The Cobalt Sigil

Dreaming the Sci-Fi Nerd

2012-01-15T22:20:00.000-08:00

I'm going through my old dream journal as I work on a project I'll write about later, one having to do with the "things in the sky" dreams I wrote about in the last post. I have created a new category for dreams: "amusing." Here's my favorite one so far, back from October 2008:

Han Solo is a space vampire. He's walking down the street, distressed because he doesn't have the money for dental surgery, so he tries to keep his lips drawn over his vampire fangs. He sits in a lecture about different blood viruses, and raises his hand to ask about space vampires, but then worries that the people around him will wonder if he's asking for himself--I guess he's wondering if "space vampirism" is a bloodborne virus. He shuns friends because he doesn't want them to notice his problem.

Poor Han. I'm sure this dream related to some inadequacy I was feeling at the time, but now all I can think of is Han getting all Buffy-style vampire on Jabba the Hut. Things would have been very different if that had been the case. Princess Leia would have had no need to rescue Han, since he'd have thoroughly drained Jabba and all his minions of their life force, and therefore Leia would have never been Jabba's sexy slave girl. Think of all the legions of sci-fi fans that would have been denied their favorite risque fantasy!

I also found a dream from 2007 that just said, "I dreamed Agent Mulder was being a dick." This was after the dream in which I turned lucid, looked in the mirror, and said, "THE SPICE!" while making my eyes turn luminously blue like in the Dune movie.Don't tell anyone, but I guess my inner dreamer is a sci-fi nerd.

Increasing UFO dreams, and hallucinating earthquakes

2011-12-22T22:07:00.000-08:00

Just a small note to myself: I just realized that I have an absurd amount of dreams in which the dream is interrupted briefly by UFOs, flying black crafts, or something else odd flying through the sky. It is so common now that I barely notice it. In the last dream, they hung in a row like Christmas lights, shining a blue light down onto me and my friend as we finished our conversation. Of course, tonight's dream was interrupted by an earthquake ... a real one this time (just a 2.7 but I felt it), rather than the one I hallucinated a few weeks ago. Yeah really. I hallucinated an earthquake that woke me up. I felt the whole room vibrate exactly as it does during a mild quake. And even when I got up and verified with USGS that there was no earthquake, of course I was wide awake from that brief moment of adrenaline. No sleep for me! Only stress hormones!So another small note to self: if you're going to hallucinate a physical sensation, how about something cool like a soak in a hot tub or the best massage ever? That would be great, thanks.***Experimenting now with 5-HTP to see if it helps with sleep quality. So far I think it does, but physical issues can still negate its effects and cause crappy sleep.

Breathing Light in the Darkness: Visual Qi/Energy

2011-12-19T16:22:00.000-08:00

On October 13, I had a weird experience that's been repeated a couple times since then, but not in such vividness. I’d gone to bed very late after staying up reading. D woke up when I came to bed, and I lay my head on his chest, gazing in his direction with unfocused eyes as he spoke about a vivid dream of speaking with his dead father.

And then I blinked as D exhaled light in the dark! It glowed and sparkled in swirls, pulsing and moving like exhaled breath on a cold day. When he made a sharp noise, such as a cough or laugh, small sparks shot out of his mouth.

I admit to a few girlish squeals. I saw this same swirly light hanging fog-like around my hands, and random sparks occasionally shot from my fingers. When I wiggled my fingers, tiny sparks seemed to fall in cascades (interestingly, this I used this same movement as a "cheat" to register raised energy in the biofeedback game Wild Divine). When I moved my hands, I created dim swirls in the air. It reminded me of being a child and taking a bath in the sunlight, and the movement of my hands in the water created a swirling pattern on the bottom of the tub as the light moved with the water.

D and I experimented with this for awhile. He couldn’t see anything, but I was just astounded and kept waving my hands around like a maniac, watching the sparkles and giggling about the possibility that I was now a "sparklepire."

I may have been seeing a visual representation of the Chinese concept of Qi. The sight I was using was, I think, physical, and I don’t think it would have worked in the daylight. Somehow it required my eyes to focus in a particular way. I thought at first I just had tired eyes and was seeing things, but the pulsations so clearly matched D’s speech and coughs and laughs. If this is what hovers in the air around us and in our bodies, then our world when viewed with this sight is extraordinarily beautiful. I should take my qigong more seriously.

I am not sure what I did to bring this on. I wonder if D's connection to the dreamworld and my physical weariness played a part in this. I’m sure a skeptic would say I just had tired eyes, but they didn’t see those exact ethereal movements in conjunction with what was happening in the physical world. Even if it was some astounding, elaborate trick of the brain, I am going to use that illusion however I can to make life more interesting and beautiful. So far it's all been spontaneous. I did find one person online discussing what Qi looks like, and it was similar to what I saw, but oddly I can't find the site anymore. However, this person had a similar idea:

Q. What does chi look like to you?

A. Water moving over rocks, sunlight moving through water, rocks resting on river bottom.

Are you a musical emotive?

2011-12-17T23:40:00.000-08:00

A funny little thing I've been meaning to blog about: musical emotives.

I have a bad habit of loading a playlist, or putting my music collection on shuffle, and then constantly fast-forwarding through songs until I find the exact right song for the moment. D is a patient man but I know it drives him batshit sometimes. I'll hear one note and fast-forward, leaving a trail of disjointed songs. We discussed this once and I said, "But sometimes its a great song, but it isn't the right feeling. I'll be depressed for hours if I listen to this song." On certain days I do not want to put Joy Division into the mix, for instance, or I'll just sit there all day, contemplating the dreadful gloom of humanity. I adore Bat for Lashes, but I had better not play anything from "Two Planets" unless I want to stop what I'm doing and ponder the transcendent mysteries of my place in the universe. And last week I delved into pop music and had to stop, because I was trying to work but all I wanted to do was laugh and laugh at this silly high-energy pop-techno. I just could not concentrate with LMFAO playing. Then I made the mistake of watching some of their videos on Youtube. (OMG OMG OMG he did not just ... shake his ... I mean with Ron Jeremey dancing on the table ... no, he did. And he's still doing it.)

I'm totally lost if Gary Jules' version of "Mad World" comes on. Don't even think of playing Sigur Ros's "Untitled Four." I will be crying and playing it on repeat for the next four hours because I can't shake myself out of this ineffable groove. There aren't even any words to that song! At least, no real words. And when the Church's "The Time Being" comes on the playlist, I will just kinda stop what I'm doing and stare off into the distance. Not really helpful when trying to make a nice spreadsheet, or talk to a client about the intricacies of the American health care system.

So if I can't handle those states of mind, I hit/click the fast-forward button. Best to nip it in the bud if I can't let it grow.

And then D says that it's not like that for him. He recognizes that he's listening to a sad song that he likes, and that's about it. The song has no effect on his mood. D's the one with all the music industry experience, too.

So I want to know--is that how it is for other people? Or am I just a musically enslaved person? Now that I think of it, that kind of explains my attitude towards the piano. I never play it as much as I want, probably because I know that once I start, the whole night is lost. Which is great if you have nothing else to do in your life, but really bad if you have, say, a job, or chores, or health concerns to attend to.

Conversely, music is my best meditative tool. I know other people from religious and occult traditions have various props they use--robes, prayer beads, mandalas, athames and chalices, whatever. For me, it's music. In particular, songs with a fast soaring melody and musical tension can trigger a beautiful soaring energy in me. Sometimes, it's even to my annoyance (good lord, I'm certainly not the Nicki Minaj pop music type, but that song "Super Bass" triggers it without me trying, just due to the composition of the chorus melody). I joke that my "Happy Song" is Empire of the Sun's "Walking on a Dream." If I weren't so lazy, I'd link to it in Youtube but I trust in your Google-fu. That song in particular has probably resulted in many fellow train-riders thinking I was really high on some amazing new drug.

The Body Knows When You're BS-ing It

2011-11-30T08:40:00.000-08:00

In my meditation last night, I was thinking about an oft-repeated New Age idea that with visualizations and affirmations, you can convince your DNA and RNA to change and produce healthy cells. I was wondering how true this is. Certainly, the world is filled with people who have meditated themselves out of illness, but I always assumed it was because they were removing the stress that caused or aggravated their symptoms.

But actually changing DNA? I was trying to imagine the mechanism that would cause that, thinking back to what I could recall of my college biology classes, when suddenly a voice in my head said, “None of that matters if you don’t first respect your body.”

Here’s the impression I got: It’s all good and well to focus on amazing feats of recovery. Yeah, sure, you can potentially meditate your way out of illness and pain. But it really doesn’t matter if you aren’t giving your body the daily respect it deserves. A few examples of common disrespect come to mind:

Wearing high heels even though you know it hurts your back
Eating a food you know will give you heartburn, and then taking a bunch of antacids to try to counter it
Going to work when you have a bad cold and you know you should be resting
Sitting in a slouchy position when you know it gives you a back-ache by the end of the day
Obvious vices like smoking, excessive drinking, and overeating
All these things translated as “disrespect to the body.” And all the lovely “Heal my DNA!” meditations will just roll right off you if you don’t have this basic level of respect to the body, because your subconscious is well aware that you aren’t really serious about being healthy.

That is incredibly inconvenient, but it might point to why healing meditations don’t seem to stick for some people (like me). It’s just that in my case, the level of respect that my body seems to want is, “Drop me off on a Hawaiian beach and leave me there for about six months, hold all appointments, hire a personal chef and a maid, etc.” My body emphatically wants to rest. And sadly, we don’t live in a world that values extended rest or makes it easily obtainable.

So I’m going to have to think about this. It can't be a lost cause.

Weird Oz Factor Experience

2011-09-22T21:43:00.000-07:00

I had an odd experience a few nights ago. I was half awake in the middle of the night, when suddenly things went quiet. Not that things were loud to begin with, but every tiny noise stopped--the sound of the ceiling fan, the hum of the fridge, etc.--and I heard nothing at all. That's weird, I thought, then opened my eyes fully in shock and thought wildly, it's happening, it's all stopped, it's happening! I recognized this state of complete silence and it alarmed me because I knew it meant something else was coming ... until moments later, sound returned and I decided that no,"it" wasn't happening and went back to sleep.

It is really strange to know that you recognized "it", but no longer have any recollection of what "it" was.

The sensation of sudden stillness and cessation of sound, or sound getting muffled and things moving slowly, is sometimes called the "Oz Factor." Some people associate it with UFO abductions but if you read anecdotes carefully, you'll note it in all sorts of high strangeness, particularly time slips.

For those of you who are into out-of-body experiences, do you experience this "Oz Factor" as you're about to exit? I've only ever heard electrical buzzing noises, but I'm not that experienced.

I could teach a class on lucid dreaming, really. What do you want to learn?

2011-08-28T22:06:00.000-07:00

Today I went to a meetup about dreaming, and the evening's topic was lucid dreaming. There were a couple of regular, long-term lucid dreamers in the group (including me), but most of the others were novices. The facilitator was a dreamer but not a lucid dreamer, so she was teaching mostly textbook knowledge and didn't have the answers to many questions people asked.

I wavered between wanting to share my considerable store of lucid dreaming knowledge (I've been doing this for 15 years, which is nothing compared to people like Stephen Laberge, of course), and not wanting to dominate the discussion. But when I came home, I realized that this is an area I could easily teach a class in. I thought about writing an article answering some of these basic questions the group asked.

There are a gazillion how-to-lucid-dream pages on the internet. Some, like ld4all.com and dreamviews.com, are extensive. I'm not sure that writing another how-to is necessary. But I can speak to my own experience, techniques, and best practices and answer questions about how and why I do it.

If I were to write about lucid dreaming, what area would YOU be most interested in? Please leave me a comment so I can focus my efforts.

***

My most recent lucid dream was last week, in which I flew right through a wall and over the San Francisco Bay. The water was crystal clear and I saw sea urchins, otters, and sharks looking up at me. "Hello, San Francisco Bay!" I shouted. Then I blinked--I was crossing the bay, but the city wasn't there! It was just some hills. Had I gone back in time? I've had a few other dreams of time slips recently, including one in which I was watching UFOs and slipped into some alternate reality in which Americans and Germans were friends in WWII. Very strange!

At any rate, the meeting today did introduce me to another lucid dreamer who had a great technique for a reality check: in dreams, you cannot see your nose when you close one eye. He called this a "motion-free reality check" which is a term I hadn't heard, but I like it. These days, my most reliable reality check is simply, "Am I able to fly?" Like manifestation, my method of flying is very specific and I know it so well that I can do it right now, except nothing happens because I'm in the physical world.

It amuses me greatly, how often I am asking myself "Am I dreaming?" and doing that internal motion that makes me fly...and I'm not dreaming! If the person sitting next to me on the bus only realized the weird things going on in my head. Hey, it's important, cuz if I am dreaming, I sure as hell ain't sitting on this bus a minute longer.

Lucid Dream Techniques: Anchors in the Dream Reality

2011-04-13T20:48:00.000-07:00

In my late teens and early twenties, I studied lucid dreaming heavily. It seemed like the one vaguely paranormal-seeming experience I could hope to have. There's nothing paranormal about it, of course. It's a natural state of consciousness that many people have had at least once, extensively researched in the 1970s by Stanford's Dr. Stephen Laberge. Lucid dreaming is when you realize that the reason zombies are descending on your high school--where you are apparently still taking classes at age 34--and eating the mean cheerleaders is because you're dreaming. Zombies. What else are they good for, except cues that you're dreaming?

Lucid dreaming happens naturally to me now, and I think that if I intetionally practiced the way I used to, I could go from "happening naturally every few weeks" to lucid dreaming at will. I'm considering this. The joys of lucid dreaming are many, from adolescent pursuits like flying and wild sex, to more evolved aspects like healing meditations (an incredibly intense experience) and direct, responsive communication with your own subconscious.

A common problem is maintaining lucidity. Realizing that you're dreaming and that everything around you feels just as real as the waking world is a tremendously exciting feeling. It's like God swooped down and said, "Here's 100 billion dollars, complete invulnerability, and the ability to bend the laws of nature to your liking." That excitement is physically and energetically stimulating, kicking you around on the edge of dreaming and awakening.

One way to avoid this is to anchor yourself in your new dream reality the instant you realize you're asleep and dreaming. A classic technique is to look at your hands, though strangely, dream hands often take on weird shapes or consistencies. I get "ghoul hands" a lot, blue-tinged, claw-like, and in bad need of a manicure. It's stopped startling me, and now amuses me.

For people like me who are tactile-oriented (you know who you are--you have to touch the leaves of trees as you walk past because they look like they'll "feel interesting"), these techniques have helped:

Focusing on the sensation of my feet on the ground. Stomping them is even better as the real-seeming physical impact drives home the new reality. *STOMP* "This is a dream!" *STOMP* "Stomping on this hard floor feels totally real!" *STOMP* "But I'm dreaming!"
Touching the walls, the floors, anything that is around me. Feels totally real. Get close enough and you can see the scratches and dirt on the desks.
Touching my face and hair, recognizing the feel of my own countenance in this new world. Yep, that's me. I feel that. I recognize that. I'm here, wherever that is.

Once I'm established in the new reality, I also find it useful to say my name, recite my address and phone number, the names of my family members, etc. I'll also do a few multiplication tables. This not only stimulates the analytical mind--bringing in waking consciousness--but it momentarily deadens emotional excitement that might wake me up. It's hard to get excited about 9x3, and it's a bit of a challenge to remember the answer in a dream state.

The techniques work fabulously, but the difficult part is remembering not to jump right into cool stuff like flying, but to first take a moment to anchor.

Adapt--it doesn't matter which side you're on

2011-03-18T23:42:00.001-07:00

Something very important happened to me recently, unexpectedly.

Like many people, I've been riveted on Japan. The ghastly 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami especially concerns me because I live on the U.S. West Coast. Could it happen here? A 9.0 earthquake is virtually impossible, say seismologists (according to a news article I read and lost), due to the positioning of the region's tectonic plates. New tsunami inundation maps show little vulnerability to floods in most areas. Whew. What's happening to the beleagured Japanese won't happen here, right?

Except when a nuclear reactor blows, we're all screwed. New Agers are famous for their "we are all one" slogan. To me, this "oneness" always referenced an annoyingly simplistic version of the collective unconsciousness. I understand oneness better now over the past week. Oneness is simple ecology: what you do affects me. There's the big stuff, like a nuclear meltdown in a far-away country. And then there's the small stuff we don't think about, and that's what's been on my mind.

I've never felt like I belonged to humanity. Since early childhood, being a member of the human race felt like an agonizing summer stay in Grandma's boring town: I love you, Grandma, but is it time to go home yet? The kids in your town are mean or boring and their music sucks.

But I can't go home--I'm a human being on Earth. No way around it. So I've wandered through life, completely uninvested in the seemingly-impossible betterment of humanity. The best I could hope for was a few like-minded souls, entertainment, and personal development. Just passing time in a little pocket of reality inside a larger, more boring world.

You know what? I can't do that any more. Not because of some dogmatic moral obligation, but because that approach to life suddenly feels hollow and false.

A while back, I wrote a few posts about 2012 enthusiasts, comparing the OMG DOOM! perspective of survivalists to the New Ager conviction that planetary spiritual transformation awaits us (and left you rationalists out of the picture because your version of things is easy to understand: ain't nothing going on.) The survivalists must feel validated by the Japanese crisis, the Christchurch earthquakes, the Australian hurricanes, the Haitian quakes, winter storms in America, the BP oil spill, mass animal deaths, even the Middle Eastern/African uprisings. Because I'm not a statistician, I can't comment on the whether these events are truly unusual or simply more noticeable due to global media. Whatever the case, I'm noticing.

