Teaching Dreams
Teaching dreams occur when the superconscious, or higher self, journeys to the other side to explore and learn. I also affectionately describe this to my students as “going to night school.”
The more you work on remembering your dreams, the more you are engaging in connecting your subconscious mind with your conscious mind, and with a bit more effort, you can connect both of these minds to the superconscious mind.
The superconscious mind, which I describe as the part of you that is connected directly to your soul, is the higher spiritual aspect of yourself that has access to the global consciousness. The global consciousness is an energy field where all the thoughts and ideas from humanity are stored. This field also has direct access to the higher energetic planes, often described as the spiritual planes, where access to thoughts and ideas and inspiration from spirit guides and other spiritual beings can be found. The ancient Greeks described access to these planes as being able to speak to the Muses or to the gods.
Once you’ve begun to train your mind to remember your dreams, you can become more consciously aware in your dreams. As you’ll find in chapter Six, you can also learn to lucid dream, through which you’ll interact with a dream and change it at will.
For now, though, the next step is to awaken the conscious mind so that you can program it to stay alert during your dreamtime and to open both it and the subconscious mind to connect to the superconscious mind while dreaming.
This is an incredibly helpful technique to have—you can work through a problem by essentially sleeping on it!
Exercise: Higher Learning through Your Dreams
In this exercise, you will be programming your mind to connect to your higher self. This allows the superconscious part of yourself, which exists beyond the confines of the human body and beyond space and time on earth, to search the global consciousness to find a solution to your problem.
As you work on this technique, you will receive brief answers in reply to your problem. The exciting thing is if you continue to work on these techniques, your superconscious will awaken and want to reach out more often to the global conscious field and the energy fields in the higher planes in order to learn more and evolve.
This begins what I described as night school. Your dreams move from just being requests to answer a problem in your life to receiving downloads of information through your dream state that enhance your personal journey here in this lifetime.
Step 1: Create Sacred Space
To begin activating your mind to be receptive to this type of information in a dream state, I suggest to my students that they first engage in this exercise while they are awake.
The most effective way to focus your mind to get into this groove is through a guided meditation. The type of meditation that you want to participate in for this type of work is one that allows you to meet and work with your spirit guide. A guide is often helpful to people when first starting this work, as it can feel like too big of a leap or journey to believe that you can access this information by yourself as a beginner. Bringing in a guide establishes a comfort level and baseline to begin this journey.
Here’s an example of one type of scene that I create in a guided meditation, which creates a sacred space:
To begin, picture a beautiful garden area with a thick, lush, vibrant green lawn. As you step onto the grass, feel your feet sink deep into the plush carpet of these green leaves. A soft scent greets you at each step, and you notice that small flowers are growing in parts of the grassy area.
Standing in the grass, feel your feet firmly connected to the ground. Raise your arms above your head, stretched outward to greet the sunlight in order to pull the pure white light from the rays of the sun around you and into your body.
Visualize this pure white light covering your body and say,
I am surrounded by the pure white light.
Only that which is for my highest and best
may be made manifest through to me.
I ask for divine guidance and divine wisdom.
Thank you.
You don’t have to say this particular prayer, but it is wise to say a protective prayer or mantra of some kind so that as you open up to the other side, you are surrounded by only the highest and best forces of good who can send information to you in this regard.
At this point, you have surrounded your body and the energy field around you known as the aura in this pure white light. This spiritually protects you during your meditation, and you are now open to engaging with the higher self and other beings from the spiritual planes. The act of sinking your feet into the beautiful deep, soft green grass has grounded you to the earth plane while allowing your mind to prepare to travel to the other realms.
Now return your focus to where you are standing in the grassy area and notice that there is a path before you made of smooth stones that create an easy walkway. You are barefoot, and the stones feel warm and comforting as they support you on this journey.
