Pulling Your Intuitive
Awareness from Dreams
Our dreams can be deeply powerful intuitive messengers that hold keys
and clues to our deepest selves. Far beyond their ability to amuse or terrify us,
they hold a profound communication system that when we learn to
understand we can use to heal and transform our lives.
—simone wright
Another common way people experience intuition is through dreams. We all dream. Whether we remember our dreams or not is a different story. When you wake up and feel like the dream you had was real life, that is usually more than a regular dream. That is your spirit’s way of letting you know something, and often that something is about what is to come. Premonitory dreams, or precognitive dreams, happen to alert you or let you know what may be developing in the future. Sometimes they are symbolic and must be deciphered entirely. Other dreams may lay things out in more detail. It may be a mix of both.
Our dreams come from a myriad of sources. They are a way for our subconscious to process problems or dilemmas or even details of the day that we haven’t figured out while awake. Dreaming is also a way for our deceased loved ones and spirit guides to visit—and for our intuition to come through. Sometimes life is so hectic we don’t notice our intuitive vibes trying to come through, or we ignore what we are picking up. Our subconscious, sleepy mind can help us get out of our own way to allow our intuitive awareness to open up through our dreams.
Processing Life
We are so busy. We are always doing. Maybe it’s working or taking care of our kids, or maybe it’s going out and playing. Maybe it’s staying home and trying to figure out how to pay the bills. We even focus so much energy on our diet—how to gain and how to lose weight and eat healthy doing it. Sometimes—let’s be honest—we can’t even remember what the heck it is that we spend our time doing but we know we are busy. We don’t always have time to figure things out—actually, it’s more that we don’t allocate time toward tuning in to what may be significant in our lives. That’s where intuitive dreams can come in, to process our lives.
Patty, a friend as well as a client, came in for a reading. I was doing her reading, explaining all the details I was picking up. All was going well, but then I stopped.
“What’s with the dreams?” I asked her.
“What do you mean?” she responded.
“I feel like you are receiving messages in your dreams. I think you need to pay attention to them. It’s like you are processing things while you sleep because your conscious mind doesn’t have the energy to explore it.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Patty chuckled. I wasn’t sure if she was being serious because she had a comedic manner, and that fun attitude carried through here.
“Okay, well, let’s see.”
I tuned in to her energy. Suddenly, I got the feeling that there was something really wrong with her body chemistry. I could sense that overall something was happening inside her, and it was not as it was supposed to happen. I wasn’t quite sure yet what it was. Then it hit me.
“Have you been dreaming of taking medicine?”
“That’s bizarre! I had this dream where I was about to take my meds, and I kept dropping them on the ground,” she said, this time with a more serious face.
“Your intuition is telling you something,” I told her.
“Huh? What do you mean?”
I went on to explain that I felt she was taking something that wasn’t right. At first, I suggested it might be that she needed to adjust her dose. Then it came in more clearly, so I told her she needed to see her doctor right away because something didn’t feel right with her medication. I asked her if she had recently started this new medicine, and she stated she’d been on it for a couple of months and that she didn’t feel quite right since taking it.
Patty said she would check it out. She put the medicine issue on the back burner for a bit. She texted me a couple months later to let me know what was happening. Knowing I rarely remember readings, she spelled it out for me: “You (and my spirit guides) told me I was taking the wrong meds or the wrong prescription. Last week I found out my doctor had prescribed the meds and the dosage incorrectly! What the heck?! When I asked the doctor about what I was taking, he looked like he saw a ghost. We spoke in his office about how he had originally told me to take the medication versus how the medication should actually have been taken, and it was then I realized you were 100 percent correct. He told me to stop taking it immediately. I don’t need it. The doctor confirmed it is not for me! Thank you so much!”
Patty’s text to me was great. I was so glad I was able to tune in to see what was happening with her body chemistry, which helped me understand what was happening. However, that was not the only thing to pay attention to here, and I told Patty as much.
“You are so welcome. But take a second to think back. Do you remember talking about your dreams? You said in your dream you kept trying to take your medicine, but it was falling on the floor. That was your intuition trying to get your attention to notice something was not quite right with your prescription,” I shared. “You knew it intuitively—you just hadn’t recognized it, yet!”