And what about spiritual transformation, is that happening? I don't know how I'd measure something so nebulous and individual as spiritual transformation. But let me tell you what's happening to me. After witnessing the misery in Japan from the safety of my home, I've suddenly realized three important things:

a) the earth is active and awake and no matter how isolated I feel, I'm a part of nature. I've always known that nature ain't gonna stop for me personally. But I guess my little lizard brain forgot that nature ain't gonna stop for armies and governments, the richest corporations, the most powerful crime cartels, or the most adored celebrities. You can't shoot down a wave or bomb it into submission. Surviving nature requires adaptation, and adaptation is a mindset, not a thing or an action. It flows into all areas of our lives, which might be why ....

b) ...the mass consciousness of our global population is changing. Many Middle Eastern and African people are demanding a humane and conscious government, and despite the violence, many of them embrace peace, cooperation, and critical thinking, deliberately affecting their world through their actions and interactions. In the U.S., there's a deep ideological and political divide between those who adapt and flourish under new circumstances, and those who can't admit that returning to old ways is no longer possible. "Old ways" can mean whatever you'd like, including social morality, technology, religion, energy use, income distribution, etc.

c) If this is happening on any level--an earth change, a planetary spiritual transformation--then I want to be involved, rather than exist in my little pocket of reality and watch disinterestedly. What's always disinterested me is a spiritual void. And I think... I mean, just maybe ... people have been shaken up enough over the past couple years to bust that void and see what's on the other side. It doesn't matter which side of the debate is right, or if both sides are wrong. Adaptation is required all circumstances--all our talents, expertise, and skills are required to create new, better ways of relating to our environment and each other. What could I bring to the world that no one else could, using my skills in a way that helps us all--including me--become better human beings?* Because when I'm becoming a better human being, I show others that it's possible. This is what "inspiration" means.

That drive toward authentic contribution, that need to be part of the collective inspiration instead of a lonely alien yearning for escape... that's flying in the face of my "old ways." I'm adapting. Whether a transformation or change is currently happening on any objective level is irrelevant--my actions, and yours, create it.

D wrote something recently that summed it all up for me: "If I have been given the abilities to improve my life and the lives of other around me, and I don’t make use of them, it is Sin." Thousands of Japanese people will never have that chance again, and any of us may endure the same fate. And if I don't yet know what those abilities are, then guess what my primary task is over the next several months or even years?

I'm not willing to wander through life anymore.

*And I think I just might have an idea.

San Francisco in the 725th Dimension

2011-02-15T20:24:00.001-08:00

While on the acupuncture table today, I was treated to weird visions. In one, I witnessed dimensional perception, similar to what you will find here: http://www.dimensions-math.org. This has to do with using polar coordinates on a sphere to visualize what stuff looks like in higher dimensions (and by that, I mean numerically higher, not morally higher).

I saw a mass of ... existence... rolling over in different dimensions until it briefly coalesced into an old Victorian town home facade, then it disappeared into the mass again as it continued moving through dimensions.

It was not a Victorian town home hidden inside a big whirling mass, like Dorothy's house in the cyclone. It was not an amorphous shape-shifting blob. What I saw as a building might have been a living creature when viewed from the 725th dimension, and more likely some concept I can't fathom. I understood then that we're witnessing just one tiny permutation of reality here. We have no idea what we are in different dimensions.

Acupuncture is hardcore stuff, man. Gives you visions where you know things ... or perhaps merely think you do. The cerebral fun was cut short when my legs gave a tremendous jerk and I hollered, because I had needles stuck in my now-tense muscles. "Oh my," said my acupuncturist, "you sure released a lot of stuck energy!" Fun.

***

Another amusing perceptual weirdness happened last week. We all have hypnogogic/hypnopompic visions as we fall asleep, right? And sometimes pre-sleep auditory hallucinations, too. Well, I had a tactile hallucination! I was falling asleep and suddenly realized that I had my hands sunk into silky, thick, curly fur, like an alpaca's. But the strangest part is that I had no visuals or audio to match--what I was seeing and hearing was completely different. The sensation was so random and nothing in my environment or recent memory was related.

D says he's had tactile hallucinations while falling asleep. Have you?

***

Weirdest recent dream moment: a doctor was working (in my dreams) under the right section of my ribcage. The pain was so intense that I vomited. In my dream! That's a first. You ever puked in your dreams?

***

The sun finally went away. It's pouring rain and the wind lends a mysterious feel to my walks. Everything around here is in bloom. We followed a little puzzle on a trail, after staggering up endless sets of stairs built into the hills. Starting in a hardly-used trail in the canyon, someone had left little piles and arrows of powder along trees and paths, past old stone foundations and disturbingly large slugs. The powder trail culminated in about two miles, in a circle in a eucalyptus grove. We stood inside the circle and kissed. We were either:

a) kissing inside a circle of cocaine left by some drug cartel

b) kissing inside a park ranger's personal forest-floor notation

c) kissing inside a fairy ring composed of the crushed bones of their enemies

I opt for C!

Spiritual Guidance when you're Spiritually Deaf

2011-01-20T23:00:00.001-08:00

A favorite author of mine, Robert Bruce, recently posted his Catch Basket Theory article. It made me ponder the ways we receive guidance from whatever greater realm is out there. Robert's article recommends that we evaluate our beliefs about spirituality and reality, discarding what we have no direct experience with. He writes:

I was instructed to dismantle my belief system, and then to intelligently rebuild it from scratch. I was told to be disciplined in my approach and to use personal experience, logic and commonsense to build a new foundation belief system, upon which to continue my quest for true enlightenment.

The foundation belief system lies deep within the subconscious mind. This comprises a set of conceptual mental filters and shields, which are fundamental to one's physical and spiritual existence. These shape and affect your thoughts and perceptions by filtering ideas and inspirations, making these conform to a central theme, as set by your foundation beliefs...If one's fundamental beliefs are even slightly flawed, information trying to pass through becomes distorted or blocked.

The idea is that true guidance from higher spiritual sources can't reach us if we're cluttered up with comforting beliefs that aren't necessarily true. And who's to say what "true" is when you're talking about subjective spiritual beliefs? The best you can say is, "I've experienced that in some way." Thus, personal experience as the benchmark.

Robert was fortunate enough to receive clear guidance on many occasions, including several occasions when a disembodied voice came right out and said, "Write a book!" He was smart enough to listen to his voice and write Astral Dynamics, a book I learned much from.

Doing his "catch-basket" exercise years ago presented an interesting dilemma: I wanted to receive this kind of clear higher guidance, but because I had no direct experience with it, I could not include it in my belief system! As much as I loved Robert's story about getting all this great information from a higher source, if I followed his theory, I could not take his word that a realm of beneficial higher beings existed. Same with other concepts and ideas that I liked. Benevolent alien space brothers? Life after death/endless nothingness after death? Reality shifts? Angels? Mothman (and I love me some Mothman lore)? The best I could say was, "I don't know," and wait for a helpful disembodied voice to give me answers.

And you know, it wouldn't. No voice. No guidance. Just a dismal feeling that no guidance or help was forthcoming now that all the fun stuff was razed. You are on your own, kid. So I started thinking about other, less obvious ways I get guidance, whether it's from a grand angelic presence or my own subconscious interpreting aggregate information from my daily life.

(Good lord. "Benchmark." "Aggregate." You can tell I've been writing too long at my day job.)

I get guidance from:

My dreams

Sudden insights as I write or walk

Meditations

Divinations (which are just free association to me, and just as useful)

Synchronicities

Books and teachers that give me sign posts (and remember not to mistake the map for the land itself)

I'm sure I'll think of others.

Most times, I still feel like an alien moored on a strange planet, isolated and forced into self-sufficiency, but I try to remember my sources of guidance. Even though it feels that way, perhaps I am not totally alone. Maybe a multitude of benevolent beings are sitting right next to me shouting helpful advice, and I'm like spiritually deaf or something.

What about you? Where does your guidance come from?

Why I'm ignoring my goals in 2011

2011-01-02T00:36:00.000-08:00

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
~ Howard Thurman, African American mystic & activist

Happy 2011! I don't usually do New Year's Resolutions because I constantly make detailed plans and structured processes for achieving a multitude of goals. But this year, I chose only one small non-negotiable goal. Why? I realized recently that whenever I ask, "But why do I/they/humanity at large do that stupid, completely out-of-touch-with-reality thing that makes no logical sense whatsoever?" I always come to the same answer: because our profound mental and psychic exhaustion leaves us unable to do anything but the most mindless, basic tasks that provide immediate gratification.

It's the state of our world. As Abraham Maslow famously pointed out, you can't work towards enlightenment well when you're struggling to meet your basic needs. Most of us in the Western World have surpassed this subsistence-level life; we generally eat enough food, sleep in warm beds, drink clean water, etc. But on the next level, there always seems to be a threat, whether it's crime, an emotionally cruel relative or co-worker, an unstable economic situation, a health problem, or an opposing political or cultural movement that threatens to ruin our community and future. It's so hard to exist in this state. We work long hours each day because we are told that's what is expected of "real" adults. We then come home exhausted and unfulfilled--and most importantly, still scared--and have no energy to think critically, consider what's meaningful in life, act compassionately toward others (that involves expending mental energy to put yourself in someone else's shoes), learn about new concepts, etc. We're just ... drained, like a maple tree with an old-time spigot shoved in its trunk, draining the sap to make syrup for the consumption of others.

And when you're drained, you are practically whimpering for something easy. Something that won't take up your already scarce mental and psychic energy. A mindless TV show. Yet another celebrity gossip website and all its mean-spirited commentary. A video game of endless clicking. Checking routine household tasks off an ever-expanding list. A bitch and moan session. A drink. Buying more crap. These are all things with a definite beginning and end. They all have clear, pre-defined goals. There is always another variation to turn to once the current variation is complete. There's no way to screw it up! Whew!

And then if we have a brief moment of clarity, we feel guilty and load ourselves down with unmet expectations. We should be doing something more impressive, more creative. We should be making something of ourselves. And we don't, because that horrible, stressful state of guilt drains the last of our energy. Facebook, here we come, and thank god for the "like" button that means we don't even have to form a coherent sentence.

I've felt more compassion towards humanity at large recently now that I've noticed how most people are struggling to lift their metaphorical feet and walk. That we make it through our lives without curling up and dying in exhaustion is testament to our species' strength. Poor humans, stuck in a vicious cycle of fight-or-flight since birth. We can't even see it, like the elephant who grew up with a chain on its foot. Take away the chain, and the elephant can't even understand that it's gone. The chain is part of the fabric of reality, whether it's physically there or not.

Poor humans, your exhaustion and your low mental functioning isn't your fault. It is your responsibility to change, but it isn't your fault. All throughout history, kind awakened souls have pointed us toward our own power to choose peace of mind. They've told stories about our ability to put our attention on what feeds our minds and spirits. Eventually our species will reach a critical mass and realize, "We don't have to suffer like this anymore. We can take back our vitality."

So I have one goal for the next three months, focused very simply on an aspect of my physical health. When you have health problems, you combine your weakened mental/psychic self with your weakened physical self. The way I've been overloading myself with expectations and strenuous goals, and then kicking myself for not reaching them, is madness and perpetuating the drain. By focusing on this one small thing, I hope to stem the exhaustion and let my energy flow back in. A peaceful mind without expectations just might lay the foundation for a more genuine, vibrant life. I can do more if I want, but I will not make myself have to do it. For people who are not goal-addicts and perfectionists like me, this mindset probably won't be helpful. But for those of us who must always do, always improve, always produce and please others even as our own spirits and bodies wither ... this might be a good thing to ponder.

Happy New Year.

Shifting perceptions

2010-11-01T22:23:00.000-07:00

Quick note from a comment I left on a fellow blogger's site: "I have been doing something weird in my dreams lately, where I've been shifting into different dimensions, or materializing objects. It's so hard to describe, but it's a bit like how you must shift your vision to see the hidden picture in a stereogram image."

It's usually a test of some sort. Here's one from my dream journal:

At the party, we were all going to do psychedelics, except that’s not really what was going on. In truth, we were meditating and shifting our perceptions enough to put us all in an altered state. I was first. It involved balancing on the top of some furniture so that I could climb onto a small loft. I held onto “nothing” in my hands and, just as though I were focusing my eyes on a stereogram image, I suddenly brought something into focus. It was not a very strong image, but it was enough, and I thought of it as non-Euclidean geometry.

For me, the trip was a divine experience, and it was all about my love for D, who was with me. It was wonderful.

When I awoke (still in the dream), I was sprawled in my corner of the loft in some sort of hammock. I stretched and yawned, and then I noticed Robert Bruce staring at me from the opposite corner, willing me to be silent. He whispered that someone there had attracted a demon (not the word he used) and that I should reach over and … like remove some item to make it go away. I did so. It was like I had immunity from it due to my love experience.

This reminds me of another dream fragment in which I did the “bring something into focus” trick. All I recall is that it was black bars, and I was not only manifesting them, but levitating them into the proper positions and depths.

These dreams always feel very real. Sometimes this shifting trick will actually change my surroundings, or make me invisible, or slow down time. Handy. Wish it would work when I try it in the waking world!

I'm here

2010-10-14T21:15:00.001-07:00

It's been quiet here. That's because I was busy achieving a very big goal. I'm here now in a strange new place, with torrents of activity streaming all around me, big waves of human creation and potential swelling against the shores and the skyscrapers. The world feels simultaneously glittery and grimy.

A drunk guy tried to sit on my lap on the bus.

I found a beautiful Victorian fan in the park.

There were birds playing on the beach.

A boy on the train entertained the entire car by quietly performing card tricks.

The grocery store is filled with enormous fruits and veggies I can't identify.

I saw every ethnicity I can think of in just my first 24 hours.

I got lost in the ghetto while driving a rented fancy convertible (fun times).

My hair and skin don't know how to behave at sea level.

I was surprised by an Aztec dance performance at a farmer's market.

I met an energy healer, three hair stylists, and a guitarist who played a song I love.

I'm still getting situated here, and now looking back towards those other goals I put aside for so many months. I have things I want to do. And every day, I'm reminded of a little drawing I saw. In the middle of the page was a huge circle that said "Where the Magic Happens." Then way down at the bottom right of the page was a tiny area that said "Your Comfort Zone."

In the meantime, I'm getting strange senses of Other Elementals. In occult traditions and classical mythology, there are four elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Occasionally you will find others, like Wood or Metal. They're usually meant to embody the states of being that you find in physical existence, personified as animals or mythological beings so that you can relate to them like you would a fellow human being.

I've never been good at the personification thing. That's probably why I'm so startled by the sense of consciousness I recently perceived as Gravity, and another as Velocity. It was a sudden and fleeting feeling that I could actually communicate with Gravity, although the window of opportunity closed quickly and the feeling faded. What would I have to say to Gravity? "Hello, so could you lighten up a bit? You're giving me wrinkles and joint pain. Thanks."

It kind of makes my head spin like Linda Blair's when I think about how it's not even the tip of the iceberg, but more of the sneaking suspicion that there is such a thing as ice at all.

Yikes. Hold the pea soup, please.

Beautifully Natural: The Earth Shift

2010-08-07T21:15:00.000-07:00

This is funny--I posted this as a comment in a friend's journal, and it showed up in my own blog. Blogger must have a new feature that I inadvertently triggered.

Beautifully Natural: The Earth Shift: "Logic would tell me that I'm going to a hot spot I don't want to be in, but my heart says otherwise."

Yes, yes, yes. I have the same feeling--my mind says, "Shouldn't you be in some nice isolated area, rather than Earthquake Central in a big city?" But over the years, I've learned that if I listen to my mind exclusively, I don't feel right. If I don't feel right, life becomes unpleasant, both physically (stress chemicals in the body) and emotionally. So I listen to both. And it's amazing what falls into place when I do that! I know you have experienced that, too.

For those of us who are called to relocate (and not everyone has to--some people are already in the right place for them), making a big move gives us the opportunity to make choices that lay the foundation for life in the "Earth shift" world. We have to buy new stuff--is it eco-friendly stuff? Necessary stuff rather than stuff that magazines and TV say that we need? Quality stuff that we love rather than whatever is artificially cheap and plentiful? We have to make new friends--what kinds of people will we bring into our lives and how will we meet them? Our daily routines will change--will we let go of things that were once important but no longer inspire, allowing more room for whatever is really meaningful now?

And how will we have to be brave and try new things, rather than sticking to what's been familiar but no longer beneficial?

These are the things I'm thinking about. You mention that we may be called to use our skills in whatever area we're in, and I'm really looking forward to finding out what my skills are. I have an idea, but I know, as the saying goes, that there are more things in heaven and earth than I have ever dreamed.

A dream of black oily alien threat

2010-07-02T19:48:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I didn't realize what this was about until the next day:

I am talking to an old classmate in an old farmhouse. I hear a noise and look outside to see some kind of alien ship descending. The aliens were enormous black curving lines, like the arms of a sea monster in an old Victorian-era drawing. I had a feeling that the aliens might BE the ship. My friend and I hid and tried to be as still as possible. The aliens looked scary, of course, as if they would view us as little more than insects or possibly snacks. They move very fast across the grass.

Later another alien species comes. They look like giant human beings and are more powerful than we are. And while we aren't their slaves, we end up as their servants because in their opinion, we are really only suitable for menial work and we powerless humans have little choice in the matter, anyway. The humanoid aliens I'm with aren't too bad. They have a sense of humor, always asking me how I got so short and such. They dislike the big black aliens and are powerful enough that the black aliens won't bother them, but not powerful enough to send them away. In particular, they dislike how the black aliens send a wave of ... burning-something ... over the city and it hurts humans. Whatever the burning stuff is, it's there to make the aliens' lives easier, not to hurt us. Our injury is incidental to them, and not particularly noteworthy. The humanoid aliens, who aren't hurt by the burning stuff, think the black aliens should take more care for our well-being. The humanoid aliens tell me how to protect myself from the burning wave, which has an effect like a giant heat wave. They want me to cover up and put on a salve.