As you walk ahead, the path leads you into a secret garden, covered with flowers, on the left side of the path. On the right is a very big tree. In front of you on the path is a river that is gently moving, and to the left is a waterfall streaming over a group of rocks. The river continues to the right side as far as you can see. There in front of the river is a bench where you can comfortably sit and enjoy the river.
As you sit on the bench, take notice of your surroundings. What kinds of flowers are growing in the garden? Is the garden just beginning to bloom, or is it in full bloom? What colors are the flowers? What kind of tree is on your right—is it in full bloom with green leaves, in the colors of fall, or bare, without leaves? How big is the trunk and how far do the branches spread?
Before you is the river. How does the river look to you? Do you see fish moving about? How about the waterfall—what speed is the water moving, how fast is the current, and how tall is the waterfall?
In this step, you are taking notice of what your surroundings are expressing to you in this subconscious manner. This practice is similar to interpreting what your surroundings are expressing to you in your dreams.
Step 2: Meet Your Spirit Guide
Sit and take in all of these scenes until you are comfortable with this space and can describe it in great detail. Then when you are ready, ask for your spirit guide to enter this sacred space and to come sit on the bench next to you. Spirit guides are helpers from the other side who were assigned to be with us before our birth. They assist us throughout each lifetime with our destined purpose and soul journey.
Visualize your spirit guide. Are they male or female? Are they someone you know, or is this the first time you’ve seen them? Are they dressed in clothing that is contemporary or from another time period? What light do you see around them, or what type of energy do you feel while in their presence?
Welcome them to your sacred space and invite them to sit with you and take in the beauty of what you have created here in the garden and in the water.
When you are ready, begin a conversation with them and explain that you would like to visit with them here from time to time in this sacred space in order to ask questions and to receive their help with problems and concerns you are facing in this lifetime.
See tip 6 for alternatives to talking with a spirit guide.
Step 3: Communicate with Your Spirit Guide
Now deep in this meditation, ask your spirit guide the first question that you have on your mind.
Be prepared that the message may come to you in a variety of ways. The guide may turn to you and answer you directly, or they may show you an answer through an image that appears in your sacred space.
For example, a deer may enter in front of you and nibble in the garden, a butterfly may flitter by, or a fish may jump out of the river. The weather may suddenly change here in this space: the sunlight may grow very bright or clouds may darken the skies as the wind picks up around you. An unexpected image may also occur, such as a rose suddenly blooming in the garden or a gemstone appearing at your feet.
When you first begin this exercise, if you are not well practiced at meditation, it may feel forced and will take you some time to do this type of creative visualization. Continue to practice creating this sacred space in your meditation, working at it at least once a week or, if you have the time, every other day, until you can visualize this scene so well that you find that after a few weeks’ time you can prepare to meditate, visualize your space, and instantly find yourself there in the garden.
You may not yet be receiving answers from your guide when you ask them, but this is still very important work, as you are forming an energetic conscious grid that is creating a space for communication to come through from the superconscious mind.
Step 4: Bringing Sacred Space into Dreamtime
Once your visualization has been established at this level while awake, it’s time to take it to the next level. In the evening as you prepare to go to sleep, follow the process you have created with this meditation and visualize your sacred space.
Now as you are in this space, ask your question that you are seeking an answer to and instead of waiting for the answer in the moment, allow yourself to drift off to sleep. Ask that the answer be provided to you in your dream state and that upon awakening you will remember the answer you received.
This is a highly effective technique, as you are letting go of the conscious mind, which tries to control the outcome or second-guess the answer you are seeking. In the active meditation when awake, it’s more difficult to stop the conscious mind from taking over and trying to mold and control what happens when you ask the question.
In the dream state, the conscious mind is quieted and the superconscious mind can take over and reach far beyond your inner thoughts in order to provide inspiration and new ideas to help with the answer you seek. When you awake, immediately jot down your dream and any details that feel important. It’s important to note that speaking to your superconscious and to your spirit guides does not mean that all of the answers to life will be provided to you.
