Dreams used as visions and prophecy were common in the ancient world. Indeed, no matter where you might journey, you were likely to fall over a prophet or two, religious and otherwise. In the Middle Ages, flying dreams were associated with Diana, the Roman goddess of the moon.36 The Night Battles discussed by Ginzburg37 in his treatise on the benandanti (well-farers) of the same time period could have been the product of dream sequences, or they could have been ritual drama practiced as part of the culture of the day. In most historical cases, however, dreams fell into a category of heavenly magic toward which the church authorities felt able to be relatively relaxed. Indeed, there were worse forces abroad of which the clergy must contend.38 Religion thus reinforced the ancient belief in the divinatory power of dreams, though it was felt that divine dreams were unlikely, yet possible. Manuscript guides to dream interpretation dating to the early medieval period were continuously replaced and updated and circulated through the 1800s.39
If you really think about it, humans experience several types of dream states—night dreams, daydreams, visualization, pathworking, and some meditation sequences. Our conscious mind works to perceive and analyze reality. The unconscious mind runs our automatic functions and communicates through our senses, thoughts, and feelings. Its language is that of pure symbolism. Our higher self is our connection to Spirit and can provide a moment of inspiration, fuel our creativity, and help us experience that feeling of oneness with the universe. When we work to balance the conscious mind, unconscious mind, and the higher mind, we can achieve miracles. Many times this achievement is a direct product of our dreams, meditations, and pathworking experiences.
Today, health care providers tell us that one of the biggest areas of concern in teen and workaholic adult wellness issues stems from sleep deprivation. Your schedule is so full that there just doesn’t seem to be time for sleep, but a teen actually needs up to ten hours (sometimes more) to stay healthy and unstressed. During the teen years, the pituitary gland (located in your brain) releases large amounts of growth hormones. If you want to grow at the highest rate possible for your body type, you need to make an effort to get plenty of sleep. When we sleep, we also dream. Cutting out the sleeping also cuts out the dreaming, which relates to our psychological health.
Most researchers agree that humans have four or five dream periods per night. Within each dream period there can be any number of dreams. Every once in a while you may wake up remembering a succession of dreams—scenes that blended from one to the other. When this happens you are remembering part or all of a dream segment. Dreams usually occur during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, first observed by Eugene Aserinsky in 1953 at the University of Chicago.40 Later scientists discovered that daily rest cycles and sleep cycles were the same, and they also discovered that REM cycles occur on a subtle level during the day while we are awake. Now, what does all this mean to us, as magickal people? Basically that all levels of the mind, body, and spirit function as one, even though we don’t have the slightest idea that all this activity is going on in our bodies. When something is out of whack with any of these cycles, we get sick or depressed. By using tools like meditation, self-hypnosis, daydreams, and night dreams, we can guide our lives to ultimate success. And you thought Witches only cast spells!
When we lie down to go to sleep, our bodies begin to relax. The same occurs when we begin a meditation sequence. Our brain waves slow down from beta (the waking state) to alpha (a light trance state with several levels). As we relax we have those familiar flashes where our minds wander. These snatches are called “dreamlets,” or stream-of-conscious energy.
Sometimes our bodies jerk as our system shuts down for relaxation. This is normal and appears to be linked with how busy or stressed out we were that day. Sensations of falling come from this powering down of the body’s various systems. As we wake up and our body starts to throw those switches to meet a new day, these dreamlets occur again and are often those we remember the best. It is during these dreamlets when falling asleep or from slight arousal to full awakening that our minds are the most creative and fertile. It’s here that we can program ourselves with positive suggestions and affirmations. Why not write down your favorite affirmation (or take the time to compose one) that you will use next time you experience dreamlets? Try to remember to insert this affirmation every night (or morning) for the next month. What happens?
