Dreams can be a way of reaching the higher states of consciousness of which all humans are capable, if they only open themselves to the possibility. Our dreams seem to reflect our inner spiritual growth and development, although often in rather puzzling ways. You will have a rich variety of dreams that show you how you are growing inwardly only if you believe you are capable of having such dreams. Getting to know yourself better through your dreams is a wonderfully rewarding experience that can be pursued just as you would pursue a friendship or love affair. When dreams “speak” to you, they always have something to say, even if you can’t at the moment understand exactly what. If you treat your dreams as valuable and worthy of respect, they’ll give you great insight into your inner nature. True self-knowledge in turn can be put to use in your everyday life.
At times of intense growth—and teens are by definition in a process of intense growth all the time—and in times of stress, also common for teens, dream activity may increase or decrease. Usually there is an increase both in dreaming and remembering dreams, especially those from the early morning hours. It’s a time to be particularly aware of your dreams, to court them, to dialogue with them. You are being given additional information to which you can respond both with your conscious mind and your unconscious dream process.
Angels can and do appear in dreams. Look for angels in your dreams, invite them to appear, and they will. I want to share an example of one angel dream that has remained with me in detail for many years now.
Dream Messages
“Whether a holy winged apparition beams silent truths to us in our own room; or a messenger appears in our dreams in the night; or if Heaven speaks through the silences in our soul . . . or the kingdom of paradise within us reverberates with love in our meditations; or our intuition speaks softly in words, feelings and a sense of things to come . . . these are the voices of our angels, gifts that uplift, console, reward, and caress our very being leading us always toward our freedom.”
Karen Goldman,
Angel Voices
As a note to the dream, I should say that I once lived in Italy, on the island of Capri. There I had a close friend, a man named Raphaelle (a form of the name Raphael, which is the name of one of the archangels and of a famous Renaissance painter). Natives of the island of Capri are much closer genetically to their fifteenth-century fore-bears than are people in other parts of Italy, and the faces you see there could easily have been painted by the great Italian masters. My friend Raphaelle, with such a fifteenth-century face, could easily have been a model for his famous namesake.
While dreaming of myself as asleep in my own bed, I am awakened abruptly (a dream within a dream) in the middle of the night by a loud knocking at my apartment door, which alarms me because of the late hour. I call out, “Who’s there?”
“Angelo!” is the reply, said loudly in a rough, masculine voice with a commanding sound. The voice sounds threatening and I don’t know anyone named Angelo, so I remain quiet in my bed. As I lie there wondering what to do, the knocking comes again, louder and insistent as if to say, “Open up or I’ll break the door down.”
Again, I call out, “What do you want?” but the answer is garbled and I can’t understand what is being said. It sounds like some kind of dialect of a foreign language that I don’t recognize. Frightened, I remain in bed (still, of course, dreaming) and do not go to the door. I hear footsteps in the hall as the man goes away and I’m relieved.
The dream changes to an evening party that I am giving for a group of friends. Suddenly, I see my Italian friend Raphaelle on the little balcony outside my living room window. Sitting cross-legged like an elf, he is smiling, and as handsome as I remember him in real life. I go to the window to invite him to come in and join the party, wondering how he got up the three flights from the street to my window.
When he comes inside, he takes my arm and leads me through the group of partygoers into the outside hall, saying that he has something to tell me. We sit on the landing together, holding hands, and he begins telling me a fascinating story about four generations of my ancestors (about whom in real life I know almost nothing). He tells me that each generation of my ancestors has written a book about itself but that there is a book left incomplete because I was not included in it. There is a “missing character,” and it is me. As I listen to the tales of those in my family who preceded me, I am fascinated, and I long to read these books about my ancestors he describes so vividly. I ask him about the book of my own generation and he replies, “It, also, is written. Except that it needs you to make it complete.”
The hall is dimly lit, and beyond the door the party is still going on. I can hear people talking and laughing, yet I seem to be in another world of long ago, completely hypnotized by the family story he is relating to me. I feel as if I had actually known these people (yet even all my grandparents were dead before I was born). I am wishing I could write such a book as the ones he is telling me about, but he has said all the books are already written, so I wonder how I fit in as the “missing character.” It seems I have to get myself into the book about my own generation in order for it to be complete—but how does one get into a book that’s already written? I can’t figure out an answer, and he does not give me one.
At last he rises to leave, which makes me sad, for I have enjoyed seeing him again and hearing about the books. I go back inside to find that all of my friends have gone home, and I go back to bed.