Generally, the information you receive will offer an inspired idea of what to do next, without solving the entire problem at hand. This is why they are called teaching dreams, as they are helping and instructing you on how to evolve without spoon-feeding you all the answers. This is how the system universally seems to be set up, which is part of the journey of our spiritual and our human experience.
What is most comforting in this practice is that you are now able to access a much larger energy plane of inspired ideas and information. You have learned how to access this information all through your dreams.
Helpful Tips for This
Teaching Dream Exercise
Tip 1: The definition of sacred space is open
to your interpretation.
The meditation in the garden described in step 1 to create sacred space is just an example of one type of environment. Create any type of environment like this that feels right and comfortable to you.
I’ve had students create classroom environments for their meditation in which different guides appeared similar to professors they had in college. Others created a sailboat and sailed from port to port in their sacred space meditation to meet with different teachers and guides.
The possibilities are endless and only limited by your imagination. The sacred space that my husband visualized was a large room filled with computers. In his meditative and dream state, he would sit at the console keyboard and type in his question and receive the answer on the computer screen.
The sacred space should be as unique as the individual, as the goal is to create a comfortable environment where you can open your mind to this level of interaction.
Some people prefer a more controlled environment, like my late husband did with his room full of computers. In his sacred space, the information only came to him when he typed a question into the computer. It was a very controlled environment where he was mostly in charge of what would occur in this situation.
On the flip side, I’m comfortable with the idea of being in the garden where anything can and will change in the moment. I like the idea of new experiences occurring beyond my control or imagination.
As I’m chatting with my guides, animals come and go, the weather changes, the pace of the river ebbs and flows, flowers bloom and wither in the garden, and even the tree shakes and the branches sway when the winds pick up as I ask a very emotional question. This works for my personality, as I’m very connected to my emotional state.
If you prefer a more controlled and peaceful environment, create a space that offers less opportunity for things to change around you. Some people ask to receive the information written on a piece of paper inside an envelope that is handed to them to read alone. Others create a small room where they enter through a door to ask their question and receive an answer. Then as they walk back through the door out of the room, everything dissolves and goes away.
The more you engage in this practice, the deeper you can go, and the more comfortable you are with this practice, the stranger it may become, as different guides and beings will appear as well as various animals and symbols to show you things.
You are in control of how much you want to see and who you want to see it from, so if you feel uncomfortable with anything that appears, simply ask it to go away and ask for the information to be presented to you in a manner that is more comfortable for you.
Tip 2: Teaching dreams are so important.
These types of dream practices have been around since the dawn of mankind. Indigenous cultures have created them in sweat lodges and vision quests, helping put the mind in an altered state so that the answers sought could come from the spirit realms.
If you’ve read my book The Awakened Psychic, you’ll realize that what you are engaging in is a form of telepathy between your higher self/superconscious mind and your guides. It’s just one of the ways that we are all psychic and haven’t been taught these tools in order to work with these natural abilities.
When you are connecting with your higher self, you are astral traveling. We all astral travel when we sleep, and you are just now more engaged in the process. With this practice, you can engage in your own vision quest using the power of your dreams.
Tip 3: If it’s not working yet, remember to train your mind.
So you have the technique to receive the answers or help you seek in your dreams, but what if you are still struggling with remembering your dreams?
Nothing is more frustrating than doing all this work, creating your sacred space, visualizing it till you get it just right, and going off to sleep to get the answer, only to awake and find you can’t remember.
First, it’s important to remember that it’s a process and to give yourself some time to train your mind to remember your dreams. Don’t give up. Over time you will create a practice that works for you.
In the meantime, though, when you set up your sacred space before going to sleep and ask to remember the dream in the morning, also ask that if for any reason you don’t remember the dream when you awake, your guide will send signs to you throughout the day to help with the answer to your question.
On that day, pay attention to any signs that come your way out of the blue, through people, places, and events that catch your attention. In this practice, you are programming your superconscious mind to send the information to you in this format while you are awake so that you can receive the answers you are looking for.
