puddle water by an oncoming car while fully dressed.

The Lower Astral

All beings pass through the lower astral but it is only the nasty ones (or the foolish) who want to hang out there. Ouija boards and seances access the lower astral. Suicides are often trapped between its layers, bouncing between the middle and higher astral and the etheric planes. Demons populate the lower astral, hoping to find hosts who can be suckered into a relationship. Why 19th century Spiritualists and their modern day equivalents failed to realize this baffles me: don't they understand the grey-water function of the lower astral in the series of planes? How is it that I know better than to stay in such a polluted place, as a former atheist no less? I find it astounding that seasoned professional mediums ignore the grave danger they put themselves in every time they deliberately channel what they think is a client's dead relative, and with no banishing ritual! The lower astral is, for lack of a better word, dirty because of its function. The lower astral is meant as a pit-stop, not a final destination or an entertainment lounge.

Dreaming is returning home, and it is a glacial process. I often dream about the cottage my parents used to own on a small lake in a nearby state. In the dreams I must pack to leave the cottage, which luckily was sold some twenty years ago just as my parents became to old to handle the long drive there and back. Packing in my dreams represents getting life stuff done on the material plane. For me, this means writing, running a music lesson business, performing, and starting a subscription library. Naturally I always dream I am running late. Packing also symbolizes the preservation of things I deem important, whether that means literally learning how to pack vegetables into canning jars or hanging on to the treasure trove of written language for other people's future great-grandchildren.

That Middle Layer: The Mid-Astral

Thank goodness the mid-astral is where I remember most of my dream time. The function of the middle astral is also to sort, however, it isn't as crude of a wash as the lower astral where the larger chunks of grime are dealt with. The middle astral is why dreams have a reputation for being silly. There's nonsense in it, all sorts of Jungian symbols, ice cream castles in the air, animals who speak fluent French, and whatever goofiness you're prone to imagine. During this form of sleep, the higher self separates and goes to hang out with the highest plane of beings it is attuned to while the conscious part of the self that usually has to do the "adulting" gets to play around with the themes of the sandbox of life. Like any form of child's play, this sport isn't necessarily relaxing or fun. I was the sort of child who hated childhood -- I am much happier now as a middle-aged woman. For me, play often felt too dramatic and too pregnant with possibility of where it was leading me.

The real question is "Who is my higher self hanging out with in Mid-Sleep?" I get brief glimpses of it if I'm lucky: a flight over the ocean, a sunlit grove, some snippets of orchestral music.

Nostalgia vs. Nihilism

Mostly I don't remember the good stuff because it is harder to remember. Allow me to repeat myself: the good stuff is harder to remember. That's why we need to try harder to remember it. Yes, I am talking about nostalgia.

Nostalgia can be extremely toxic. The playwright Tennessee Williams had a knack for capturing the toxicity of nostalgia: think Laura's mother in the Glass Menagerie, forever pattering on about gentleman callers as she tried to imprint her halcyon days upon her pale, cowering daughter. Nostalgia often paints the good old days in a wholly unrealistic light: maybe Pleasantville wasn't so pleasant after all, all things considered. Nostalgia siphons off all the warm fuzzies and then pretends the rest of it never happened. Nostalgia cleanses the past, or at least it cleanses our perception of it. Nostalgia, taken too far, is taking pessimist nihilism and spinning it around to the opposite pole, which is an equally bad thing. Nostalgia is of vital importance because it is our window to gratitude for the past. Without the sorting effect of nostalgia, it is extremely difficult to remember anything positive or happy because of our evolutionary tendency to remember negative events.

The past is what it is. When considering it, we need to take into account that it is a spectrum between two poles: nostalgia and pessimist nihilism are only useful insofar as they allow us to see the spectrum between them. The past was the best of times and it was the worst of times. Neither should we shed too many tears for the loveliness of what was nor should we stew in frustration for the unchangeable horror that was. The truth was always somewhere in the middle. All of our ideals from back then may be tarnished, but that doesn't mean we should leave them behind.

When I was a child, my grandmother and grandfather would babysit my brother and me at their house in northern Illinois so my parents could catch a break. During those weekends, I remember playing with a toy called a Lite Brite. The Lite Brite was a black box with a lightbulb in it. It had plastic pegs you could stick into a grid of holes to make colorful displays. The nostalgist in me wants to romanticize the Lite Brite, to see it as a representation of an idyllic childhood. In this childhood, I could paint myself as a beautiful but misunderstood genius child. The pessimist wants me to see it as plastic landfill junk, the stupid wastefulness of a decadent age for a spoiled, miserable brat. The truth is in the middle.

Time flies and the events of only a second ago are already in the past, never to be re-lived. Mistakes can and will be made. I suppose the trick is not to overreact, to put it into perspective, and to keep plugging away.

We are all on our way back home, better late than never.

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