When I woke up—really woke up—I was so deeply into the dream that it took me several minutes to realize that I was actually awake and that I had been dreaming a complex dream within a dream. Sadly, although I remembered what I have written here, I could not remember anything about the books and what was in them. However, I had the same feeling that I had had in the dream—that I would dearly love to write such a fine book as the ones he had described to me.
After much reflection—for the dream stayed with me—I realized that “Angelo” (angels are messengers of the gods), having been unable to get in through the front door (a symbol for the conscious mind), had become a figure that I could recognize and therefore accept and let in—through a window high off the ground, or into my higher self. His message was clear: I have many ancestors who are unknown to me; however, I am known to them from the “other side.” The angel-messenger came to tell me that “I” am missing from the family archives, a way of expressing my “orphan” state of not knowing my relatives or much about them. As my mother died when I was only a year old and as my father was distant from his own family, I grew up mostly alone, without a family.
Angel Energies
“Right now angels are bridging our physical reality with their pure spiritual energy. Like a leaf falling softly on the still pool of our consciousness, we recognize their presence. As we trust in them, they will pour their blessings on us. . . .And as you become aware of angels [in your dreams] they will be more and more drawn into your life.”
Denise Linn,
Sacred Space
For many years I had wanted to research both the maternal and paternal sides of my family and to write an autobiographical book about that search and its results. The angel’s message to me was that the book was already written—as all books are already written in the divine mind. It was now my job to fill in the blanks, so to speak, to put myself into my own family from which I had been excluded in real life.
This was an extremely important dream for me; it changed the direction of my life and work. It seems that the human psyche is so constructed that the achievement of unity in the internal world causes a similar unity in the external world, like a mirror image: a wholeness between what is inside and outside, which composes a single totality. Only our thinking they are separate makes them separate.
A guide, whether in a dream or a vision or in the sense of “just knowing,” is actually a symbol for our own deepest wisdom. This inner wisdom connects us to the celestial energies of planets, stars, angels, and whatever else is out there influencing and guiding us without our specific knowledge. It also connects us to animals and plants; to nonorganic life such as rocks, minerals, and all of Earth’s materials; and to the cosmos itself in all its vast complexity. Guides are cosmic tour guides—and you can ask for a tour through your dreams anytime you need one by calling upon these spiritual entities. A guide might be an “intelligence” from another dimension, or a stone, or the ocean. The symbols you receive are likely to shift and change over time according to the nature of the subject about which you seek guidance. They will vary also with your state of inner development, your age, your knowledge, your practice, your intention.
“Dreams have always been an important part of my life. I think that is true for most people who are searching for spirituality and go out and fast. Dreams guide you; they show you the way that you should be living, or the direction, or give you signs to help someone else, and they are gifts.”
Jackie Yellow Tail,
Crow Woman
“If modern physics is to be believed, the dreams we call waking perceptions have only a very little more resemblance to objective reality than the fantastic dreams of sleep.”
Bertrand Russell,
English Mathematician
and Philosopher
We are all capable of contacting the guides of our own deeper dimensions symbolically, especially in our dreams and in altered states of consciousness, which we attain in the “twilight” or hypnogogic time just before sleep, or through meditation. It is through our understanding of our dream symbols that we can connect with what cannot be accessed through our five physical senses—touching, tasting, seeing, hearing, smelling. That’s why it’s vital to interact with the symbols in your dreams, make the effort to remember and record them, and work with them over time to understand what they mean to you. These dream guides can be very powerful influences in our daily lives, give direction, and aid our growth and development on a spiritual level.
For example, for many years I met with a group of nine old men, wise men or sages, who conversed with me on various topics. In one dream, they gave me a large book made of ancient parchment sheets, yellowed with time but not fragile. Though I could not read the mysterious writing that covered the pages, I nevertheless understood that on these pages were written important esoteric and magical knowledge. I realized that the nine men were celestial intelligences from the world of nontime, and I called them “the Council of Nine.” After meeting them several times, I was inspired to write a poem, “The Return,” about my experiences with this group of marvelous dream guides.
In this extraordinary dream, I am visiting the house of a man who goes by the nickname Winnie (possibly a pun on the word win). He shows me a magnificent library that is a collection of ancient texts on papyrus, handwritten books from antiquity, illuminated manuscripts, medieval books on herbalist lore, mysterious alchemical texts, books of magic spells—esoteric teachings of all kinds and from all ages. It takes my breath away to be in the same room with this knowledge of the ages, written by the wisest of writers. The books are all bound in gold-lettered leather and they seem to glow with power. As I admire the books, he says, “I will teach you all that is in here if you forget about getting your Ph.D.” I ask, “What will I accomplish if I learn all of this?” His reply is, “Nothing.”