Tip 4: If the answers in your dreams don’t make sense, ask more detailed questions.
If you find that you are receiving answers in your dream but they are so vague and nebulous that they are not helping you, there are two things you can do to fine-tune this process.
The first is to look at the question you are asking your guides and higher self. The best questions to ask are very specific and to the point.
For example, a good line of questioning regarding career would be this: “I have been offered a job at XYZ company. Should I leave my current job and take this job offer? Will this new job bring me more money and opportunity for advancement?”
This line of questioning allows for a specific answer. You may see in the dream a vision of you walking into a new office building that represents the company, and you feel happy and excited when you are inside the building. You may see a large paycheck on your desk, or you may see yourself in a conference room giving a presentation that people are appreciating. These are signs that the new job will bring the opportunity you seek.
On the other hand, you may see a vision of you leaving your old job and people shaking their heads in dismay, and then you walk outside of the building and see a gray and cloudy sky, looking like it’s about to storm. This can indicate that it’s not the right time to leave your current job. It depends, though, on how you ask the question and also if you have any fears regarding leaving your old job.
Alternatively, you might ask, “How is my company doing financially? Are there layoffs ahead, or should I stay at my current job?” The signs in the dream from the previous paragraph could indicate that layoffs are coming to the company, so in this case it’s a good time to leave before this occurs.
It’s important to be very detailed in the questions you ask and to be very specific in the way you ask them so that the answer can be as clear as possible to you in the dream state. Questions like “What’s the meaning of life?” or “What should I do with my life?” or “Will I ever find a partner to love?” are too vague. The answer to what you should do with your life may not focus on what you need to do for a living in order to provide for your well-being, and the meaning of life is different for each person and can differ from lifetime to lifetime.
The same goes for asking about a partner to love. Friends can be partners in life, helping you through your journey, along with family members and sometimes even coworkers. If you are asking about a partner in a romantic setting, be specific. If you have someone in mind, ask very detailed questions about them and your relationship. If you are not seeing anyone at the moment, ask for a concept of time for when you might meet this potential life or marriage partner.
The better you become at focusing your questions, the easier the answers will come.
If you find it difficult to get just the right question, try writing it out first. Get a piece of paper and write down all the questions you have about the matter at hand. Then condense this down into what is at the heart of the question. Ask yourself, what do you truly want most to know about this situation?
Continue to cut through excess information until you have one very succinct question to ask. You may wish to write this question out on a new piece of paper and read it at your bedside before you go to sleep so that you are focused on getting the answer to that direct question. You can also take the piece of paper and slip it into your pillowcase so that you are truly “sleeping on it.”
The second thing to note when looking for answers is to understand that not all answers are revealed to you, even when you ask. Some life events are part of your journey and destiny in this lifetime, and it is not meant for you to know at this time how they will unfold. If you are receiving vague answers about a question, try asking it a different way. If this does not work, ask a direct question to your guide to provide information to you that explains why the answer cannot be revealed at this time. Also ask your guide to provide any helpful hints on what you can do in the meantime.
Tip 5: Ask your spirit guides for advice.
One of the main reasons it’s so important to create sacred space and then actively ask for help from your spirit guides with your question is that they can’t just randomly offer you advice or answers. They have to be asked in order to engage with you and offer information. A beautiful side effect of this experience is that in their presence you will feel love, peace, and hope. Their presence alone is very comforting and reassuring.
At the same time, they are not allowed to give you the answers to every question you ask, so it can be a process to see what you can and can’t discover. You have a group of spirit guides assigned to help you, so you may meet several of them over the course of doing this work.