From the dreamlet stage when we are falling asleep, our bodies and minds move into four successive states that equal one sleep cycle. As I mentioned earlier, we will have four to five sleep cycles per night. The time we spend in each stage depends upon the person. For most people, their heaviest sleep of the night falls within the first three hours. During sleep, we move from alpha to theta, and finally to delta before we ascend again to begin a new cycle. In the first cycle of the night, dreaming only occurs for ten minutes toward the very end of the cycle.41 As we continue to sleep, the REM lasts longer, until finally about 90 percent of the last sleep cycle is filled with dreams. These are the images most individuals use for dream recall. Still, no one really knows why we dream! While you dream, your higher conscious sends you messages that are encoded by your unconscious mind. Your conscious mind must meet the challenge of decoding the message, but first we have to teach ourselves to remember our dreams.
Everyone dreams (even though they say they don’t). The trick is remembering them. If you practice telling yourself each night that you will remember the dreams that carry the most important information, you will begin to have better recall. Keep a pen and pad by the bed to jot down dreams or even phrases you might hear in your mind. Don’t worry about decoding them in the night. It’s better to let your conscious mind haggle over it the next day. If you keep up this practice, you will soon have a journal full of dreams. You might try the following spell before falling asleep to help with better dream recall.
Dream Recall Spell
Supplies: One cup of hot, brewed chamomile tea; dried, crushed lavender; a white hankie.
Instructions: Place the lavender inside the hankie. Fold neatly. Place between the pillow and pillowcase. Drink the tea. Recite the following incantation three times:
From my higher self I bid thee come from the deep rushing river of my dreams—great winged thoughts of inspiration, knowledge, growth, and learning. I welcome with joy the symbols and vivid colors brought forth, up through the depths of my mind, and I will remember only those dreams that are significant. I will decode these with little difficulty upon waking by using the keyword (insert a special word of choice here). So mote it be.
Ground and center. Turn out the light and close your eyes.
It may take several weeks before you are able to recall significant parts of the dream segments, but don’t give up. How we wake up also has a lot to do with what we recall. If you are overly tired and then roused by an alarm or a screaming sibling, it’s highly possible you won’t remember a darned thing. Sit quietly in bed and say your keyword aloud. If that doesn’t work, there’s always tomorrow.
Most of us don’t have time to decode our dreams right away. This is especially so if you have to get ready for school or you have some other commitment. When you do have the time, my best advice is to use word association rather than a dream dictionary. Yes, some symbols might be universal, but these are your dreams and your private code from your unconscious mind. Only you hold the complete dictionary.
Go through your notes and pull out the most colorful symbolism. I had a dream once where a giant wave of water rose up over the whole town and threatened to wash us all away. In the dream, the wave was the most prominent symbol, both by its size and the vivid color of the water. So I wrote down “big wave” and then did word association by writing down the first ten words that came into my head. I repeated the symbol aloud—big wave—then wrote down “Fear, Overcome, Drown, Loss, Float, Flow, etc.” The dream meant that I felt I was being overcome by something much bigger than myself, and that in this mental helplessness I was afraid that I would lose something precious to me. As I continued to think about this, I realized that FEAR means “False Evidence Appearing Real,” and that the big wave was actually a representation of my worry. My mind was telling me that I was drowning in my own fear and worry, and that I was supposed to “go with the flow.”
Granted, some dreams have so much symbolism that it takes awhile to decipher them, and on occasion they will appear so cryptic that you toss your pencil across the room in frustration. If this happens to you, let the dream sit for a few days (even a few weeks) and then go back to it. By then you’ll probably look at the dream and smack yourself on the forehead, saying, “Duh!” because the answer will come to you immediately. That’s because even though you haven’t worked on the dream in a few days (or weeks), your subconscious mind continued to shoot additional clues to your conscious mind.
Using Your Divination Tool
to Decipher Your Dreams
If you have been working with a favorite divination tool for any length of time, you have gained experience in decoding symbols, moving from your intuition to your conscious mind and sometimes back again. If a dream is particularly puzzling, take a deep breath and relax, then shuffle the cards (or whatever your tool requires) as you re-read the dream. Your final question should be, “What important message or messages are contained within this dream, and how can I use this message to become a better person?”
Let’s use the example of the Big Wave dream and a deck of Tarot cards. You can use your favorite card spread, or you can simply draw two cards—the first for the message of the dream and the second for how you can use the message. I drew the Six of Wands, meaning that all obstacles are surmountable, and the Three of Wands, meaning I should welcome change (and not be afraid of it) and continue to assert my efforts in positive ways. The suit of Wands also tells me that my worries were about communication and my inner resources. True enough.