Patty’s intuitive guidance system was trying to let her know something was wrong and used her subconscious to try and share it with her. “Intuition is our means of tuning in to truths about our health that the conscious mind cannot know or is denying,” writes Char Margolis, psychic, author, and television personality.7 Patty’s dream state was the only place she slowed down long enough to receive the message, as she was so busy every day. I am convinced that had she not come in when she did, she would have put two and two together and figured out what her intuition was telling her. It just would have taken a bit longer.
Your dreams can help you process life in so many different ways. From how to handle medicine, like in Patty’s case, to dealing with your finances, and everything in between, your intuition will often play out the story of what you’re dealing with in your dreams. It may be the only time you slow down enough to receive the intuitive messages.
Premonitions and Dreams
Betsy has the premonitory type of dreams. She’s had them sporadically throughout the years—probably more than she realizes. We were discussing intuition during a Goddess Weekend, during which about twenty of us strong, beautiful women got together to bond over our incredibly powerful energy. We started sharing stories.
Betsy said, “I have one, but I don’t know if this is my intuition or not.”
Well, of course I wanted to know all about it. She shared her first story with us. Shortly before Thanksgiving, Betsy had a dream. In the dream she realized she was being told to be sure her CPR training was up to date and that she remembered how to do it. She had no idea what that meant, but she woke up with the desire to be sure she knew how to perform CPR in order to help anyone in need. She didn’t have to wait long to try it out.
Betsy’s workplace had an annual Thanksgiving meal. During the gathering, the owner of the business started to choke. Betsy’s coworker quickly performed the Heimlich maneuver, but he did it wrong. Rather than helping dislodge what she was choking on, he actually pushed the air out of her lungs. Betsy’s training kicked in. She knew, as scary as it was, that she needed to let her boss and mentor pass out. She had learned it would relax her muscles in her neck and throat. Sure enough, her boss passed out and Betsy was able to reach in and remove what was blocking her airway.
Her premonitory dream had prepared her for what was to come. It had caused her to brush up on her knowledge, which pretty much led to her saving her mentor’s life. Not only had her intuition come through in a dream, but it came through with a precognitive and precautionary warning. Thankfully, she had listened to her dream.
Paying Attention to
Recurring Dreams with Warnings
We’ve got so much going on in our lives that we often neglect our intuition. Sometimes it seems like it takes too much effort to merely notice our intuitive hits. When we don’t recognize important messages while awake, our intuitive guidance is going to find a way to come through, so showing up in our dreams makes a lot of sense. There are other types of intuitive dreams besides ones that are precognitive. There are also nightmares. These are dreams that may happen as a wake-up call or to help you process real-life trauma. Nightmares can also reflect crisis or fear. This type of intuitive message can also bring warnings of current health issues.
Meghan, a forty-two-year-old mother of three teenage boys, had a real wake-up call. Her intuition came through in her dreams in the form of recurring nightmares. Out of the blue, one night she had a dream that she was pulled into rapids and was repeatedly being smashed up against huge rocks. The dream was so real and so forceful it woke her up, gasping for breath and holding her left side in pain. The pain in her side continued for hours—so severely at times that it caused her to break down in tears. Then, just like that, it went away.
About a week later, Meghan had the same dream and woke up again in unbearable pain. As before, the pain lasted for a few hours. It was intense. She began feeling like something may be wrong. She wanted to see her doctor but had just recently been in for a full physical, gynecological exam, and blood work. They hadn’t found anything wrong, and her husband felt she was overreacting.
Flash forward to about two weeks later. Meghan had the dream again—but this time she wasn’t just smashed against rocks, she was also pulled under by seaweed. Like before, she woke up out of breath. She was in such intense pain she decided to call the doctor that day. The best they could do was more blood work and an ultrasound, since she had just had a full physical only a few weeks prior with no red flags.
A few days went by and she received a phone call from the nurse’s office telling her that her blood work and ultrasound had come back fine. That night, she had the dream again, only this time there was a blur or shadow-type figure standing at the side of the rapid waters. It was screaming something she couldn’t fully hear but sounded like “tubes.” When she woke, she had the same intense pain. What the hell was happening? She was becoming afraid to sleep!