Now here's what I figured out:

dream humans=wildlife in the waking world.
humanoid aliens=ordinary humans in the waking world.
black aliens=the Deepwater oil spill and the corporate interests behind it.
burning wave=the chemicals they've attempted to use to clean up the spill.
the salve/covering up=possibly my own recent meditations in which I've tried to warn wildlife away from the area, and shield the ones stuck in it.

It nauseates me a bit to think of it. I've been upset, as most of us have, about this oil spill and feeling very helpless to do anything that actually means something in the grand scheme of things.

When I told this to Dave before I understood what it meant, he said, "Oh, so like they were harvesting water by evaporating it with the heat ray, then extracting it from the sky in their ships so they didn't have to go down onto the earth to get it?" I told him that I wasn't sure, but it had that kind of feel. They were just trying to get what they needed. Too bad about those humans who got in the way.

I wish this dream would give me insight about what to do.

Funny, the big humanoid aliens have shown up in my dreams before. They all treat me like I would treat a toddler. Some are loving and seem to adore me, some are impatient with my slowness (mental and physical, to them). They are always controlling, having much, much more power than I do.

My dreams and 2012

2010-06-22T21:10:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I shared two dreams about compassion and how to most effectively dispel negative energy. I mentioned that these dreams were also connected to my Eclipse dream. I'll elaborate.

As I've said before, I don't subscribe to the whole "AGHH 2012 WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!1!!" theory. But I do find the various theories interesting, especially the idea that we could create a self-fulfilling prophecy due to all the attention people give 2012.

There seem to be two camps around 2012. One is the 'AGGH!" contingency with their dire predictions of natural disasters (including the various Killer Sun scenarios I mentioned before), epidemics, and World War III. I'll call them Doomsayers. The other camp espouses the idea that there will be a major change, but on an energetic level and that it will be positive. I'll refer to them as New Agers. So one camp is preparing for the Apocalypse and stocking up on food and guns while the other is meditating on global enlightenment and extraterrestrial space brothers. Each camp thinks the other is fucking nuts. The New Agers ask "Why would you choose to focus on this negativity?" The Doomsayers reply with, "Whatever, Pollyanna. Cali is going to crumble into the sea when the Apocalypse starts, and good riddance."

And then there's the third camp of rationalists and scientists, which say "You're all fucking nuts" to both camps, but that's a story for another day.

One theory I've pieced together from both sides is the idea of diverging reality. Take the concept of the Christian Rapture. Typically we think of it as God looking at his watch and saying, "Time for Rapture!" and going through each person's life and judging them as bad or good, then beaming up all the good people to be with him while the bad people live in hell on earth. But the actual concept, as I understand it from my religion classes, is not that God is a giant Santa in the sky, distributing presents or coal to boys and girls everywhere. When the Rapture occurs, those who are in a holy state of mind (i.e. rapture) automatically fit into the reality of the Rapture, while those who are not in a holy state of mind right then and there are left behind, having forever lost access to the blissful state of Rapture. It's not so much judgement but more like "Have you developed Rapture Receptors?"

I hear there's a book and a movie about it, but I haven't read it. Starring Kirk Cameron, a face on teenybopper magazine posters that once adorned my bedroom circa 1988. He's all religious now--a fate that I suppose is better than the Coreys', right?

So for the sake of argument, assume that in 2012, a similar split occurs. Those who have been meditating on raising consciousness and global peace separate from those who are fervently waiting for disaster. Who know what happens to the scientists and rationalists.

If you take it in a literal way, something like the Rapture occurs. The New Agers walk peacefully into a new dimension of lightness and spiritual bliss, disappearing from the world we're in now. At the same time, the "old world" continues where the Doomsdayers and other assorted folk are miserably suffering through the End of the World.

If you take it in a metaphorical way, the constant focus on "raising our planetary vibration" in 2012 may actually do just that. An ever-widening group of people reject violence, greed, and other negative approaches to life while beginning to love more and enjoy life more, using sustainable living techniques. Meanwhile, the Doomsdayers see no change and are still waiting for the inevitable collapse of civilization, living in fear and increasing scarcity.

My dreams are pointing this out to me. In one dream, I am awaiting the horror and death associated with the violent power of our solar system. In another dream, I am a pioneer into a strange new dimension where the laws of physics are different and evil can be successfully fought with positive energy and strong loving emotions. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

And I can take this to new levels in weirdness by pointing out that I dreamed of the Pleiadians, a supposed extraterrestrial race who are always talking to channelers about the New Age side of 2012. I have never been big on channeling. I suppose this is because I once went to a hilariously bad channeling of "The Ashtar Command" and met one too many megalomaniacs convinced that they are the savior of the planet because of their alien channeling. But who knows? I do try to keep an open mind. The last video I saw of Pleiadian channeling was dreadfully trite, but perhaps there are more engaging and creative ones out there. I suppose that if they exist, they don't have much control over how their followers present their knowledge, kinda like Jesus and his often misguided followers.

And the crazy thing with 2012, in my opinion, is that there is likely no predetermined cosmic change scheduled in 2012 by the Powers That Be. The Mayan calendar probably ended because the Mayans said, "Damn, I'm tired of chiseling out this stupid calendar. Do we seriously need to keep going that far into the future? Honestly, I'm carving out the winter solstice in freakin' 2012. " But because so many people strongly believe that a change will occur, it just might, particularly the kind of change that result from the actions and intents of human beings.

In a previous post, I mentioned that my desperation to learn everything about survivalism and sustainability has calmed into a healthy interest in living in an ecologically sound way. I think I made that transition from Doomsayer to ... wait, don't call me a New Ager. People will expect me to channel the intimate details of galactic races and dress in flowing robes and such, and I am so not a flowing robes kind of person. I'll do a sarong on the beach but that's the extent of it.

What do you think? No, really! What do you think?

And today I dreamed that Thor (as in the Norse god) was sick. He wanted a latte and for someone to call Poseidon for help. I felt sorry for him so I offered to do this. But I spilled the latte on the bus and couldn't figure out how to contact Poseidon. I mean, what do you do, call his cell phone? Go to the ocean and shout really loud? Catch a fish, give it a message, throw it back and wait? I tried, though. Poor old Thor.

Clear dreams on compassion

2010-06-22T20:06:00.000-07:00

Thank you, Dreams, for giving me some very clear messages about the future and compassion. It's so annoying when I have a powerful dream and I know it's important, but it makes no damn sense at all. But these two dreams are not only complimentary among themselves, but they form a second connection with the "Eclipse" dream.

Dream one: I am with a group of pioneers. We are not 18th-century American frontiersman, as the term is often used here, but instead current-day pioneers moving into a new dimension or a changed state of being. I'm not sure how many people there are, but it's under fifty and we all live in a large house, beautifully structured of wood and with many open spaces. The world around us is familiar physically, but new situations pop up we've never had to deal with before. Something has been stealing our people, changing them into malicious beings who look the same, then trying to sneak them back into our home. First we had to realize what was happening, then spend a lot of time trying to keep these people out. They would reappear directly in our home, but they'd sort of materialize slowly. If you could spot them materilizing, you could keep them behind some sort of forcefield wall. I don't really understand how that worked, but it was stressful and took a lot of effort, not to mention the grief people felt over losing someone.

But one day I realized how to deal with this more effectively, and it was just in time because the forcefield wasn't working anymore. I concentrated on the emerging malicious person and bombarded them with the purest, most blissful energy I could muster. I would also sing their name while encouraging the "good" old personality to come back. All this would really piss them off and they'd send a roiling black cloud of energy towards me, but my pure energy would dissapate it and the person would come back. I sang my Happy Song, too.

In the second dream, I was driving home from work as I normally do, only to find that one lane of the road was packed with children and their teachers walking out of town, I assume on a field trip. I meant to turn down another street but ended up not having enough time, so the car crawled alongside of the children as I nervously watched to make sure they didn't dart out in front of me. After a long scene of trying to get ahead of them and having to ride a malfunctioning bike through a marshy trail, I ended up at "my house." A teacher knocked on the door, asking if I was ready for the presentation to the children. Someone presented, and I'm not sure if it was me giving it (with a split consciousness) or another person. Regardless, I wandered to the back of the huge group of kids. A group of boys, probably 10 years old, were watching. There was one kid who was being an ass, and something about him (maybe something he said or the way he looked) suggested that he was a rich spoiled brat. I grew annoyed watching him pick on the other kids and started scolding him. He clearly wasn't intimidated so I shoved him against the wall. Again, it had no effect.

The obvious interpretation is that love and positive energy are the best ways to dispel negativity. Love worked, threats and violence did not. However, I see another meaning here about compassion. It was easy to send love to the malicious people in the first dream. It wasn't their fault that they'd been taken against their will and forced to become evil. But the kid in the second dream was just a privileged little monster ...

... really? Just that and nothing more? Perhaps he had no more control over what he had become than the people in the first dream did. Consider an innocent child who is raised by cruel parents, or somehow hurt unbearably. Perhaps he learns that if he is a bully and uses his social status, he can dull his pain. Is he any less deserving of compassion?

Theoretically, no. But I still wanted to grind his smirking face into the dirt. It's harder to be compassionate to bullies. And of course, you can have compassion for someone without taking any of their crap or ignoring their actions.

As I mentioned, this also has a connection with the Eclipse dream. I'll talk about that in my next post, since this is pretty long.

A strange dream: The Eclipse

2010-06-18T10:43:00.000-07:00

In the dream, we are in a building of perhaps 6 storeys. The building has many wings, some used, some not. My colleagues and I work there on a research project.

I know that soon a creature I am calling something like "Eclipse" will arrive and destroy people. If I go into a wing that isn't used, and take the stairs, I might escape notice. But I wait too long and I hear the footsteps of marching soldiers, the ones the Eclipse travels with. I race back to the door that will take me to the disused wings, but it's locked. I bang on the door, but no one opens it. I look over and see the Eclipse and its soldiers coming down the stairs. The Eclipse is a pale golden color mixed with white, and its spiky appendages form loops and whorls. I can't tell if it has feet or a head.

Too late. I'm stuck here.

To my colleagues' stunned surprise, the soldiers march into the room and pull out the wall where I'm standing, the one that had the door to freedom I couldn't get open. I see now: they are widening the room to make it a giant oven. They will release poisonous gasses in a moment. It wouldn't have mattered if I'd gotten in that room anyway.

Ah well. So I will die this time. Perhaps next time I will leave the building sooner.

***

In the second dream, I am in a building with colleagues again. One of them is my old boss from when I worked in the university Psychiatry Department. We don't seem to be working, though. Some of us are staying overnight in the building because it's not quite safe yet to go home. I remember a vivid dream I had about an entity called something like "Eclipse." I suspect that "Eclipse" isn't its real name, but that was the closest my brain could approximate. I look slowly around the room. Same size building. The floor, which had been black and white tiles, is similar but not identical. I know there are unused wings in this building, too.

"I had this dream," I explained to my coworker. I tell her the dream and she seems mildly interested but that's it. I wonder how long I have before the Eclipse comes here, and I wonder what part of the building it will arrive in. Should I leave now? But we are here for a reason--something is not safe yet outside.

As I ponder this, I find that I'm in the building's research library and a man is telling me about his wife, who has written a book about her channeled revelations. You have to learn a different language to understand them, but he says they're life changing. It's almost like he's doing an infomercial for her, and the stuff he's telling me is not new. "But that information is already published," I tell him. "That's the Pleiadian story." He looks puzzled, as though I've made a non sequitur.

Then the alarm goes off.

A couple interesting points:

a) I'm not really into the channeling of alien races, so it's odd that the Pleiadians came up. I wish I could recall exactly what he was talking about, but I only recall that at the time, I immediately recognized it as part of the Pleiadian story. He gave me the name of his wife, too, so that I could read her book. The man was middle-aged with dark hair, glasses and a beard streaked with white.

b) This dream had recurring themes: the wall opening up with marching (and in one past dream, choreographed dancing) people coming towards me. Another is the idea of having to make it through poisonous gas and knowing that I will re-do the whole scene until I don't die.

I wonder why the creature was called "Eclipse?" and that it was going to kill people? It was a very beautiful entity. Some people believe that our planet will soon be bombarded with sun spots that will do all sorts of troublesome things, like reverse magnetic poles and kill our electrical grid. Perhaps an eclipse is part of it, although I have never subscribed to the "OMG KILLER SUN!!" theory. The next solar eclipse is July 11, 2010.

How the past becomes the future ... in ways I did not anticipate

2010-06-16T21:24:00.000-07:00

A blogger friend has been writing about being "out" for who she is in terms of her spiritual inclinations and aspirations for the future. Her post was a little nudge from the Universe to gather thoughts that have whirled in my head for months now.

***

When people speak of spiritually-gifted children, understand that I was not what they're thinking of. No visions, no communications with nature spirits, no matter-of-fact predictions and drive to change the world for better. Instead, I was the kind of kid who would stare in the mirror and freak out because I didn't recognize myself. I'd write weird little existential poetry, read books on the human brain and its potential, and fall asleep watching a whirling white vortex in my third eye. Not so much a miniature earth mother as I was perhaps a budding intellectual mystic. I did not feel any deep devotion to nature or to the human race as a whole; I was more interested in the nature of reality. This tendency was exacerbated by my upbringing, which, though rural, did not include nature or frequent social interaction. Instead I spent long hours completely alone in my room, hating to come out even to eat.

These tendencies faded and were gradually replaced with less abstract inclinations.

I finally gained an appreciation for nature in my late teens when I discovered Wicca (a short-lived but important experience) and my birth father emerged to whisk me off on fishing trips. I had a transcendental experience with the moon, and I finally understood peace while sitting alone near a tree-shaded creek watching trout dart under the water. Nature was the one entity that I did not have to walk on eggshells around.

A few years later I had the strange compulsion to learn everything I could about living sustainably, and about survivalism. The magnitude of "everything I can learn" overwhelmed and stressed me, but I gained a basic understanding of survival techniques, gardening, water caching, primitive living skills, etc. This came out of nowhere; I still can't recall what prompted me to gather these acres of knowledge, and to share them online with people. But I no longer have the "learn NOW NOW NOW!" fearful compulsion, which felt like the intellectual version of bulimia. I no longer foresee a horrible disaster on the horizon, only a future in which the world turns to a more sustainable lifestyle out of necessity; I can now be at the forefront of the movement because of what I learned and what I continue to learn.

And in the past few years, I've learned to connect to the human race as a whole. I set that intent and as it so often happens, to reach that goal I have to shed other baggage. To feel connected to the race as a whole, I must first feel connected to the people around me, and feeling connected requires that I first feel comfortable in my own skin and not live in a hyper-aware defensive state, etc. It can take a really long time to reach a goal because to do so, I have to complete so many other steps first. Sometimes it seems like I'm not making progress, but that's only because there are many other steps I never anticipated when I made my original goal.

So another part of that happened recently. Previously I've been envious of those who have transcendent experiences in which they feel totally at one with the world. They feel connected to everyone they encounter, with the animals, with the natural landscape around them. And I've felt that! As I consciously learn to tune my brainwaves from high beta to lower alpha, I reach that meditative state in which even the tall skyscrapers around me become not symbols of evil corporate greed, but just beautiful towering constructions rising from the fog. Lovely state to be in. I understand the connected feeling now and every day I get better at consciously reaching it.

There's another side to that coin that doesn't feel as nice. Being connected to the human race means that you're also connected to the murderers, the rapists, the thieves and child abusers and nasty bitchy people and soul-crushing bureaucrats and insipid celebrities. All those things you hate and swear you are nothing like ... well, you are. It's part of the package. It's so difficult to feel compassion for them. The man shouting at his children and hitting them is not evil; he's scared and hurt and lashing out in a misguided attempt to ease the unbearable pressure of a life he hates, and he has never had the good fortune of understanding that he doesn't have to just react to the bad things in life and that he has control. You think you've never done that? Sure you did. You just didn't smack a kid when you lashed out in pain. Instead you purposefully verbally wounded someone you were supposed to love. You got drunk and picked a fight. You created an elaborate fantasy in your head about getting violent revenge, poisoning your own psyche with it. You tore down a defenseless person or scarred someone for life with a cruel word.

And the hardest part is this: can you feel compassion for yourself? When you hate, when you want to hurt someone, when you do something selfish and wrong and small-minded? Hey Universe ... how about making that a little easier?

***

So for the past ten years, I've had this assumption that one day I'd move to a lovely remote area and live sustainably in some fashion, though I have done enough research that I'm cured of any romantic delusions. I was looking forward to quiet, peace, and no stupid social bullshit to wade through. In short, solitude, with only a few beloved people in my life.

And the universe recently said, "Yeah that's nice ... but no. You're moving to a very big city with lots of people! You're going to chuck most of what you own and leave behind this comfortable life in this town that you love. You're going to learn to love these hordes of people, you're going to learn how you fit into humanity, and you're going to create amazing things in collaboration with the other souls in this world. And then ... then you can move to your off-grid cabin in the woods, but you will no longer be isolated and so you can do more good."

Can I just say that this is terribly frightening? And that I'm also so very excited?

Optical Illusions and Waking Dreams of Things in the Sky

2010-06-01T20:45:00.001-07:00

Let it be known that if one dies of Cute Overload in a dream of playing with seven baby pandas, one does not actually die in the waking world. I proved that to myself this week.

(They were adorable baby pandas.)

Anyway ...

I was reading this fun site called "Get High Now" about optical and audio illusions/hallucinations. I recently had the chance to experience a natural optical illusion. D and I were lying on a big rock in the foothills, chilling out and looking into the cloudless sky. We heard buzzing and then a hummingbird the size of my foot hovered over our heads. We both exclaimed over this apparently mammoth hummingbird. But as we sat up and watched it descend, then ascend over a group of rocks, the hummingbird appeared normal-sized.