Seth Speaks
“When you look into yourself, the very effort involved extends the limitations of your consciousness, expands it, and allows the egotistical self to use abilities that it often does not realize it possesses,” Seth says in The Seth Material. Jane Roberts comments, “According to Seth, these Inner Senses are used by the whole self constantly. Since past, present, and future have no basic reality, this (particular) sense allows us to see through the apparent time barriers. We are seeing things as they really are.”
My interpretation of this stunning dream (for I was indeed contemplating getting my Ph.D.) was that I must give up conventional thinking, represented by the academic way of life and by our society’s fixation on collecting credentials as the only acceptable path to a successful life. This pursuit of only that knowledge which is taught in our universities would be replaced with the powerful ancient tradition of learning (which some feel is far superior to the dry “book learning” that values only the left-brain, rational mode of thinking and denies anything that cannot be proved in a laboratory).
However, my learning the ancient wisdom will not accomplish anything in this world, the world of the “bottom line” mentality. That is not the purpose of esoteric or occult knowledge. Although it has certain uses on the mundane plane of practical life, its true purpose is for the development of the spiritual life.
In a similar vein, Jane Roberts told of having had a “vision” of a great library which she could consult at will through her contact with her spirit guide Seth. This library she discovered was full of ancient and all-but-forgotten knowledge and wisdom. Many people who study occult matters believe that there is a spiritual repository of all the world’s knowledge, from its very beginnings (which may be much longer ago than our scientists think) and that this repository is available to anyone who seeks to enter it and use it.
Night Classes
Some fortunate people have the ability to receive “teachings” through their dreams and remember them entirely. Such a person was a woman named Viola Petitt Neal, author of Through the Curtain. She reports how she attended “night classes” regularly, the contents of which she dictated to Ms. Shafica Karagulla while she was in the dream state. In their book, the authors speak of a “Council of Seven,” who were the teachers. Interestingly, seven is a magical number, combining three (the number of sides of a triangle) with four (the number of directions); it is often diagrammatically shown as a triangle enclosed within a square, symbolizing the unity of the trinity and the four directions (North, South, East, West) on which many cultures have founded their spiritual traditions.
One of the best ways to contact the spiritual dimension in your dreams is through a power object. With a power object, you can obtain a power dream for any purpose you need. A power object can be anything that is important to you, and it doesn’t need to have monetary value, although some do, such as a piece of jewelry or other object that has been handed down in your family for generations. I use my mother’s wedding ring as a power object. I also use a very special ring that was handmade by a woman who was a well-known psychic and Tarot card reader in New York many years ago. She made the ring for a mutual friend of ours, and he wore it daily for many years. Upon his death in 1999, the ring came to me. Another power object I use is a stone, a “pet rock” that I found on the beach at Montauk Point, New York, while on vacation there many years ago. I have other stones that I’ve collected from different beaches in different countries over the years, some special shells, and a few other objects I use in dream work.
The idea behind using a power object to obtain a power dream is that such an object has in it a kind of intelligence—stored memories of where it has been and, if it has belonged to a person, of that person and his or her life. Any handmade object will have the imprint of the person who made it. An object you make yourself from materials special to you would be a good power object. And you can have more than one that you use for different, specific power-dream purposes—such as problem-solving, out-of-body travel, precognitive or telepathic dreams, chasing nightmares away, or simply entertainment. Fun and fabulous, our entertainment dreams usually need no interpretation. Flying dreams are extremely pleasurable, as are love and sex dreams. Often entertainment dreams tell us stories of a fantastic nature. (Remember my friend who writes fantasy fiction? She says she gets lots of her ideas from her entertainment dreams.)
In a spiritual sense, power dreams are potent because they connect us to other realities, open our minds to what is possible beyond what we think is possible. If, for example, you dream of a magical crystal or stone, go out and look for one that represents your dream object and use it as a power object.
Dream Cards
Dream Cards, by Stephen Kaplan Williams, is a set of sixty-six Dream Cards and sixty-six Wisdom Cards along with a book explaining how to interpret and learn from your dreams.
Spiritual Life
Write a short essay about your spiritual life, what you believe in and how you feel about those beliefs. Write about what you would like to develop in your spiritual life, what you would like to change, what you would like to experience. Be as detailed as possible. Ask yourself where you are now and where you would like to be in the future. List anything you want spiritual guidance on.