If you are into astrology, you can cast a chart for the moment you woke up and wrote down your dream. Not only is this a cool way to learn astrology, you’ll also get some major insights on what’s going on inside your brain!
Dreams of Prophecy
As dreams are so incredibly personal, it is difficult to discern what may be an outlet of our fears and what may, indeed, be an indication of what is to come. Unfortunately, every segment of history has had its prophets of gloom and doom. Most were wrong, a handful managed to get it right, but in the meantime, thousands of people have been frightened or even lost their lives over false prophecies. When the attack on America occurred on September 11, 2001, some of the members of the magickal community indicated their angst that the “leaders” of our community hadn’t found a way to warn the victims of this disaster. Why didn’t they know?
Prophetic dreams are funny animals, as I have come to discover. I can only tell you my experience, and you can draw your conclusions wherever you like. On August 11, 2001, I awoke from a very vivid dream. In the dream I was on a white road. There was sand all about. In the distance I could see a man walking toward me dressed in Arab garb leading a camel. He walked up to me and smiled, but a loud voice in my mind said, “This is a very bad man. He carries the evil eye.” The man reached his hand out to me and between this thumb and index finger was a real eye. I looked up and saw a snow-white obelisk behind him. Instantly it was covered with what looked like red Arabic writing. The writing began to drip like blood. When I woke from the dream I immediately wrote it down because it was so strange and so very vivid. I tried my usual dream-recall sequence but could not find an adequate association to the dream. I checked the news—papers, Internet, television—nothing stood out. Days passed, then weeks, and I forgot about the vision. Throughout the first week in September I received several e-mails from community members speaking of disaster dreams (many of them teens, by the way), however no one could come up with a place, a time, or a day. Such is the rub, for most of us, of prophetic dreams. On September 10, as I lay down to sleep for the night, I went through my normal meditation sequence when suddenly everything tunneled and I found myself in a black tunnel, looking out a hole shaped like a round doorway. The world outside of the tunnel was deep twilight—an eerie blue-purple mix. As I sat protected in the tunnel, hundreds of silhouettes of people silently marched by. I have no idea how long I watched the people silently shuffle along, I only know that there were no silhouettes of children in the line. Disturbed, I stayed up all night trying to understand what I had seen. Was it a product of my own imagination? Was it real? If so, what was I seeing? Finally, toward dawn I gave up my pondering and went back to work on this book. My husband was watching the stock channel when the first plane hit. I saw the second plane hit myself. The rest is history.
There was once a famous mystery writer who always added the sentence, “Had I but known . . .” in just about every novel she wrote. Even if I had known the dream and the vision were true prophecy, there was no additional signage or blinking lights telling me when, where, why, or what time. All I got was a “who,” and even then I didn’t get a name—just a face, and at that time, it was a face among millions. Yes, there were hints in the dream and the vision, but hindsight is 20/20 and we can always draw correlations where we wouldn’t have possibly seen things before.
How many of us were warned by visions and prophecy? Probably quite a few. I’m sure I’m not the only person who couldn’t sleep the night of September 10. However, I’m also sure that hundreds, maybe thousands like me received only pieces of the oncoming nemesis that was about to hit. Future shock waves? Something like a collective unconscious tuning fork? Psychiatrist Montague Ullman, the founder of the Dream Laboratory at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, believes that nature is concerned with the survival of the species and in that concern provides dreams to counteract our seemingly unending compulsion to fragment the world. Dreams reflect our individual experience because there is a greater underlying need to preserve the species, to maintain an interconnectedness with all humans.42 If this is so, perhaps, as Ullman postulates, dreams are a bridge between the perceptual and nonmanifest orders and can warn us of an upcoming transformation that will affect large numbers of people. Until we are able to scientifically measure prophetic dreams, we can only gather data and wait, and since many people fear drawing attention to themselves or have a legitimate desire not to frighten people unnecessarily, we can’t retrieve most of the prophetic data floating around out there in every social structure. One thing is certain; we must never, ever be afraid.