When we had been reclining, we were angled so that nothing was in our visual field but the clear blue sky. There were no clouds, color variations, or other features in our line of sight; we might as well have been staring at a blank blue screen. When the hummingbird hovered over us, our brains had no point of reference to compare it to and nothing to judge its size against, so it guessed. Incorrectly.

It's fascinating, isn't it? Our brains can make the same errors at the same time. That's why seeing isn't believing, and why I always question reports of Thunderbirds and other giant avians: it's incredibly easy to misjudge size. I'm not saying all Big Bird sightings are bunk, just that we have to be careful not to make assumptions that our vision is infallible. Certainly, eagles have been reported to carry off children (whether this is true is debatable, but there are many documented reports of it happening). And some reports of giant birds (sometimes called Thunderbirds among cryptozoologists) are undeniably compelling, like this report on CNN of Alaskan scientists who saw giant birds in 2002.

I admit it, though: I'm disappointed that I didn't see a giant mutant hummingbird. Come on, Nature. Let's get creative here. You'll make a giant squid but not a giant hummingbird?

Symbolically speaking, this event shook me up a bit. I have so many dreams of huge, shockingly abnormal things in the sky. Often they're beautiful things, including, once, a huge mechanical macaw, and they make me stop what I'm doing and shout, "Look, look at that! It's so amazing!" (or occasionally run in terror, but no less in awe)What does it mean that it happened to me in the waking world, even if it was an optical illusion? I don't have an answer for that yet.

Just Resting

2010-05-26T20:02:00.000-07:00

In my dream, the endless requests wouldn't stop. People everywhere wanting this and that, requiring things from me and making demands. My friend Sage was with me, feeling similarly overwhelmed.

And then a genie--of sorts--appeared. He looked like a little fat man with dark hair and olive skin, but his appearance also seemed like an illusion. I don't think he had a physical form, really, and was only wearing the form because I expected to relate to entities with forms.

He asked me what I wanted, because he would give it to me.

I told him that there was a clear mountain stream above us in a green meadow. "I want a little cabin there," I told him, "where no one can find us. Where we can be safe. Where we can rest."

The genie nodded and I was stumbling into the small, bare wooden room. I collapsed on the floor and fell to sleep, vaguely aware that Sage had already fallen deep asleep. I knew that this was a like a little pocket of reality that no one else could ever get to. As I faded out, I heard the genie say, "Are you sure you don't want more? Should we revise this?"

And I thought about it for a moment. Yes, perhaps some other things, too, now that he mentioned it ... but no, I just wanted to rest.

***

I suppose it's telling that when given the opportunity to have anything, I chose deep, uninterrupted rest and solitude. That's the thing about chronic illness. It keeps you from resting properly and because of that, any genius you may have is hobbled. It's an interesting form of Maslow's Pyramid.

(I checked: the etymology of genius and genie are related)

***

It's an ethereally beautiful late spring evening here. Nearly full moon hanging golden in the sky, covered by cloud wisps. The scent of rain, which fell Colorado-style (a wild twenty-minute torrent) an hour ago. My cats sleeping lazily in their baskets by the screen door, the perfume of lilacs drifting in, and Neil Gaiman's beautiful book, "Stardust" on the table. There's an empty spot in the room. My piano used to live there, and now I've returned it to my mother in preparation for an upcoming move where I can't take it. I feel vaguely naked without it.

Ordinarily, I'd feel obligated to be productive but right now I guess I'm just ... resting. When I go to bed at night, I've been putting myself back in that tiny cabin by the stream. It helps me sleep.

Die, Nemesis Dreams, Die!

2010-05-13T19:10:00.000-07:00

I'm doing a bit of experimentation with various meditation styles and their effects on my dreams. So far, meditation does seem to influence how well I can recall my dreams. I'll write more later.

Interesting dream events include a big increase in “things in the sky” dreams and “animals watching me” dreams. My favorite one of those was when I looked out on the neighbor's snowy roof and saw a monkey sitting there quietly, watching me. Extraterrestrial enthusiast Whitley Strieber claims that in such dreams, the animals are actually aliens and the dream is a cover-up of an alien encounter. Well, looking's free, ain't it?

I have a particular kind of recurring dream that I call a Nemesis dream. It's not usually about a person, but a concept that has been following me around for ages. These annoying dreams emphasize how I haven't gotten past a limiting belief. Dreams are so unforgivingly accurate in that respect, aren't they? I can posture all I want about how enlightened I've become, but if I'm secretly obsessing about whether people accept me, my dreams are going to let me know. Dreams don't sugar coat. Quite the opposite, really.

Nemesis One: Driving Dad's Truck. When I was a kid, my stepdad's behemoth truck was his baby. He went to ridiculous efforts to keep it shiny and perfect. And then was I was 14, he made me learn to drive in this manicured monster. Our rural gravel roads rang with shouts of “Slow down! You're going off the road! You're going to chip the paint on the truck!” Fun times. And ever since then, I've had unpleasant dreams about driving that truck. I'm in the driver's seat but can't see the road. I'm going too fast. I'm going to crash but I can't gain control of the truck.

I'll spare you the psychoanalysis, but that truck represents everything about my relationship with my stepfather. Don't mess up the facade everyone sees. Do what I tell you, even though you're never going to do it well enough to please me and I'm setting you up for failure with my impossible expectations.

I've had several dreams lately in which I was driving that truck with ease. In one, I jumped in it for a quick road trip to the West Coast. I was fiddling with the radio, driving carefree and without concern. In another, it was my nephew who had to drive the truck, which was now out of my life and not my concern. Could this mean that my mind has finally moved past those childhood issues of familial control and self-worth?

Nemesis Two: My #@$*ing Closet. This is possibly my most annoying dream trap ever. All my friends and family are waiting for me as I frantically go through my closet trying to find something to wear. The closet is bursting with clothes, but they're all inappropriate for the event, ill-fitting, or hideous (Flourescent orange jumpsuit? Please.) I try on outfit after outfit, knowing that I'm holding everyone up. Clothes pile up around me, and finally I dash out the door in some ridiculous getup. And if I even pass a closet later on during the dream, the whole dreadful scene restarts.

How embarrassing. I mean, THAT dream doesn't have to do with altering one's identity to please others. No, certainly not.

But recently I've had great dreams of a closet full of gorgeous clothes that I love. My only problem is figuring out exactly which combination I prefer. In another dream, someone stole my clothes and replaced them with a teenage girl's wardrobe, which only made me laugh. (Haha! Back in my day, we ripped our own clothes!) Maybe I'm finally putting aside that need to contort myself to please others-- that endless, impossible task that no one truly appreciates-- and focusing instead on the image that truly represents who I am inside.

Nemesis Three: School, Redux. I know I'm not alone in having this dream. I find myself going back to school. I can't believe I haven't studied for that stats exam! I don't even remember the last time I went to class—I've been so negligent. I don't even recall where my locker is and I wonder if my stuff is still in there, or if they've thrown it all away. Sometimes I think, “Isn't this a little weird? I mean, didn't I get my diploma years ago?” but then I get distracted and go back to being lost and contrite.

In a dream a few nights ago, my best friend from high school and I were back in school. All the usual stuff was happening, but I kept wondering why I was there. Finally my friend (the smartest girl in school) said, “Are you here because they told you that your degree was worthless, too? And that you had to go back to get a new degree?”

I nodded.

“I don't think it's true,” she said, and got up to dance in the cafeteria. And in that moment, I knew she was right. Yes, they said I wasn't good enough as is. Yes, they said I needed to be retrained. And they were wrong. It was bullshit.

And I like to think that I'm shedding that “never good enough, never smart enough” mentality that has plagued me since childhood. Maybe. Keep it up, dreams.

I'm going to redesign this blog soon. The plain black is not quite right anymore. (fine, fine, revoke my goth card)

Heart Chakra Song

2010-05-04T21:21:00.000-07:00

I dreamed that whenever I tapped on my heart chakra, a beautiful song would play. It sounded like bells and the song was always the same. And, typically, I was just lucid enough that I kept trying to record it with my cell phone so that I'd have proof. It didn't work very well.

I'm experimenting right now with the effect of different kinds of meditations on my dreams. Will write more about that later!

And can I just brag about my new me-friendly culinary creation? It has none of my allergens and problem foods and it was so delicious.

1 portabello mushroom cap
chopped crap and shrimp
avocado
green salsa or chili
chopped tomato
chopped cilantro
black olives
ghee
coconut milk (So Delicious refrigerated is the best)
garlic
salt

Saute garlic with coconut milk, ghee and salt.
Add seafood, saute until somewhat done.
Put mushroom cap on baking pan and add the seafood mixture to the top.
Mash the avocado and spread over the seafood.
Spoon the salsa over the avocado.
Top with black olives, tomatoes, and cilantro.

Bake. Serves one.

Sorry I'm not so good at precise amounts and such. I don't usually cook via recipe. I am very happy that I got something that would fulfill my seafood enchilada cravings without making me sick.

Altering reality. Magic. Surfing synchronicities. Reality shifts.

2010-04-12T20:19:00.000-07:00

Lately I’ve been thinking about altering reality. Magic. Surfing synchronicities. Reality shifts. Etc. Crazy how many names and euphemisms it has, and all the different rituals people use to bring about the mental state necessary to make the desired change in their reality. I’ve always rebelled against rituals. I don’t disrespect them, but they don’t resonate with me. If the unseen and creative world is a beach, I feel like the kid on the beach who isn’t interested in building beautiful elaborate sand sculptures, but instead studiously examines grains of sand trying to figure out exactly what sand is composed of at its most basic level. And then I give up and watch the other kids build their fantastic constructions. After awhile, I make some small, cool structure … and then fall asleep, exhausted, because I’ve been building grain by grain.

There’s a difference in synchronicity that I’ve been pondering. There’s creating reality in an active way, like saying, “I am going to record my own CD and tour the country!” You gather your internal resources to create this. Most of it comes through practical action combined with a positive attitude. You take some singing classes. You purposefully network with people in the music industry. You save money to record and support yourself with while traveling. Or if you’re young and hot, you move to Los Angeles, buy tight clothing and sleep with the right people. Using those inner resources gets you to your goal. Making this achievement of your goal into the realization of your dream requires another kind of inner power. You might tour the country and end up shivering in some skeevy New York motel where cockroaches run across your face (ala Christine Kane), but hey, you released a CD and toured the country, right? Woo-hoo! … right? No. Not until you’re living the life you dreamed of when you made your goal. The “magic” part comes with inviting in the synchronicities that make a circumstance blossom into the original desire, not just in the general vicinity of it. These are synchronicities you call for. This is when a chaos magician, for instance, releases a sigil. This is when people start saying specific affirmations while under self-hypnosis. This is when people make requests to spirits and deities.

But there’s another kind of synchronistic magic that’s been knocking my head around lately. It has to do with recognizing the potential for something and figuring out what that something is. This usually happens to me in a quiet wooded area on a mountain trail, or in a deafeningly loud club with hypnotic strobe lights and pounding electronic music. The awareness sneaks up on me. I feel a tingling in my head, my hands, my face. Chakras get up and shake and everything shines for a moment. And I realize: here is a potential for something. I have the ability, right now, to focus this moment in a way that will benefit me if I can pick up the thread of what is trying to manifest. But “trying to manifest” is the wrong word because this energy has no desire. It’s like sitting at a crossroad and you could turn right or left. The crossroad doesn’t care which direction you pick, but if you go left you go to Sedona, Arizona and meet some alien space brother channeller, and if you go right you travel through the Navajo Nation and get stuck behind a traveling circus (true story). And maybe while you’re stuck behind the slow-moving caravan and its enormous clown-head, you see the most beautiful sunset that inspires you to a great spiritual realization that will change your life forever. And if you go to the alien channeller in Sedona, you’ll slip on your way out, break your leg, and be stuck in bed for a month in which you have nothing to do but read, and you read a book that gives you the knowledge to propel yourself through your career at astonishing speed.

The last time this happened to me, I picked out the thread and got what I wanted immediately. And it was so profound that I still have trouble grasping what happened.

But if—as is usually the case-- you aren’t paying attention to the tingling in your face and the tapping on your brow and the shiver at the base of your skull, you don’t notice the potential for something beneficial and you keep going straight and end up in a border town where a street vendor chases you through the market trying to sell you a hookah. You go back home and think, “That trip to Arizona was totally worthless.”

It didn’t have to be worthless. You could have been still and listened with your soul.

So that type of magic is different. You’re not trying to create anything—you’re just recognizing what’s already there, and then giving it enough of your energy to help it come through. And “giving it energy” is a nebulous concept I can’t even begin to explain here.

Potential keeps tapping me on the shoulder and I feel it, but I don’t always know what it wants. This is frustrating. It’s hard to maintain that state of mindful awareness necessary to be aware of it. But I recognize that right now in my life, this is the only kind of magic that's going to get me anywhere. The listening kind of magic, you know.

***

I spent all afternoon hula-hooping by the creek yesterday, and I have the nastiest bruise on my hip due to my obnoxiously delicate skin. But it was worth it. I cannot tell you how elated Spring makes me. As I grow older, time seems to go so fast that I’m surprised by the change in seasons. The harshness of winter seems like an undeserved punishment, but subsequently, the flowering Spring feels like a glorious gift that I’m constantly grateful for.

Why do we dream about people from childhood, after forgetting about them for years?

2010-03-09T19:15:00.000-08:00

When I was five years old, my first nemesis appeared. His name was Jason. He was a year older than me and he lived across the street. On my first day of kindergarten, he pushed me into the brick wall and said, "Kindergarteners have to pay first graders a dollar to get into school!" This sounded like total bullshit to me. I pushed him back and shouted at him--in kindergarten terms--to go to hell and leave me alone. I told my big sister, who was a high school student, about it that evening. The next day, she marched up to Jason, shoved him against the same brick wall, and told him to leave me alone or she'd beat him up. I won! Maybe he was bigger than me, but I knew how to enlist help.

Three years later, my best friend Jenny and I were playing in the backyard. Suddenly my mother flew out of the door and started screeching at the bushes. Jason and his two friends emerged. They had a slingshot and had been aiming at Jenny's head. She grabbed Jason by the ear (oh, she was good at that!) and dragged him home. He got in trouble for trying to kill Jenny. So much trouble, in fact, that Jason and his thuggish pals never let me forget it. All throughout middle school, they never shut up about my bitchy mom. My mom, the bitch, trying to keep little girls from being murdered. Hey, David killed Goliath with a slingshot.

When I was fifteen years old, I learned to play bass guitar, quietly and hesitantly, in the school jazz band. To my surprise Jason had been learning six-string guitar. Somehow he had transformed from a mean little brat into a friendly, pleasant guy. Even though he was the kind of guy I didn't normally get along with (football player, popular, etc), and we never became close friends, we talked about guitars and music whenever we ran into each other. When I graduated school, Jason's bullying was a humorous memory of the past.

So I'm puzzled by two recent dreams I've had about him that share the same theme. I always wonder why certain people from the past show up in my dreams, and what message they are trying to give me.

In the first dream, I was at high-school reunion. I met old friends and was so happy to reconnect, walking arm-in-arm and catching up. Later, we were watching a movie and an argument broke out between some girls, the kind of girls who thought their shit didn't stink. I thought, "Wow, it's still like high school here" and remembered that dreadful feeling of wondering what stupid drama was arising and whether or not someone would try to pull me into it. Girls! They can be so mean to each other.

Some of the jocks put a geeky boy into a glass coffin and kicked it around the room while the kid inside shouted in fear. Jason came in and seemed angry at them for doing it, and stalked out. The instigator leaned back over the coffin and muttered under his breath that Jason would come back. He said a phrase, which I can't remember, that he knew Jason would say in just a few moments. He knew Jason very well and bragged that he could predict his behavior and could convince him to do bad things, such as tormenting this geeky boy. There was an odd visual of the instigator learning back over the coffin, which was now covered with money, and even the boy inside was waiting breathlessly to see if Jason would return. Sure enough, Jason came in did exactly that. He still didn't approve, but he had convinced himself that there was a good reason to rough up this kid.

Jason's girlfriend was pleased about this, but I wasn't. I didn't say anything but somehow Jason knew. He came over and asked me to help him adjust some setting on his football gear. Then he said, "Do you still hate me?" Part of me was still a kid and feeling shy and happy that "the cool popular boy" paid attention to me, and that, of course, is what he wanted me to feel. If I didn't hate him, he would feel better about his actions. It was like I was his conscience. In response to his question, I said, "I don't know." The adult part of me was thinking, "He wants my approval. Why?"

In the second dream, Jason had control over several hundred people. He seemed like their cult leader. I was new, probably just visiting. But he noticed me. He arranged to have someone tell me that he wrote about me in his diary, and if I would join them, he would let me see what he wrote about me. I knew he shared this purposefully and was trying to manipulate me. The number 173 was associated, like page 173 or 173 words or something. And I got the impression that it was true--he really had written about me. I did want to see it, but not enough to join a damned cult.
***

If I had had this dream in high school, I could have made instant sense of it. This dream would have been about cutting through artificial social barriers instead of letting the social scene manipulate you into being someone that you aren't.

What I can't figure out is Why Now? I haven't thought about Jason in a long time and I can't think of any similar situations in my present life, yet now I've had two simlarly-themed dreams about him in one week's time. When you dream about people from the past, what triggers it?

Big dumb hunk of meat ... speaks

2010-03-09T18:13:00.000-08:00

In my meditation, I wanted to focus on the relationship ... well, I struggled with the wording. I want to get rid of chronic body tension, which is causing many of my problems. I've been having a little success with biofeedback, but it feels like a monster of a thing to overcome. The instant I stop thinking "Relax your muscles," they tighten again. In a way, this is a lot like mindfulness. It's discouraging at first, because the instant you take your focus off being mindful, you go back to your inane mental chatter. Then half an hour later, you realize that you forgot ... again.