She called her doctor and spoke to him about the intense pain and asked if there was another type of ultrasound that would look specifically at her fallopian tubes. He told her to come in for an endovaginal ultrasound. As she watched the screen, the nurse gasped. It turned out there was a cancerous cyst in her fallopian tube the size of a grapefruit. She went in to have it removed immediately. The doctor told her if she hadn’t had it removed, or if it had gone undiagnosed even a few more weeks, her chances of survival would have been bleak.
I have no idea why the cancer didn’t show up in the bloodwork, but I do know that Meghan’s intuitive nightmares had let her know something was indeed wrong. If they hadn’t continued alerting her and drumming up the pain, she might never have found the cancer. Meghan persisted and she’s still here to share her story of intuition. Not only did she use it, but she is now a survivor.
Dream Symbolism
Interpreting dreams can be tricky. They can be literal translations of what’s happening in your life, showing up to help you process what’s happening while awake, or they can quite often be symbolic. In Meghan’s experience, water was a symbol in each dream. Water typically represents emotions. However, it can represent your plumbing—in your house or in your body. The rapids indicated there was something tumultuous and probably painful going on, and boy, was there!
The symbols that show up in dreams are not always as easy to recognize for what they represent. For example, the water in Meghan’s dream is easily decipherable as her plumbing after the fact. During the dream, it can be more difficult to understand. Referencing a dream dictionary or your symbols book is a great way to start understanding your future night messages. An entry in Meghan’s journal would look something like this:
Water: Can represent emotions, building plumbing, or anatomical plumbing
Water, Rapids: Can represent turmoil or an issue with the above, something that is causing grief and must be addressed
Figuring Out Relationships,
Personal and Professional
Mary had recurring nightmares. She had dreams that she wasn’t quite sure were her intuition speaking to her or her subconscious mind sending her a message, but she knew it was something to listen to. For weeks, night after night, she dreamt about spiders dropping from the ceiling on top of her while in bed. The sensation was so real every single night. She continually jumped out of bed, often climbing over her husband who was sleeping beside her.
The dream was so real and never varied, repeatedly. The spiders would drop from the ceiling, landing on her. She knew there was something deeper going on and was pretty sure it was a sign to take some action.
She had been contemplating quitting her long-term job, which had become more of a familial type relationship than a company position. Her friends had previously talked her out of it three years before, citing how long she’d been there and how it was like working with family. But no matter what she did, nothing got better in her increasingly bad work environment. The stress and anxiety of having to deal with a boss who was an out-in-the-open liar, a drinker, and a drug user just wore her down. She knew subconsciously this dream was her mind shouting at her to get out. Be it a web of lies or a spiderweb, she knew it was time to leave. The repetitive spiders finally convinced her. She sat down with her boss and told him she was done. She never looked back. She experienced peace of mind and started living the life she wanted with no regrets, thankful that the spiders had showed up for her.
Mary was lucky. She recognized the spiders as a portent of things to come and what she was dealing with. Her emotions were playing out in her intuitive dreams and she knew she had to act. It was hard enough dealing with her own problems in her personal life, but not dealing with the work issues had caused her sleepless nights and scary imagery. As soon as Mary made her decision after that last nightmare, the spiders disappeared, and she was able to get a full night’s sleep again.
Think of dreams as your gateway into intuition. When we don’t get it during consciousness, we are afforded an opportunity to review what our sixth sense is trying to tell us while we are asleep. We aren’t always as astute with our ESP as we’d like to be, but don’t worry—our intuitive vibes will keep coming!
We are connected to the energy of the universe, and our guides will give us the information we need, regardless of whether we are awake or asleep. We are beginning an incredible period of growth. There is no perfect method to decide who we want to bring along during this time, but reading the energy of others allows us to examine who works best in our lives.
7. Char Margolis, Discover Your Inner Wisdom: Using Intuition, Logic, and Common Sense to Make Your Best Choices (New York: Fireside, 2008), 67.