Some guides are with you to help with your personal growth while others are assigned guides who help with specific details of your life. Many health-care workers, for example, have spirit guides who are healers and work directly with the person to help enhance their healing abilities in the medical field. When they engage in this practice, they may ask for answers in their research or on how to solve a medical problem they are working on with a patient, and that guide will be the one to answer and work with them on a breakthrough. Later, the person may ask a personal question about a relationship or buying a new home. The guide who appears would most likely be a different guide who helps in personal matters rather than medical procedures.
Tip 6: Consult other spiritual sources.
If you’re not comfortable working with your spirit guides or other spiritual beings, you can ask that a family member who has crossed over to the other side be your guide. Maybe your grandfather or favorite aunt always gave you great advice and was there for you when you needed it. Now that they are in the spirit world, you can ask them to visit you in your dreams and offer their sage advice, in almost the same way as when you would visit with them here on earth.
Some people prefer to use animal totems, connecting in the dream state with an animal that they feel is their totem animal, here to teach them.
The process is uniquely independent and should be tailored to what feels right for you. There’s never just one way to do this type of work—after all, you are working in the mystical arts, which are quite different from the more exacting sciences. Be bold. Explore different types and scenarios until you find that one that feels just right for you.
If you don’t wish to explore a spiritual path to connect in this manner with your dreams, you can skip the step of connecting with a spirit guide. Just create a private space in your meditation where you are inviting your superconscious mind to engage with you in order to help use a greater portion of your mind to figure out new ideas and inspired solutions to your problems.
You don’t have to engage with anyone at all when setting your space. Remember, my husband preferred his communications to come from a computer screen he created in his space, similar to typing questions into Google and receiving replies.
In any case, it’s helpful to establish these rituals. They set the tone and program the mind to focus the subconscious, conscious, and superconscious minds to work together and do what you are asking them to do. Over time, these exercises become commonplace to you and your mind, and it becomes quicker and easier to go into this mode and connect.
Tip 7: Create a special section in your workbook
for teaching dreams.
At this point, your dream journal is really turning into a dream workbook. In it, you should create a section called “Teaching Dreams,” where you describe your sacred space and note how many times a week you entered in meditation and began this exercise. Make note of how many weeks it took before you could easily create this space in active meditation, and practice creating it before you go to sleep at night. Then make note of how many weeks you practiced this exercise before sleep until you could remember the answers in your dreams.
A separate section should detail the answers you received to your questions. Note the way in which the answers were revealed. Did they come through the active meditation, in the dream sequences, or throughout the day with signs and symbols?
When you feel that you have received enlightening information or an answer to your question, go back and look over the random dreams that you have been having and recording in the past month. Determine whether any of the random dreams you were having in which you didn’t ask for guidance were also giving hints and clues to the answer you sought.
You may find that you were being guided all along in your dreams. The difference is that now you have created a direct path that works more quickly and more clearly to connect and receive answers and inspiration.
Tip 8: Use accessories to heighten your dream state.
Smell is a powerful sensory activator, and some people find that a scent helps awaken their superconscious. Think about a favorite scent that you love that triggers a memory for you. Perhaps the smell of pine or sugar cookies immediately makes you think of being a child at Christmas. Certain scents can evoke powerful memories for us in this way.
Understanding how this works, you can consciously use a particular scent to program your mind to focus on a certain thought or intention every time you smell that scent. Before going to sleep, breathe in the scent from a mist spray or sachet with a fragrance that you have chosen and say, “I will remember my dreams,” “My spirit guide will help me with my dreams,” or another focused intention that you’d like to create during your dreamtime.
I have a vanilla-orange scent in a jar that I like, as it is strong and makes me pay attention. I open the jar and take three deep breaths of this orange scent and then lie back in bed and prepare to talk with my guides.
Whatever type of scent you like is what will work best for you. Just pick one that you normally don’t use so that this sensory trigger is only connected to the meditative practice in dreamtime. Don’t use a candle because you should not light a candle before falling asleep.