So the archmed was a big square wall of muscle. I did all the things I could think of: healing light, energetic clearing, whatever. Nothing happened. I complained about it to my guide and said, "It's like this big hunk of meat that won't cooperate and I feel no connection to and ... oh."

Oh. Yeah. That's sort of how I feel about my body in general, isn't it? Big cumbersome hunk of meat getting in the way of my goals, something I'm stuck with. My guide suggested that part of the reason it was always weak and problematic is because my very definition of the body includes those words. Like in my own mental dictionary, the entry for "physical body" would read, "Worthless, poorly-designed piece of junk that the soul is stuck with, weak, unprotected, and constantly breaking down." When I look at it that way, it's no wonder I have issues. And although typically those NAGs (New Age Gurus--NAG, NAG, NAG in my mind all the time!) advise, "You must love your body, my child," this concept has never resonated with me. I don't doubt the wisdom, but I can say, "I love you, body" until my lips stop working, and nothing happens.

So instead, this big hunk of muscle starts talking to ME. I am hazy on exactly what it said (how annoying that this always happens), but it is a section of muscle in my lower abdomen, one that hurts sometimes and I usually ignore it (because if I paid attention to every ache and pain, I'd never get out of bed). Its "personality" reminded me of a big slow football player who used to carry my amp for me when I was in high school. Sweet guy, very kind, not exactly bright. But it had goals and desires. It was not inanimate, dumb, or worthless.

I wondered how I was supposed to integrate this archetype into me, and my guide was like, "well ... I suppose you could, you know, integrate it into your body." Felt a bit silly when he said that. Of course! So I did, and I had a vague impression of telling it to be a spokesperson for its area, and to get my guide to translate for it so that I could understand. Tell me what you need and all that.
-------------

Looking into qigong classes again. I really miss qigong.

Exhaustion

2010-02-22T14:21:00.000-08:00

Is it funny that I sat down to do an archmed on "Exhaustion" and ended up falling asleep? No? How about maddening instead? Next time, perhaps I should slam a Red Bull and a quadruple-shot latte prior to attempting this meditation.

Life is calming down a bit --might be able to make some more posts here soon.

Energetic Re-uptake of Negative or Stupid Daydreams

2009-12-28T21:19:00.000-08:00

Something the last post made me think of:

Somewhere on MyPsiche's blog is a post about how negative daydreams suck up an incredible amount of time and mental energy. What a horrible and pervasive habit! I'm a writer, so my brain loves to make up stories at any excuse. In addition, my childhood circumstances meant that I was always trying to figure out what would set off my crazy stepdad, so I learned to always look for potential problems and then find an excuse or escape.

So these days, a simple thought like "That was a sad news article about the guy who was a victim of gang violence. Man, if that happened to me, I'd be all like ..." grows to ridiculous proportions and before you know it, I'm defending myself against an imagined danger that doesn't exist and likely never will. And worse, then I find some fault in the scenario and imagine how so-and-so would disapprove. But the worst part of all this is that I typically have no idea that it's happening at all until after I've finished! It' sucking up my energy, producing stress hormones, causing physical tension, and occupying my mind.

I've been experimenting with projecting the energy of a negative daydream out in front of me (another technique I picked up from MyPsiche). By consciously becoming present in the moment, I often get a rush of wonderful energy that can burn through the negative daydream/memory and leave me with clean, free energy to reabsorb. And the more I do this, the easier it is to stop the negative daydreams before they start, leaving me with more energy to focus on the things that matter.

I'm not perfect at this, but I'm getting much better.

Kindness to Oneself

2009-12-28T20:03:00.000-08:00

I'm suffering from a horrendous cold right now. In a meditation today, I was frustrated with the coughing and congestion and said "What the hell is the problem, body? Why can't you get well?"

My body replied in vivid color. Have you ever had a job where the boss was impatient with you because you fell behind? It's the busy season, customer call volume has doubled, Enormous Report X is due to the Federal government next week, the new admin sucks and can't do anything you ask for, etc. They dare imply that you're slacking when you're actually working 12 hour days with no overtime pay, and all you want to do is curl up under your fuzziest blanket and cry for a couple of weeks.

My body told me exactly that. In short *I* am the Asshole Boss. I am impatient with my body because I perceive it as being weak, but in reality, it's incredibly strong and holding up under an amazing amount of strain. And every cell in my body wants to curl up and rest for awhile, and instead it gets no rest and works, works, works to fight off unknown invaders and trying to heal damage.

I have to work on this more. What would I have wanted my Asshole Boss to have done instead of criticize me? I would have wanted him/her to say "What do you need? What can I give you to help get the job done?" I give my body what I think it needs, but nothing I've done has helped. Perhaps what I think it needs isn't right.

*****

I've just transitioned to a paperless home office, scanning in 90% of my documents, and photos and tossing the rest in favor of more closet space. In the process, I opened boxes of high school mementos, childhood scrapbooks, college photo albums, and bad teen poetry. I did not have a happy youth, and my identity is somewhat structured around the Bad Things That Happened. Those old people, places, and things had become archetypes in my mind, polluting my dreams and insidiously directing me on how to feel, think, and act. I've been trying to ditch that mindset for awhile. As I sorted through these old boxes, I realized a few things:

a) Now-Me has zero connection to Then-Me and the places, people and things in those boxes. Most of them do not even exist anymore. I have a photo and a few memories of someone, but all I have to do is look at her Facebook profile and realize that she's a completely different person. It's like someone else lived those events and I just happen to have it on video.

b) I remember things incorrectly. I thought so-and-so wasn't a friend, but then I found old letters talking about how we did things together. I thought I wrote a story that ended up one way, but when I read it, I realized my memory mixed several stories into one. I thought John didn't like me, but found 12 hilarious love letters from him (He called me Sweetcheeks, and spelled it something like "Sweatcheks"). If memory is fallible, and memory is all that remains of those times, then how do I know that anything happened the way I thought it did? The person I remember being may not have existed at all.

So much of my identity has hinged on an unpleasant conglomeration of memories, yet those memories were irrelevant and sometimes plain wrong. I think that by going through those old boxes and then finally dumping it all in the trash/recycling, I finally got past that madness.

Snippet of Vivid ... something?

2009-12-16T22:03:00.000-08:00

Before I forget: what an odd little snippet. I was falling asleep in the car as Dave drove and as I drifted off, I asked my body, "Why are you always so tired? What do you need?" And suddenly I was telling a bunch of people this:

Sometimes you can ask certain entities for energy. Never take it for granted when they give you energy, because this means that they believe that you are worth the expenditure.

And just as I realized that the people I spoke to were actually ME somehow, I saw the most brilliant flash of crystalline flower-like things. It was really one of those not-a-dream-what-the-heck-is-this moments. I have seen such things before and don't know what they are. They're certainly beautiful. I might assume that they are "the entities" but that isn't saying much about them.

Dreams, memory, and ciphers

2009-11-30T20:02:00.000-08:00

In my dream last night, I was in a disappointingly ordinary "Museum of Curios." I picked up a supposedly mysterious codex, which was nothing short of boring. Instead, I turned to a little boy and described in great detail the Voynich Manuscript. Because I'm lazy, I'll quote the wikipedia article on the Voynich Manuscript here:

The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious, undeciphered illustrated book. It is thought to have been written in the 15th or 16th century. The author, script, and language of the manuscript remain unknown. Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame (all of whom failed to decrypt any portion of the text).

Another odd bit of information that surfaced in my dreams. It reminded me of another uncrackable cipher, although one that is an open fabrication, called The Codex Seraphinianus. The illustrations in the Codex are incredibly weird and beautiful. Two of my favorites are below.

Both books are interesting to read about. Someday I'll get the Codex, though I'll probably never get to see the Voynich manuscript. Ah, dreams: making sure that my notoriously bad long-term memory doesn't completely swallow the interesting tidbits of life.

Translating dreams from symbol to reality... or not.

2009-11-19T20:27:00.001-08:00

Occasionally my dream symbols are very clear. Dreams of open doors and windows, particularly when insects are coming in, predict illnesses like colds. I need to start paying closer attention. If I had, I wouldn't have this obnoxious ICK right now.

Dreams of blocked streams and rivers usually signify an energy blockage somewhere, though I haven't been able to figure out any reliable indicator of the blockage's location.

But the pain dreams stump me. I've been told that feeling pain in dreams is uncommon, but it happens to me regularly. Last night I dreamed that I walked into a McDonald's (I should have known it was a dream then, since McDonald's is not food to me). As I waited in line to order my quarter-pounder with cheese (!!) I was enveloped in a brilliant light that shot searing pain into my lower legs. I looked down and couldn't see them, as they'd been engulfed in a field of "radioactivity." I stepped away and the pain stopped. I wasn't sure if I would be hurt in the long term. Radioactive light, great.

A couple things puzzle me about this dream. One is the pain; I can't correlate the dream pain to any physical malady, and the lower leg isn't one of my trouble spots.

Second, the light. THE light. Maybe you know what I mean. Trying to describe it is useless, so I'll just say that it's the kind of light where God, if you were to believe in God, lives. It's the most calming, healing presence I know of. The bad thing is that sometimes healing means death (yes, in waking life). And sometimes not. Hurray for clarity.

And third, the "radioactivity." If I'm going to dream about burning, then why not dream of fire? What's the deal with radioactivity? D made me laugh by saying, "Well, isn't McDonald's kinda like a toxic waste dump?"

Anyway, dream symbols. Interesting how they can subtly alert you to impending events. I wish I was better at translating.

Sea creatures forced into new gravity

2009-10-07T21:32:00.000-07:00

Today I had a dream that changed my perception of illness.

The first dream involved a healer. I was at an alternative healing practice, something common like a nutritionist or chiropractor. The waiting room was busy, and a young blond woman waiting mentioned a name. "Who is that?" I asked. "That's our witch," she replied. My name was called and I went to the counter. It was the witch, a Greek man from Englewood (nearby city). I asked what he charged and it was very reasonable, so I said I'd like to work with him. We went down the hall to his office but he had me stop outside. There was a small iron object on a stool in a corner, and he wanted me to focus on the source of my illness (mental or energetic, I think) and transfer it to the iron object.

Then later, this dream: I walked upstairs and outside and encountered a very strange thing. It looked like a cross between a huge orifice and an eye, very Lovecraftian. It was partially visible through an open door. It wanted to talk to me. I felt more disgust than fear, so I said, "I'm not going to talk to you when you look like that!" I watched it try to become several different things, like a snake and a dog. I think it settled on a dog. A vision and a sentence came to me. The sentence was saying that some creatures of the deep know when they've reached the top of the water because then gravity as they know it ceases to work. The image accompanied was of long stringy sea creatures floating on the water, rising gently to the top. When they broke the surface, they were no longer supported by the water and they flopped over, no longer straight and weightless. I understood that this was an unwelcome shock to them.

I think this is what happened. The Lovecraftian thing was my illness in an energetic sense. It was showing me that it and its kind—the things that my people view as pathogens or invaders—don't necessarily want to be involved with us. From their perspective, they're minding their own business and peacefully floating along when suddenly they're propelled into a harsh, heavy world. That world is my body and its gravity.

It made me think of when a bird gets into a building. It flies around frantically trying to get back outside, banging into the windows, etc. It doesn't realize that it needs to go back out the door where it came in. It's not sure where it came in. It can't even comprehend the concept of a door. So a human has to get a broom and shoo it back out. Or think about the wasp on your window or sliding glass door. You carefully open up the window so it can fly back out, but it doesn't budge. It just doesn't get it. You have to nudge it. It could sting you in its fear. The bird could claw you. It hurts you, but it doesn't mean to. It doesn't even comprehend that you are a living being.

The point is that the entities that cause illness on an energetic level might not be anything more than poor creatures swimming into an unfamiliar world. All our language about illness revolves around violence. We “fight” it or direct anger towards it. Even new-age guided meditations involve things like using your flaming sword to kill pathogens and such. And I think this is appropriate at times. But perhaps sometimes we need to show it the way out instead.

As for the iron aspect to my dream, I wonder if it has something to do with alignment and conductivity. It could also be referring to dietary iron, which I've been deficient in before, I suppose.

Snipping, and Obnoxious yet Cool Dream Skills

2009-09-09T18:27:00.001-07:00

(Holler if you're seeing this via RSS. I think my feed might not work anymore)

On Labor Day, I headed out to my favorite trail in the foothills. I found a secluded rock and stretched out under the Ponderosa pines, watching the cirrus clouds drift along the blue sky. I did what I call a "snipping meditation" and am much improved for it.

The snipping meditation was the first adult meditation I developed (I'll write about my childhood meditations some day). I was experimenting with Robert Bruce's New Energy Ways and developing my energetic senses. I closed my eyes and sort of ... cast my awareness around my body. I noticed thick cable-like structures leaving my body. I worked these cables with my mental hands, making one thin (think of a kid stretching out bubble gum). At the thinnest point, I snipped it. I didn't have amazing Astral Gold Scissors or anything ("Fear my Mighty Scissors of Flame!"). Just ... snip.

And invariably, that part of the body relaxes when I snip the cable. I don't even know it's tense, but it relaxes instantaneously, along with other areas nearby. I mean, who has a tense ear? I do, apparently.

This is hugely beneficial because, as Serge Kahili King says, you can't be angry when all your muscles are completely relaxed.

While "snipping" on the rock, I noticed several points that are almost always tense. I wonder if it's this way for everyone, or if these are my personal cranky points?
-Just above inner eyebrows
-to either side of the nostrils
-chin, about where the frenulum ends inside your mouth
-solar plexus
-navel chakra

Now if I could only keep it relaxed for more than 5 minutes.

------------------

And for the sake of updating, here's an amusing dream I had.

I was having a dream in which annoying people were pursuing me. It sucked! They were everywhere, always whining and harping on about something. I was really sick of it. My displeasure propelled me into a protective place. I knew it was wholly my own mental creation where I could be protected from intruders. If someone wanted to communicate, their message appeared in the sky like airplane writing and I could ignore it if I chose. It was lovely. The colors were bright and beautiful. The grass was scrubby and brown, though, so I said, "Make it more lush!" and immediately a spray of water shot at me. I gasped and laughed. My dream was going to water the grass to obey my command.

Sky writing appeared. It said something along the lines of "Being in this place is good for the reasons you mentioned, but there's one important thing you haven't considered. Can we talk?"

And I thought, sure, why not? A figure in a hooded robe appeared and pushed back his hood. I saw a young man, early twenties, with painfully short hair and bright eyes, and an otherwise ordinary face. He was about to tell me this important thing when ....

HACK HACK HACK

Kitty puked on the floor next to the bed, and I'm awake. Fabulous. Thanks, cat. Who cares about grand secrets when there are hairballs to expel?

----------

Other annoying dream things:
1. I dreamed I was stressing out about what to wear to a party. I stood in front of a closet filled with clothes I didn't like, and my friends grew impatient as I held things up. I became lucid and with this lovely gift of lucidity, I decided to turn back time so that I could spend MORE time standing in front of the dream-closet fretting about what to wear. Brilliant! I love low-level lucidity.

2. I had increasing dreams about an ex-friend. An hour after I comment about this weird increase of dreams, I ran into him. I don't want to see Ex-Friend! I'm not sure what to do with this type of precog dream. If I were to take the dream as a warning, what good would it do? I'm not going to stay in the house forever. So ... meh.

I should be nicer to my dreams. I do appreciate the lucidity and the precog stuff. I just need to develop more finesse in handling them!

A forest

2009-07-29T09:59:00.001-07:00

A few people nudged me, wondering if I'm still alive. Yes, barely.
I've been ill and my meditation time has been automatically --and
against my will!-- morphing into sleep.

People always say that development is cyclical, and I suppose
spiritual development is no different. Sometimes the world infuses
you with ceaseless wonders, fountains of energy, prophetic dreams and
unclassifiable experiences, as my life was five years ago. The pump is
primed, and then the world lets go, allowing you to build your life
with new knowledge. The wild energetic surges slow in favor of
practical tasks. Your challenge is to balance between both extremes,
pursuing what you lack and stepping away from that which consumes too
much of you.

I've taken a few years to figure out my personal balance. The good
news is that despite how physically awful I feel right now, my plans
are in motion and I have a timeline. My major shift and balancing act
involves recognizing my physical limitations, no matter how stupid and
unfair they are, and respecting them. Working around them. Doing
what I must so that they don't run my life anymore while still
creating the life I want.

So ...

For the past four years, I had a mental landscape: a sanctuary of
house, gardens, guides, etc. It had rooms for different things like
healing, study, meditation, and figures who could help me. There was
even a dungeon crammed with crap from my unconscious mind that needed
to be healed or released. I went to this comforting and beautiful
place frequently.

Several months ago, I stood outside the sanctuary with a new
...archetype? Some kind of mental figure. I watched the whole
landscape fade away in a patch of moonlight. I had no sense of why it
disappeared, only that it was futile to rebuild. It was done.

After awhile, PJ posted about reality meds and I decided to try it. I
wanted to bring myself --not work, not household tasks, not health or
appearance or what anyone else wanted from me-- back into the focus of
my life. It wasn't a quick little meditation as I expected, probably
because it was such a major shift in my relationship to being alive.
I felt compelled to "feed it" daily without imposing my original goal
on it. I just gave it my energy, and slowly this tiny patch of
geometric shapes grew into a garden-like thing. The more energy I
gave it, the taller it grew. One day I noticed that it became a
forest. A few weeks later I was IN the forest. It loomed all around
me as I meditated in a very real, physical way. I didn't even have to
be in a deep meditative state to access it. I am accessing it right
now as I type.

This is the replacement of my sanctuary. No societal trappings
derived from the expectations of others, just an ancient and natural
forest open only to me, drawing forth the physical, mental, and
emotional strength I need. I go here each day to align myself and to
meditate. This is how my shift occurs. And it's funny, my
meditations here don't result in amazing external changes. They're
producing amazing INTERNAL realizations that are absolutely necessary
to proceed into the life I want. It is the difference between buying
new curtains for your house, and drawing up plans for a totally new
piece of architecture. I refrain from buying those curtains because I
want the money for a drafting table.

I've been bemoaning my metaphorical lack of new curtains for awhile.
Seems kind of silly when I view it this way. After all, I know how to
sew, which means I can craft new curtains from old fabric AND get my
table :)

(and on the title: If you're a Cure fan, go listen to Bat for Lashes
and her cover of "A Forest." I love it! I'm going to see B4L in
concert next month and I cannot wait. It will make up for missing the
Church)

Some dream-style encouragement

2009-06-20T05:41:00.001-07:00

I suppose it's a good sign when the President of the United States* comes to your dream and puts his arm around you, saying, "It's ok. I've had some tough times in my life, too."

*Obama. I've had only bad dreams of Bush.

So illness is really a teacher?

2009-06-15T10:31:00.001-07:00

People say that illness can be a teacher. However much I would like
to smack my illness upside the head, I admit it's true. I've always
known that if it wasn't for my illness, I'd probably still be stuffing
myself with fake food and chemicals and developing diabetes, heart
failure, and the other serious problems I was heading towards.

There's another thing about illness, too, the kind that exhausts you
so profoundly that you have difficulty making simple movements. It
keeps you in the present because you have no energy to expend on
stressing about the future, or moping about the past. Surviving this
moment takes every ounce of concentration and effort that you have.

Hmm. That last sentence makes it sound like I'm dying or something,
which I'm not. But at the moment, my attitude about stress is sort of
like this morning when I realized that the jacket I wanted was
upstairs, and I had no energy to go back up there: Oh well. I don't
need it that bad. I'll leave it where it is.

The purpose of hypnogogic imagery

2009-06-08T15:25:00.001-07:00

I attended a psychic development workshop this weekend. The techniques weren't my style, but my energy was really moving after 2 straight days of this stuff and I had wild hypnogogic imagery before bed. Hypnogogic imagery is frequent for me, and it gets clearer than a movie screen when I meditate regularly and often. This time, I watched a woman walk slowly down a city street. I could only move about half her speed and was quickly losing sight of her, which is common with these things. Usually I watch; I can't participate. However, I discovered a new ability to run and decided that I wanted to speak to her! She moved faster. So did I. Finally I lunged in front of her and forced her to halt. She freaked out. She was screaming that she had a role and a purpose and that I was disrupting that. The entire scene broke apart into a jumbled heap of junk and wailing. I opened my eyes.

I got the impression that these images might be simply to keep me entertained, rather than conscious as I fall asleep (which would lead to a Wake Induced Lucid Dream). Robert Bruce has often talked about how the body and mind have a natural barrier to leaving the body consciously, probably as a way to ensure that people don't accidentally slip out at inconvenient times. Perhaps hypnogogic imagery supports that.

I wonder what would happen if I spent a whole week meditating. A month. A year. A lifetime like some monks do.

One's own wisdom

2009-06-04T16:43:00.000-07:00

Today someone referenced "Comment Luv" or the excessive attachment bloggers have to reader comments. Some bloggers, it explained, will comment on people's blogs even when they have nothing of value to say. They do this in hopes that the other blogger will return the comment, thus increasing their own blog popularity.

I laughed. I'm contrary to this. I have to remind myself that I might have something useful to say! I underestimate the value of my own contribution, figuring that other people are wiser and more eloquent than I. This is a form of wisdom, as the proverb goes (insert some saying that I've forgotten here about a wise man saying nothing and a fool blabbing about). However, not knowing your own intelligence is a form of low self-esteem.

Introversion. It does not escape the internet.

While I was in San Francisco, this came up metaphorically. I mentioned to a houseful of strangers that I do energy healing. One athlete wanted help for a hip injury. We'd been chatting for awhile so I felt comfortably doing so. I love his description of the healing sensation: "It felt like someone was ruffling the pages of a book through my hip."

Before I was finished, a young Puerto Rican film student tore into the room. We'd only talked minimally, and he seemed like the hip kind of college kid that would scoff at all things metaphysical. He smacked me upside the head with that assumption. "I have all this bad energy going from my head to my arm," he explained, distressed. So I worked on him. Turns out that whatever the "bad energy" was, it was blocking his hands and depriving him of a major source of energy absorption. He was so happy with the results, smiling and using words like "amazing" "impressive" and "I feel totally different!"

After we finished (and this somehow evolved into port floats and a discussion about the sex habits of crane flies), I evaluated my situation. Could it all have been a mental thing for him? I know what I felt, and yes, he had some blocks. But what if I was just imagining things? What if I only thought I did something real?

The old "just imagining things" fear. It doesn't escape ... well, anything, really.

And I decided, "Screw it. I don't care if I had just been juggling chicken feet and singing Woody Guthrie. It helped him. That's worth something."

Now what to do with this?

***

And I saw redwoods. Not the giant sequoias, but still, towering redwood trees that spoke into my brain. You bet your ass I'm making plans to go back.

Of boxes and foxes, and being non-ordinary

2009-05-16T19:03:00.001-07:00

How interesting! Energy work is so much cleaner and smooth when I've spent time on creative things like writing and music, or when I've been in nature. Today I hiked in the foothills all afternoon and yesterday I wandered at dusk on a quiet path. Being totally alone intensifies the effect.

I saw a beautiful tiny red fox as I perched on my favorite boulder on my favorite trail (I know many boulders well). I offered to share my pumpkin seeds with the fox, but it preferred the mice it was hunting.

Several blogger friends recently discussed their relief in accepting themselves wholly, and releasing guilt for not being "normal." Thank you, keep talking because I need to be reminded that I may stop my desperate attempts to appear Normal. It was an important survival skill for years and now I know how to play the game when necessary. But I can finally stop it as a way of life. These insights followed an interesting conversation in which I was called an "angelic being," probably because the speaker knows I dislike the term "indigo child." I don't (can't? won't?) categorize myself as a particular brand of Other like many people do, but I admit that certain aspects of myself are distinctly alien to the rest of the population, usually prompting very interesting reactions. The question isn't so much Why, but What to Do With That and To What Effect. In other words, am I acknowledging and using my Potential for the greatest good?

(I stole Nali's quirk of Capitalizing Important Things)

I'm using MyPsiche's Reality Meditation to interesting effect. PJ, I tried to link to your entry about that, but I can't find the link.

My life is moving outside the box, possibly into a reality where the concept of a box is a quaint children's bedtime story. I guess I'm ok with that if they still have good tea there. I'm currently enjoying tasty vanilla bourbon Rooibos and am loathe to abandon it!

Return of Dreams, and theme jars

2009-05-03T12:54:00.000-07:00

In an effort to clear next week totally so that I can write and meditate, I have indulged in a flurry of domestic activity, including repair people, my sewing machine, seed packets, cat brushes, el Chupacabra (my worms) and a long series of Winamp playlists. My music collection is mine again! I no longer have a huge jumbled collection that randomly selects Loreena McKennit to follow Ministry. It's a simple thing, but music really sets the stage for my writing.

I've realized that my dreams are back. I went through two years of pale, disorganized dreams, or none at all. I've been a vivid dreamer since childhood, so I was disturbed. I knew it was connected to my poor health, but all my efforts at healing were futile. Now that I've made some radical changes to my diet, my dreams are coming back, just as weird and detailed as they ever were. They lack the vivid color I used to enjoy, but I think that will come back. This dream resurgence is yet another sign that this diet is working for me, but damn, this sucks. For the first time in my life, I'm totally detached from food because I'm so bored with it.

Today I dreamed that I was dating a politician's son. He was pompous, controlling, and hateful, the kind of guy who would call a girl a prude if she wouldn't have sex with him, then call her a slut if she did (or do worse). There were many scenarios in the dream that prompted me to dump his sorry ass. It was like watching a soap opera, or sneaking a glimpse into someone else's life.

***

I've also created three theme jars. I went through my journal from the past five years (no small task) to collect all the pertinent exercises and meditation points. I printed them, cut them out, and put them in jars. I have a dreaming jar, a meditative exercise jar, and one I'm calling "focus jar" that has affirmations and things to ponder throughout the day.

I did this because I have a bad habit of believing that the Thing That Works is just around the corner, which leaves me flitting from exercise to exercise like a confused bee. I get frustrated because the Thing That Works never materializes. So I'm taking the pressure off myself. I'll flit from exercise to exercise simply because I'm interested in trying new things, not because I expect a grand outcome.

It's kind of like the story about the young monk who strives for enlightenment. The moment you make it your goal is the moment you fail. It's not a goal you can meet and check off the list. It's a way of life.

Some energy blocks are protective

2009-04-28T21:21:00.000-07:00

This morning's dream inspired tonight's archmed. In the dream, I saw a stream blocked by huge rubbish piles. Later I struggled to let my friends into my house while keeping out the creepy, malicious guy hanging around, but the lock was flimsy and eventually it broke. In my experience, these type of dreams are pointing out blocks and holes in my energy body.

Interesting that this dream appeared directly after my bedtime meditation attempt at removing job stress, but I fell asleep. I took this dream as a hint and tonight, I meditated on the dream. B showed me the dream-stream again and I began tearing away all the debris, but stopped when I realized that the debris was actually housing something. A misty and glowing entity floated inside, gently spiraling upward. Was it a nature spirit? The first heap had a pale green spirit, and the second heap had a purple spirit.

"The heaps are actually protecting those things, aren't they?" I said, shocked. I've always viewed energy blocks as nasty, obnoxious things. Get them the hell out, right? But these delicate spirits needed protection. The debris heaps were just the easiest, most accessible ways to accomplish this, and they'd grown unwieldy and huge. To remedy this, I created tidy, strong energy capsules and carefully transported each spirit inside. There, I thought, my replacement protection is much more efficient. Then I cleared the debris, leaving the stream flowing freely around the capsules.

I don't know what these spirits are, but I'm astounded to realize that some energy blocks may be protective. Usually, they're just full of junk and grossness.

My focus draining, I asked Brandelys about the other part of the dream, the unwanted visitor and the intruding energy it suggested. To shorten the story, I realized that my problem is maintaining the shields that keep job stress and trauma out and away from my inner core. I was told that I'll be talking to "an expert" about this subject soon in my dreams.

Great! Now I need to just freakin' REMEMBER my dreams, and I'll be good to go.

A Dream of Eggs

2009-04-20T18:07:00.000-07:00

Well, this is an odd dream that's begging for introspection.

I dream that I'm reading a book and when I turn the page, there are ... eggs. Tons of tiny little eggs sitting where the page should be. Each egg has a small star-shaped break in the top, and when I peel the egg open, there's a sentence.

"This is stupid!" I think. "You have to peel an egg to get a sentence of the story? How will you ever know which egg comes first? This is going to take forever. Who's asinine idea was this?"

Then I realized that I had actually entered the book's story. There was no book, only a bunch of eggs in a library and worse, I was an awkwardly shy, large man feeling uncertain and clumsy. I was watching a middle-aged woman do something to the eggs. I immediately disliked her and knew her to be a nitpicky, mean bitch.

She had to hold the egg just right. With her fingers in the right position, the egg was unaware that anything was happening to it, and it continued to sleep. When the egg was asleep, she could move the thick red fluid around inside. I understood that this was not especially good for the organism, and that by doing this to the eggs regularly, they would develop in a way that was personally profitable to her.

(Don't ask me the specifics. I have no idea)

I interrupted her. I might have said something and startled her, or accidentally jostled her. She lost her precise grip on the egg and it "woke up." It projected a sense of indignation and "stopped cooperating." All I know is that the egg was aware that it was being manipulated, and protected itself like a turtle withdrawing into its shell.

She started screaming at me for ruining her concentration. I, in turn, starting yelling back. "Why are you doing this? How could you? This is cruel and you are wrong for doing this!" I was outraged that she held so little regard for this sentient creature.

...and like the dream wasn't weird enough already ...

...she turned to me and burst into tears. Her domineering, harpy-like demeanor fell away and she sobbed, "Just stop it, ok? Mommy doesn't know what else to do to make money! Mommy doesn't know how else to put food on the table for you!"

***

So really ... WTF is this? The eggs contain pieces of a story, and someone is manipulating the eggs and therefore this story for personal profit, but actually she is just a scared person who is doing the only thing she knows how to do to take care of her children, and the bitchiness is a tough veneer to hide the fear?

No, Freud, she was nothing like my waking-life mother.

THANKS UNIVERSE! I totally know why I dreamed about that!

*grumble*

Archmed: Water Walls

2009-04-18T16:27:00.001-07:00

Archmed from last week:

I went to B with the intent of separating myself from work emotions. I wanted to have a clear space when I'm at home where I am not thinking or worrying about work. My work itself isn't inherently stressful, but personnel dynamics can be ... challenging.

The landscape of my inner world has changed after my trip to Hawaii. The entrance cave became the Maniniholo Dry Cave at Ha'ena Beach Park, and the stream became Ke'e beach. B was nestled into the sand, reading, propped up by the black lava rocks. I asked him what he thought of the new setting, and he smiled as though amused at my creativity, and said it was nice. I explained to him that I wanted to cut the cord between work emotions and myself.

"Are you sure about that?" he asked. I took this as a warning that my goal wasn't quite right. Cutting the cords could lead to a lack of caring about my work, which would make me unhappy and a rotten employee. It would be better to separate my home and work lives in terms of emotions, and in fact, not get stressed out about work at all. It's the stress that's the problem, the useless damned stress that achieves nothing.

B said then that I needed to speak to the Spirit of Water (the "Silver Bird" book references are getting to me), since water governs emotions and we were in front of the ocean, anyway. So I walked to the water and told this Spirit of Water that I'd like to get to know it, because I needed help with a problem but didn't feel right about asking for something without getting to know the person/entity I was asking for help from.

I floated into the water, hesitating a moment as it swept me to sea. I got the impression that to know the Spirit of Water, I had to be far away from all land. I floated beyond any hint of land and sunk deeper into the sea, feeling a little nervous about all the unknown sea life in the dark waters. I felt water intersperse with my blood as I was lifted high in the air by a whirlpool.

Water said it would help me. It installed a clear, watery wall between myself and my work life, and told me that because its water was now in my blood, I would have an easier time guiding my emotions.

Oh. Guiding my emotions. That's what I'd been forgetting, that my emotions are not me, but something that I experience. It's like watching a movie about an angry person - you feel the character's anger and understand it, but it isn't you. And neither are the emotions generated from work. Because of this, emotional energy can be guided.

I asked what it wanted from me, and it asked for a drop of my blood in the ocean, so that it could know me as well. When I asked what it wanted me to learn from it, I felt it sort of ... chuckle, and realized I already knew. It was the bit about guiding emotions.

I found myself back on the beach, and realized that I could use these water walls in any way I like, not just with work.

***

Now ... make me REMEMBER this!

Expansion, and the Intelligence Behind the Dream

2009-04-18T14:58:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about what I want to write in this blog. I originally wanted this to be a topic-oriented blog revolving around meditation and metaphysics, but I'm weary of compartmentalizing my life into various blogs across the Internet. Prepare for expansion, though my posts will still fall into the genre.

I'm drinking coffee. This is a rare occasion because I dislike coffee. I often say "If you see a cup of coffee in my hand, you know I'm desperate." And I am. My galantamine experiment today contained an ill-advised full dose of melatonin to help me get back to sleep. I need to cut back to half that, otherwise my body is going "WTF is this?" at 11am, thinking it's more like 2am. There was nothing amazing about today's experiment beyond me dreaming a particularly vivid, movie-like dream that would make a great novel. But let me tell you about last week's experiment.

Prior to my return to sleep (Wake-Back-to-Bed lucid dreaming meeting), I was reading my International Society of Dreams email list. Someone mentioned that instead of speaking to the dream characters, you could speak to the intelligence behind the dream. The theory was that the dream characters are an intermediary between your dream self and the deeper self that creates the dream.

So during my next dream, I became lucid and shouted, "I want to speak to the intelligence behind the dream!" And for some odd reason, the question on my mind was "Why were D and I put here?" This is an odd thing for me to ask. I believe that no one slapped us here on Earth with some Grand Purpose, and that although humans can create wonderful meaning in their lives, the universe in general isn't human-centric and doesn't assign each new soul a Divinely-approved plan.

A booming, gravelly voice resounded from the sky and answered my question. And I remember very little. Figures! I do recall the voice saying that we had a large task to fulfill, and that after it was complete, we would be "called on a retreat." What's that mean? Like we'll be summoned to go stay with Thich Nhat Hanh or something?

Well shit, sign me up. I love that guy.

The other interesting thing about this dream is that I entered it via WILD (wake-induced lucid dream). As I was drifting off, I would hear a crowd chattering and as I focused, I'd be sucked into a dream scene (crowdless, strangely). It's an interesting variation on my "mind-radio" that I've experienced since childhood. It sometimes sounds like I'm listening to someone flip through radio stations as I fall asleep.

***

Things that pleased me this week:
-The Robert Moss lecture I attended (he's a great speaker - anyone want to take his Active Dreaming e-course with me? Cheap, too!)
-The Savory Spice Shop
-This awesome Viennese penthouse (mostly I like the platform bed/curtains/hottub combo)
-The new Bat for Lashes CD
-Retro makeup for an upcoming costume event. When I say "retro" I mean "shades of candy pink I haven't worn since I was twelve" and "purple eyeliner that would make Madonna squeal."