If scents don’t work for you (maybe they are overpowering and awaken you too much, or you have allergies and prefer not to work with a scent), then try playing music before going to sleep. Pick a song that plays for two minutes, preferably just music without vocals, as you don’t want any words from a song to come into your thoughts. Classical music may work best. Set the song to play and then listen to it as you fall asleep.
A third idea is to program and use a crystal. Charge it with the intention that holding it in your hand for a moment will put you in this frame of mind.
Any item you use for meditation may work for this exercise. Other ideas are a bell, chime, or small gong to focus the mind.
Tip 9: Teaching dreams can enhance your mind-body-spirit connection.
The other exciting thing about programming your mind through teaching dreams is that once you learn how to set this in place, you can use it for other purposes.
Many people will set the tone each evening before they sleep to ask for energetic healing to come through while they sleep. They visualize this healing energy surrounding their body and working on a specific area of the body that needs healing.
If they enter their sacred space, they ask their guides specific questions about what is occurring healthwise with their physical body and what they can do to help the healing process in conjunction with the medical advice they are receiving from their doctors. Healing requests can be made for physical, mental, and emotional healing as well as healing from past-life issues and other matters of the soul.
When we sleep, we are restoring the body. When we can set a program with the intention of the superconscious and subconscious minds to work in tandem to assist in healing the mind, body, and spirit, it can help direct energy to these specific areas to be of greater help.
This can be further enhanced when awake, in the form of visualizations that focus on health and wellness.
Tip 10: If you’re not ready for advanced teachings, ask for sweet dreams.
If you’ve recently been through a very stressful experience or time in your life, it may not be the right time to engage in teaching dreams, as you may not be ready to deal with the answers to why things happened as they did.
Instead, you can ask to have sweet dreams, dreams in which you feel safe, loved, comforted, warm, and relaxed, floating in a space with your cares removed for the moment. You can do this in your active meditation and before going to sleep.
This is helpful when you’ve already been practicing how to have teaching dreams and have become proficient at it. This way, when something challenging comes your way in the future, you are already skilled at knowing how to program your mind and how to connect with your guides.
Ask your guides and loved ones in spirit to come hold and comfort you in their loving energy so that you can be restored on the mind-body-spirit level.
Tip 11: This work can help you in your daily life.
Once you’ve activated this awakened connection with your subconscious, conscious, and superconscious minds, you can use these same techniques in your daily life as well. A fun side effect of doing this dream work is that it tends to spill over into your daily life, helping your mind be more open to new ideas.
I often set the intention before going to sleep that I’d like to awaken with inspired thoughts of what I should write about that day when I’m working on a book. When I do this, I wake up and the ideas are right there ready to pour out of me. I do my best to avoid all distractions that could pull me out of this frame of mind and get to the computer as quickly as I can so that I can open up to these thoughts and let them pour forth from my superconscious mind. When I’m in this zone, the words come flying out of me, and I can write thousands of words in a day!
Try this sometime when you’re working on a specific project and see how it works for you. It’s not something we can do every day, as many days we have other responsibilities and expectations to manage, but on a day when you can awaken and stay in that energetic flow, the results can be amazing.
You may find a big surge in your creative and inventive ideas and more energy to take on new projects and endeavors. You’ve freed your conscious mind by allowing it to let go of stress and worries that are being worked out in the dream state, so when you’re awake, you’re ready to explore. Because the conscious mind is no longer heavily burdened, there is space to learn new things and grow.
Where Do We Go from Here?
Now that you’ve been practicing how to remember your dreams and engage your subconscious, conscious, and superconscious minds to work together, you are ready to communicate even more directly with the other side.
In this chapter, you’ve met and worked with a spirit guide. In the next chapter, we are going to explore what it feels like when you are visited by a loved one or other spiritual being in your dreams. I call these visitation dreams.
This is the next big step, as you are leaving an area where you had some control of what you would dream about. In visitations, you may be surprised by who has been waiting to spend some time with you from the other side. Nervous? Don’t worry—I’m here with you as your travel guide to the other side. We’ll take this next step together.