Globetrotting:
Chicago next week, San Francisco in May (doubt I can also make it to Vegas like I planned), Steamboat Springs in June, New Mexico in July and possibly Rocky Mountain National Park. And somewhere in there, we must escape to the Great Sand Dunes, one of our sacred places.

Best of all, I'm busily and happily plotting and planning for greater things to be disclosed later.

When geeks lucid dream

2009-03-15T22:05:00.000-07:00

Oh, and I am indisputably a geek.

I had a lucid dream, and realized that I could look in the mirror and alter my appearance just by speaking a command. So what do I do? I change my eyes to all black so it looks like the spooky Black Oil-infected people in the X-files. Then I change my eyes to a glowing all blue, realize that I look like a Fremen from the Dune movies, and say in a dramatic, raspy voice, "The spice must flow!"

I don't mind being a geek, fortunately. I just wish I had bothered to work on something a little more ... oh, cosmic, maybe? :)

Musings on Anxiety, Social Control, and energy

2009-03-15T21:24:00.000-07:00

My brain has been spinning for a few weeks now, musing about my capabilities and the social controls (some from the outside, some embedded in me during early childhood) that keep me from developing them. I keep getting these synchronous reminders about this topic. Friends and fellow bloggers bring it up. Someone talked about it in a lecture I listened to today, and so did a guy in a movie. Little things. I'll take it as a good sign; this always happens to me when I'm onto something life-changing.

I have so many excellent creative ideas, but when I act on them, I lose motivation after a month or two. I crash with exhaustion even if I've been working at a moderate pace. I've been blaming my health for years, believing that poor health drains energy and makes everything harder. That could be part of it, but I don't think it's the whole story. I think ... I think ... the real issue has to do with tiny anxieties that have woven themselves into the fabric of my reality. What will people think? What if I'm not good enough to do X? Am I doing this the "right" way? These are the things that drain me, not the work itself. It's extremely taxing to always be vigilant for potential disaster. It hurts the creative impulse, and stress hormones hurt the body.

It's funny how the spooky, neat things grab me, like metaphysics and dreaming and super-cool majic powers of cosmic wisdom, but they all boil down to one simple thing: learning to still the mind and find peace no matter what your situation is. And that one simple thing is so incredibly hard. It's like ripping apart the seams of your curtains to make them into a dress, to use another example that came up today. It's altering the fabric of how I see the world.

***

Anyway, my brain has been rattling around, slowly putting things together into a grand approach I can't yet verbalize nor even comprehend yet. I'll let it go slowly and I'll try to be patient. It's a good sign. It's just not particularly gratifying right now.

Recurring dream places

2009-03-13T18:00:00.000-07:00

I have two places I return to in my dreams. They aren't recurring dreams because no dream is the same, but the place is the same.

The first is a cemetery that doesn't exist. I can take you to the exact location it would be in the small towns where I grew up. I know where to turn, and where to stop on the rural gravel roads. When I moved from one small town to another, the cemetery moved with me. In its first incarnation, it was wide and situated on flat land behind a park. In its second incarnation, it moved to quiet green hills and reduced to crumbling white stones, illegible with age. In my dreams, I enter the cemetery and I'm alone and away from societal influences. I can be myself without feeling as though I'm on the defense. In the past, I met people and entities less ordinary. I've met human friends here, beings I can only describe as fae, even ghosts.

But it doesn't exist. As clearly as I see it, as exact as its location is, it doesn't exist.

I dream of it rarely now. It's always silent, and there's no one to meet inside. In the past two dreams, I've been blocked from entering (once by my stepfather, and once by a huge bureaucratic building). I've been thinking about the lack of other beings and people, and this attempt to keep me out.

I'll keep thinking about it. This is something I should do an archmed for.

The other place looks like the red rock formations of Utah. These dreams aren't as clear, but I usually have the feeling that I'm standing on a trail through these mountains, facing family and friends as I wave goodbye to embark on to my journey. They turn around to go home, and I continue into the mountains. It always feels so cold and enormous, as though I could get lost in a world utterly foreign to humans. Nothing there would notice if I died, unless it was only to treat me as carrion.

I think these two places say a lot about me, some of it good, some of it bad. Mostly, it reminds me that I never felt human. Sometimes when people say that, they mean something grand - they feel like they're really from another planet or reality or something. For me, it's just unadorned isolation. I'd like to change that some day.

Dream Triggers: The Zombies Have Left the Subway Station

2009-02-09T20:49:00.001-08:00

I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary as I walked into the subway station in rural Colorado. Then I turned a corner and ran into my stepfather and a particularly unpleasant sister-in-law. The combination was just too horrifying to be real.

"I'm dreaming, aren't I," I said to my stepdad.

"Probably," he replied.

I woke soon after, but I'm interested in how a dream character told me that I was probably dreaming. Usually when I ask dream characters "Am I dreaming?" they'll deny it, get offended, or act like I'm crazy. They rarely agree that I'm dreaming.

I'm amused. Horrifying triggers have always triggered me to lucidity, but they used to be things like zombies and psycho killers. Now there's a new horror on the block: Dad and She Who Shall Not Be Named. Move over, zombies!

I just love it when this crap happens

2009-02-06T19:55:00.000-08:00

Last night I had an unusual dream sequence. I was having a normal dream about hanging out with friends, when it was suddenly interrupted by a flash of a "memory." The memory was of being abducted by aliens or something similar, and being absolutely fucking terrified! My dream-self blinked in confusion and the dream went on like nothing happened. Then I had another flash of the same thing a few moments later. I don't think I've ever had a dream where I engaged in remembering a distinct, unrelated incident. That's pretty high-level functioning for the dreaming mind, whether the memory was real or false.

Immediately after I woke up, my leg was really itching. I went into the bathroom and looked, and saw three small black bruises in a triangle, and three small red dots also in a triangle.

THANKS, UNIVERSE! I love your FABULOUS unnerving coincidences that just happen to mean something in the alien conspiracy community.

There was also a long scratch down the side of my face, but that's not as weird given that I have cats, it's easy to scratch yourself in your sleep, etc.

Damn, it's still itching. Perhaps they are spider bites from a very geometrically-oriented arachnid. What's worse? The possibility that aliens swooped down and did awful things to you, or a spider in your bed?

(note to self: Stop thinking about bot flies. Stop thinking about bot flies. Stop thinking about "Fire in the Sky," too. )

The Galantamine/Choline combination is successfully working for Lucid Dreams and OBEs

2009-02-05T09:17:00.001-08:00

In an earlier entry, I lamented that I couldn't get a reliable outcome from Galantamine/Choline, the supposed wonder supplements for lucid dreaming. I kept taking it anyway, just in case. After my recent surge of energetic activity, I have had great success with it! It now reliably prompts lucid or incredibly vivid dreams, and OBEs. I never expected any OBE phenomena. Wow.

I'm not sure if my increased energetic activity opened up neural pathways, or if I simply took it long enough for the supplements to have a cumulative effect. I don't think galantamine works that way, but perhaps I'm wrong.

It's not a magic pill, since you still have to put the effort into lucid dream induction, but it's worthwhile.

Cyborg Flower

2009-02-03T20:25:00.000-08:00

Today I did an archmed on my relationship with the path that will bring me the most joy and fulfillment. That's a mouthful. Perhaps I should rename it Ferdinand or something more concise. Anyway, it was an unusual archmed that focused on density. What emerged was a weird spiky looking flower, part organic and part something else, and it looked like a closed lily. To me, it was a jumble of delicate flowers, sheets of metal, coils and liquid. I got the impression that it only appeared this way to me because it existed on some level of reality that I had no concept of.

The cyborg flower was tall and had a lever that opened it up. The petals snapped perpendicular to the ground, and I peered inside. The center of the flower was a portal to a more-intense version of the exterior. Whatever was in there seemed alive and sentient, chaotic and beautiful. I hesitated before jumping in, uncertain of what I would find.

I landed in this ... room. It was alive, but it was clearly a low-ceilinged room. It was comfortable with cushion-like things here and there, swirling bright colors of blue and red and other weird synaesthetic phenomenon. I couldn't focus well on the changing surroundings. One minute something would look solid, and the next it would be fluid. I couldn't name the things I was seeing. It was pleasant, though, and the sentience seemed excited to have me there. The whole place felt very dense, like touching a cool, smooth billiard ball. It also felt like when you take a bandage off newly-healed skin - the slightest touch is magnified by ten. Those metaphors are the closest I can come to what it was like.

I asked where I was, and was told "your heart." I was a little put out by this stock answer. I wanted something more impressive like "the gateway to the outer realms of consciousness and duality!" But ok, whatever, my heart. It was very different from my mental image of my heart chakra, which is a small cave of water with a vibrant green light. I realized that my old image was just something pretty I created to help myself relax. Although useful in certain contexts, it was as substantial as gauze. This new image that I sat in, though ... I couldn't even figure out what I was experiencing because it was so new and more importantly, real.

I imagine that babies feel like this. And when I really thought about it, I understood that most of my mental places were insubstantial pleasantries like the cave. That's why my elaborate mental house just faded away awhile back, leaving only the foundation. though I'd been using it for years.

But this room had no windows. I sat on one of the cushions and realized that the whole room was a craft of sorts. You can't pilot a craft without windows, so I created two. I had to use physical (in my actual physical body) movements to do this, which is unusual. Once the windows were created, I did the standard "What should I learn from you" routine. It responded with "visit!" It presented me with a huge .... telescopy-catapult-thing. It looked like the flower, but it propelled me upward at a great speed. I understood that it was meant to propel me forward in this new reality.

So ... sometimes I don't know exactly what I'm experiencing, but it seems promising.

Thoughts on childhood abuse and adult illness

2009-02-02T12:48:00.001-08:00

Last night I thought about why abused children often become unhealthy adults.

Some children dismiss or ignore their own abuse, particularly if the abuse is subtle or infrequent instead of a daily barrage. This is how they survive childhood. A child can't say, "Stop hurting me!" because that may further enrage the attacker. Their coping mechanism is denial. It's more than denial - it's outright not seeing it. It wasn't real abuse, it was just discipline, right?

When the kid is grown and on their own, they may fully realize what happened and anger overwhelms them. The abuse was not right! It was wrong and someone needs to pay for it! Someone needs to feel the fury of the child's rage. But by this point, the kid is old enough to realize the complications of confronting the abuser. What good will it do? It may upset the family. Despite the abuse, the kid may love the abuser and wants to avoid hurting him/her. In my case, I ask myself, "What good will it do? He's just a sad, lonely old man who's already tried to commit suicide once. He is suffering." Alternatively, the abusive adult may be dead or otherwise gone.

So what happens to the newly-realized anger? A person can't live indefinitely in that conscious, active state of anger and rage. It's not safe to direct it at the parent, but no one else deserves it. It is too strong to be ignored or deflated anymore. There's nowhere for the anger to go but towards the self, circling the body endlessly. And if the child is now a rational adult who thinks, "There's no use digging up the past; I should let it go," even the mind is not a safe place to store the anger. So it goes into the physical body, and illness results as stress hormones elevate and accumulate.

Heavy, ugly stuff. And understanding this cycle doesn't mean that I know what to do about it. I can only be conscious of my current feelings and allow them to boil over and out, and meditate to remove the old repressed feelings.

The Scarlet Tree Woman

2009-01-30T22:13:00.001-08:00

Yes! I can do energy work and archmeds successfully when I'm using my recumbent exercise bike. In many ways it's even better to do it while exercising because the repetitive motion is hypnotic, but active enough to keep me from falling asleep.

Today I thought about a conversation I had with a friend about old-fashioned face-to-face social networking. My natural introversion is a hinderance here, and I often wish my "extrovert switch" (I do have one) was easier to use instead of being so draining. It's draining because I'm always on the lookout for trouble when interacting with people I don't know well. The lizard part of my brain believes a) people want to hurt me, and b) even if they have goodwill towards me, they will likely end up hurting me out of their own ignorance. The more evolved part of my brain knows this isn't true. Too bad Lizard weilds such influence.

Anyway, today's archmed was on having fulfilling relationships and getting past that notion. But I had a brief interlude first with my guide and asked why I felt so low. I get depressed sometimes when I realize that I have "issues" and it seems like they'll never end. In our faster-than-lightening emotional/idea language, he suggested that the better question to ask was "Why do I need to feel low?" I realized that these feelings often mask a new concept that I would rather not take the time to explore. My guide explained that my gloomy moods are reflexes, distractions to avoid new concepts. It's a trap of familiarity: I know how to be sad and miserable, but adapting to a totally new approach? That's too much work!

The archmed showed up as a tall, slender woman encased in a deep red casing. It was a beautiful, shining material. She looked almost like scarlet tree. She walked forward with her eyes closed, and I saw that she had a silohuette behind her that suggested four legs (think of how a horse's body looks).

She walked blindly forward, protected by her thick casing. The casing was a problem. It shouldn't be destroyed because it was so beautiful. It's beauty was what made her unique and attractive. However, its thickness was protective to the point where she didn't have a human body anymore. It needed to be transparent. I drew up energy to lighten the casing, and eventually she became visible.

But here's the bizarre thing. Her "hind legs" were actually a dog. It was a big brown mutt following her, and he'd become completely covered by the casing. Once it became transparent, he broke out and started running around and snapping at things. The poor thing was frightened and agitated after being covered up for so long, so I worked on healing him. His insides were full of junk (nails and wires and such), so I removed it, sealed him up, and petted him. He put his paws on my shoulders and licked my face, and I took a few strands of his fur to put in the pouch around my neck.

I asked the woman to open her eyes, and she obliged. She had beautiful green eyes. I struggled to remember the three important questions to ask archmeds, but all I could come up with was "What should I learn from you?"

"That people are dangerous," she promptly replied.

I was dismayed. I had come to remove this notion, not be told it again. But my guide suggested that I let her finish. The rest came in ideas, not words. People are dangerous, she conveyed, but the danger can be mitigated by a balance of protection and clear sight (the transparent shield around her). The dog, I realized symbolized the eagerness for friendship. Dogs love everything and everyone, usually. Most of them have no problems making friends.

Dog archmed. I laughed at that.

There was something more I can't quite recall. I think we exchanged clear, colored stones, one from her heart and one from my throat.

Now it's late and I'm going to crash.

Something weird is going on!

2009-01-21T21:32:00.000-08:00

Weirdness is happening lately at a level I haven't experienced for years. I'm not complaining!

First, the tappings. Have I mentioned them before? Since childhood, I've sensations that feel like someone tapping my head or a drop of water falling on my body. As a kid, I learned to ignore it when I realized that nothing had landed on my head (somehow, despite this and other bizarre childhood happenings like getting sucked into vortexes each night, I still complained that I was paranormally inept). As I got older, I discovered that energy workers usually attribute this to your crown chakra opening. Because of the length of time involved, this seemed unlikely.
The tappings have increased in the past few years, and I discovered that with enough struggling and concentration, the taps would evolve into intense energy surges from my crown to my belly (the lower dan tien in qigong).

But this week ... wow. It's happening dozens of times each day. I effortlessly absorb these intense energy surges, though not without some discrimination; I mean, my coworkers will not want to see my eyes roll back in my head, and it's not so helpful while I'm driving, either. The energy generally pools in my belly, sometimes in my heart (Robert Bruce's "sub-heart storage center") and a few times even under the brow chakra. Energetically speaking, this is an excellent thing.

Sometimes it's so intense that I just start laughing. It feels amazing, like an energetic orgasm. I can't contain it all within me, and it radiates outward. I have moments of clarity in which all concerns fall away from me. For a chronic worrier like me, this is dumbfounding. I watch people in a state of ... suspended judgement? Stillness? Sartori? The people all sparkle inside, sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively, even those I would normally ignore or actively dislike. For a people-shy person like me, this is a fascinating development.

Last night I woke at 3am and messed around online for an hour. I returned bed and lay there trying to fall back asleep. Suddenly I felt small electrical surges in my crown shooting down to my brow chakra. I felt myself floating out of bed and tried to figure out how to move without a body!

I've had OBEs before, but only a few and always from a direct sleep, which makes it hard to distinguish the experience from a dream. Some people believe that OBEs are just a type of lucid dream, and I don't doubt this. I imagine the brain mechanism is the same. However, it's a completely different experience than a lucid dream. You actually feel your body separating. Unlike in the past, there were no crackling sounds or heavy vibrations this time. I unintentionally floated up, detached myself from my ankle (I got stuck for a moment) and floated out the door. Ok, let's be honest: I bounced painlessly off the door frame as I tried to figure out how to maneuver through the door. Then I got freaked out by the scary dark stairway and zoomed back to my body. Yeah yeah, no comments from the peanut gallery about my vast courage reserves.

This is extremely unusual. It rocked! More, more!

Then there are the smaller oddities. I see things during the day, instead of just at night like usual. I have visions of the most dazzling natural places, like mountain towns and gorgeous wide rivers. I feel hands tugging on my body at night. And energy work and meditation are just so easy! I use visuals of electricity and downpours of cosmic energy, and it's like I barely put any effort in at all.

This is the kind of thing that gets people shoved into the psych ward if they can't keep it together. But I'm definitely keeping it together, almost effortlessly. I'm doing great at work (moving to more writing work, which I love, and getting a beautiful new office and a raise). My relationships are wonderful. My creative writing is flourishing and I've submitted some for publication this week. My health is starting to improve.

So I don't know what this experience is, but I am having a damned good time.

A few nights ago, I dreamed something symbolic of what is happening:
I had a pet salamander. Salamanders are typical symbols of my astrological sign. Despite me not especially liking reptiles and amphibians, I enjoyed him. One day I came back to find that he'd escaped from his aquarium and had been injured. The poor thing's tail had fallen off! That happens to some reptiles when they are frightened and threatened - not sure if it really happens to salamanders. Both he and the tail were skittering around the floor. He was terrified and wouldn't let me pick him up. I stressed out, and eventually closed the door and walked away, figuring I'd leave him for a few hours and maybe he'd come to me once he'd had time to calm down.

When I opened the door again, I screamed. He was huge! He was a couple feet tall and much thicker, a little bloated. I wasn't scared of my pet, just freaked out. I mean, how could a little salamander grow that big in just a couple hours?

Well hit me upside the head with symbolism and call me Carl. I get it.

Healing techniques: Descending into stress

2009-01-09T22:34:00.000-08:00

I had a dream, or maybe a midnight meditation, that gave me a technique for dealing with my illness. I can't remember the dream well, but I did retain a technique.

Illness seems correlated to emotional pain in a psychosomatic way. Psychosomatic doesn't mean "hypochondriac," it means that stress hormones can aggravate real physical symptoms. My dream explained that this was much of my problem. My stress never really dissipates; instead, it gets covered up with logic and adaptive behavior. It's all very functional on a day-to-day level. But underneath, the stress is still there and as far as my body is concerned, the "threat" (real or imagined) is still ongoing. When I consider that I've had significant stresses since age 3 ... that's a lot of "ongoing stress."

So the dream instructed me to watch for a physical feeling that occurs with a negative reaction. I have to be observant because these physical sensations (usually in the gut or chest where most of my issues are) are quick and I've unwittingly trained myself to ignore them. Right now, I only notice them when I'm sitting quietly and thinking, or lying in bed. When I notice them, I make an effort to mentally lower myself into the feeling. Imagining some visuals of descent and immersion helps with this. Once there, I experience this ugly, nasty feeling of fear, anger, or sadness to its full extent. It's awful. But then something interesting happens: I feel it getting lighter and lighter and eventually fading away.

I think that kind of emotional experience releases the stress hormones (or in other words, brings closure to the feeling and convinces my body that the stress is over) and keeps them from continuing to poison my body.

Many spiritual gurus, including Eckhart Tolle, recommend something similar. But I always thought it would be obvious if it happened, like "Oh look, I'm furious and wow, my stomach aches." But for me, it's not obvious at all. It's so fast that I wasn't even aware that it happened until recently.

I wish I could recall more about the dream, but I'm not even sure that it was a dream.

Helpful entities and slaves

2008-12-29T18:39:00.000-08:00

I dreamed that a friend was going to tell me about the cause of my waking-life illness. She looked like my friend, but I was aware that it wasn't really her. Some highly evolved entity was taking her likeness to talk to me. I was not allowed to ask questions, only listen. She said:

They do this to their slaves, sometimes, to make them easier to control.

Then I woke up.

~~~

Request to Above Entity: Next time, let's talk about how to not be slaves, shall we? Cuz that's creepy as hell.

Dream/Possible Archmed Continuation: Healing the Plant Man

2008-12-18T19:08:00.001-08:00

I fell right asleep last night, but I had this lovely dream. I think it's pointing out that healing isn't just about energy - it's also about actions. Maybe actions are energy in the physical realm.

Some friends and I are at a restaurant and see a middle-aged man and his small daughter exit the building. He is short, portly, balding Italian man. Because of the awful growths on his feet, he shuffles and stumbles when he walks and can't wear shoes. The growths are also on his ears.

We all stare after he walks by. "It's weird," I comment. "That looks so hard for him. But he shows up at this restaurant every week."

The dream shifts and I am not just me anymore. I'm also a beautiful woman with long, wavy dark hair. I follow the man and his little girl, strike up a conversation, and take them home. The man's energy is sapped from his excursion, and when he gets home, he has to crawl into something like a dry bathtub because he can no longer walk. It is very hard for him to raise a child and be out in the world. I can feel oppression and hopelessness radiating off him.

But I help to heal him, but I don't use my normal energetic techniques. Instead, I clean up his house and talk to him in a friendly fashion. I help clean up his body because he has a hard time doing it on his own (he is embarrassed and keeps covering them up, which amuses me). I keep track of the little girl and explain to her how she can help her daddy by being a good girl.

And as this happens, I realize that the man and his daughter are not entirely human. They are also plant/human hybrids and sometimes manifest as plants or a combination of plant and human. As the man warms up to life, his dull attitude lessens and I see that he has produced a tiny shoot of new plant. He seems unimpressed but surprised. He doesn't think it will live. I understand that his daughter was produced this way and he is not attached to her because their kind often have children that die and are replaced.

Later, I show him that the new plant has flowered. It's created two different types of flowers in its little pot. "It won't be the same as your daughter," I explain. "The conditions were different so it is an entirely new plant. But isn't it beautiful?"

He smiles, a rare action for him. He's excited. By now we've lost the little girl, who also reverted back to her non-human nature, which was something between a plant and an egg (she flies and gets very small). We're not upset. We may find her again and if not, we have the new plant.

He tells me that he had a wife of sorts once, and she used to cook him eggs (nothing to do with his kid looking vaguely eggish, just to be clear), so I cook him breakfast.

But the scene is interrupted with a window into the past, which confuses me. The man is at his family's house for a holiday gathering. His mother is hosting and she's a horrid old woman. He has reverted back to plant form and is in a small pot for the occasion. His mother sits around with several older women and gossips about him as though he can't hear, ignoring his little girl who wanders around by herself, lonely and confused. The mother says, "That old plant is pathetic. You see how he sends up that 'child' of his more and more?" Here she gestures to the little girl, who lives like an insect in her father's pot when she is in her plant form. "I don't think he controls but a third of his own consciousness. She's taken the rest." I'm repulsed. That's not true. He's just sick and needs help. They enjoy deriding him for his helplessness, and I realize that this is what the poor man has dealt with his whole life. No wonder he was so sick when I met him. Just going out to that restaurant each week was his act of defiance against this attitude. It took every ounce of strength that he had, but he still did it.

I woke feeling peaceful because I had healed someone, or at least made significant progress.

He reminded me of the "slave" from the Witch Bottle post a few entries ago. I wonder if this dream was a continuation of the healing. If so, I wonder what I did to trigger it? I mean, that meditation was 3 weeks ago.

Passion, Dream Incubation, and Healing Imagery

2008-12-17T21:12:00.001-08:00

A while back, I mentioned that I was experimenting for a month with Stephen LaBerge's dream interpretation technique. It failed and I only once kinda-sorta dreamed what I wanted to dream. I think it has to do with motivation. I was only really inspired to focus on my dream target for a day or two, but then I continued because I wanted to be consistent in my little experiment. I wonder how I'll fare if I allow myself to change incubation topics from night to night? It's hard to say, because often as I fall asleep, my only real, honest motivation is "Sleep Now."

I can now move on to other LaBerge exercises, though. Know why? Because I now have a cat-puke-free copy of the book again.

Interesting healing note: I was working on D because he was having a bad respiratory flare-up. As I did the healing work, I wasn't very focused and suddenly realized this.

"How is that?" I asked.

"It's not doing much," he said apologetically. He hardly ever says that.

I concentrated. I decided that a cool breeze imagery might be useful to combat the heat of the inflammation, but my brain kept conjuring up visions of ice. After a few minutes, I wondered if perhaps freezing the poor inflamed cells was any better than inflammation.

"How is that?" I asked.

"I don't know what's going on, but this seems a lot worse!" He spasmed and coughed.

Ok, that's feedback you don't ignore. This time I reached back for an old standard: golden healing light. I visualized it filling each cell, permeating all cell walls and getting all components to relax and release.

"How is that?" I asked.

"Much better," he smiled. The coughing was gone.

It's possible that he picked up intangible cues from my body and vocal inflections somehow. It's also possible that it worked. Given that we put so much effort into it and the results seem so obvious, I prefer to believe that it just works.

Archmed: Witch Bottle Slave (and electrical musings)

2008-11-24T08:57:00.001-08:00

I've been using electrical imagery in my evening meditations and wow, it's like an instant jump start (no pun intended)! If I imagine a live wire "zapping" my chakra or elsewhere, the energy moves so strongly that I sometimes have to stop because I'm not sure if I can handle the influx. Interesting. I know it's just a face I've put over my own internal energy manipulation. I mean, there's no actual electricity involved. Why does it work so well when other visualizations don't?

I tried for an archmed this morning and had a lot of trouble because I was so tired. I asked to see the archetype of my overall illness, rather than a specific component or symptom. I saw a giant jellyfish-like structure and had the notion to cut it open. Inside was a disgusting mess of sharp metal parts that reminded me of an old-time witch bottle. In past centuries, people would fill a bottle with nasty things - broken glass, bent nails, broken springs, and whatever injurious thing they had available -then fill the bottle with the urine or blood of the witchcraft victim. Then they'd bury it. They believed that the witch would be attracted to their victim's bodily fluids, but would get trapped inside the bottle by the junk.

Anyway, that's what it looked like to me. I began clearing all the junk out when I noticed that behind it all was a slave. The word "slave" was presented clearly to me. He was a short, fat man with darker skin and dull eyes. He seemed brainwashed and without will of his own. When I looked at him, I saw that his internal organs were filled with the same junk.

I tried working with him, but could not stay awake and focused, so I'll come back to this tonight or tomorrow.

Grumbling!

2008-11-19T20:39:00.000-08:00

I spent my entire meditation working on energetically unblocking my feet today. Such a basic part of energy work and I've totally neglected ... well, everything. Now I'm starting at the bottom, no pun intended. *sigh*

I can't seem to have any success with galantamine! I've tried altering my bedtimes, the dosage, the amount of time I go between doses, all to no avail. I'll try a slightly larger dose and a more intense lucid dream induction protocol. I recently rediscovered the Monroe Institute's "Wave" series of meditation recordings. I'd forgotten how much I liked them and the resonant tuning bit.

Still I struggle with the precarious balance between health and altered states. When you're sick, you're tired. When you're tired, you fall asleep during meditations, which is particularly ironic when you're trying to do self-healing meditations. I wish that staying healthy for me wasn't so incredibly difficult. Still, I keep trying to do better and accept what I need to do.

I tried to do an archmed yesterday and ended up in a bizarre jungle-like representation of some subconscious realm. I don't recall everything that happened, just that some wild version of myself was shouting, "Admit your fear!" and it did seem that after several hours, a lot of anger and fear came up spontaneously. It was so sudden and unprovoked that I had to think about what could have possibly caused it. I'll take that release as a good sign.

Galantamine Success: No lucid euphoria

2008-11-03T06:23:00.000-08:00

I had mild success with my fourth galantamine/choline experiment (half dose). This was the first time I didn't experience the infamous lucid euphoria. My first respond to lucidity is usually ecstatic, and I run/fly around shouting "I'm dreaming! I'm dreaming!" It's common among lucid dreamers - lucidity is exciting, after all. But it's annoying - the increased energy can be enough to wake me up immediately.

But this morning I was like, "Hmm. You know, photographs don't usually have vortexes of flowers that suck you in, do they? I must be dreaming. Huh. Gee. Wonder what I should do." (YAWN) I'm not sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing because the dream was so short. Note to self: feed kitty before bed to avoid early morning stomping on my head.

I didn't take any additional supplements, like the 5-htp, or any ibuprofen, nor did I when I had my first success. However, I did take both during the failed experiments. It might be a confounding factor. If so, crap! Due to a long-term chronic back pain, it can be impossible to sleep without ibuprofen. Part of my pain today is my own fault, since I haven't taken my fish oil supplements regularly. I'll need to experiment with this again.

Next time, I'm going to go to bed really early to account for the time it takes to fall back to sleep. Also, I want to spend time each day going over my goals for when I get lucid. I shouldn't be asking my dream self "what am I supposed to do?" I should already know.

My other goal next time is to stay up a little bit longer before going back to bed. It gets your brain out of the dead-asleep state, and this is more conducive to lucidity.
~~~~~~~~~~~

My meditations have been really basic and focused on raising energy, so nothing amazing to report there. I did have some unexpected weird energetic sensations yesterday. I felt cold inside, but my skin was warm. Also, the top of my head felt like it was burning. This has happened several times before so I know it's nothing to be concerned about. I do wish I knew why it happens though, and always without provocation. I wasn't meditating at the time. Standard answer is "your crown chakra is opening" and in that case, my crown chakra has been in the process of opening for about four years now.

Galantamine failure, and juice feasting

2008-10-30T11:52:00.001-07:00

My third Galantamine experiment failed. Not even a hint of lucidity!
Next time I'll focus on what time I go to bed. My late bedtime may
throwing off my body's natural rhythms.

I'm enjoying Steve Pavlina's (www.stevepavlina.com) blog posts about
his new "juice feasting" experiment and its effects on his dreams.
He's making and consuming a gallon of juice each day, similar to a
juice fast except he's trying to consume his usual calories via juice
instead of food. Apparently it's pushing his dream life to unexpected
new heights. I wonder if the huge amount of antioxidants are doing
something to his brain.

I almost want to try it. Hmm. Anyone have a high-powered juicer I can borrow?

Galantamine Experiment #2: Failure (mostly)

2008-10-26T14:32:00.000-07:00

Second galantamine experiment was not successful. I took a full dose (8mgs galantamine, 100 mgs choline) to see if the effects would be intensified. I sufficiently prepared myself so I wasn't distracted with bodily complaints (food, warmth, comfort, etc). I took a small amount of melatonin when I went back to sleep and didn't have problems falling back asleep. But although my dreams were long and detailed, there was only one brief flash of lucidity that quickly faded.

Here's what I did different:
a) took a larger dose
b) took melatonin
c) went to bed around 1am instead of 11pm, and took the supplements after 4 hours of sleep instead of 4.5

I'll try again on Wednesday and go back to my original dose and bedtime, and skip the melatonin, and we'll see what happens. There could be other things influencing this, like the ibuprofen I took, the food I ate, or whatever. But we'll see.

First Galantamine Experiment: Success!

2008-10-21T17:57:00.000-07:00

My first galantamine/choline experiment was a success!

However, how could I have forgotten all the lucid dreaming prep secrets I learned over the past 11 years? There's no excuse for 3 hours of insomni - I know better. I should have remembered to care for my body's needs before I returned to bed (for instance, proactively feeding myself and wearing earplugs).

The dreams were solid and lengthy but I functioned at a lower level of consciousness, frequently getting distracted and forgetting that I was dreaming. And the nightmarish string of false awakenings occurred again. I tried screaming repeatedly to wake up. I tried diving back into bed where my sleeping body was, though I couldn't see it. I finally woke in my body but I don't know what triggered the awakening.

So it was successful, but I must address the false awakenings. Someone suggested that I habitually do a reality check when I wake, so I put bright multicolored paper right on the alarm clock that says "Are you really awake?" I'm always too groggy to notice, though.

I'll try again on Friday, since the protocol says this will allow the galantamine and choline to fully exit my body, reducing the chances of desensitization.

Preparing to experiment with galantamine and choline

2008-10-20T20:43:00.001-07:00

I received my order of galantamine and choline today, two supplements purported to significantly boost lucid dreaming. I'm using the protocol in Thomas Yuschak's book, and am taking 5-htp before bed to promote restful, deep sleep early in the night.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, who wants to be dependent on chemicals for lucid dreams? They are perfectly legal, ordinary chemicals that many people use for memory boosts, but still... it's altering your brain chemistry when you could be doing the usual mental protocol and keeping your independence from drugs.

On the other hand, I take fish oil to help with inflammation, multi-vitamins for RLS, etc. I'd be in a lot of pain without them (no lectures about "get your vitamins from food" please - I was on a rigid regiment of kelp and it didn't work). That's altering the chemistry in the rest of my body and I don't feel weird about that.

So what the hell, I'll try it. At the very least, it will be good to have a trigger for when I have an important mission, which I currently do have. My goal, of course, will be to find healing information for my myriad illnesses. I've thought about doing energy work while lucid, but I need more control first. In the past, any lucid dreaming healing attempts or energy works has blown my mind and woken me up immediately.

Oh ok, I promise I'll do something fun one day, like orchestrate a romantic lucid encounter with James Dean or something.

Was this a healing dream?

2008-10-19T20:05:00.000-07:00

Here's the end of my dream this morning:

The pool was on top of a tower filled with water. To get to the exit, you had to dive down maybe fifty feet and swim through the door. I wasn't sure that my asthmatic lungs had enough capacity to succeed, but I decided to dive anyway. 2/3 of the way down, I ran out of air and was forced to inhale water. But instead of drowning or choking, I breathed the water easily and reached the door.

I woke up immediately and noticed that I had no pain. None! I always wake up with the usual chronic lower back pain and rib pain. My arms and legs felt heavy and buzzing. Somehow I knew the pain would return momentarily, and it did, but those few pain-free minutes were astounding and lovely. I had forgotten what it felt like to feel good.

The dream seemed so symbolic. I wonder if it was hinting at a healing technique, whether dream or physical.
~~~~~~~~~~~~

The dream incubation exercise hasn't worked so far. I may have another technique to try.

Forgive More

2008-10-14T08:50:00.001-07:00

I always want my meditations to be something grand, like fabulous
energy surges, stunning visuals, secrets of the universe, etc. But so
frequently it comes down to basic spiritual or mental tenets that can
be summed in short phrases like, "Be nice to people" or "Forgive
more."

Today's was the latter. I was in the ER yesterday with awful pain and
I didn't know what it was. It turned out to be kidney stones, which
SUCKED. When I got home, I looked up kidney stones in Louise Hay's
little book, "You Can Heal Your Life." I'm never sure what I think of
the book. Hay relates various medical conditions with emotional
triggers, but there's no exact science about how emotions affect
physical ailments. I've worked on research that demonstrates the
effect of stress on certain conditions and actually, a lot of good
research is coming out about the mind-body interaction, but Hay's book
is pretty specific and is based on her own observations.
Nevertheless, I often look at it in curiosity. According to Hay,
kidney stones are caused by undissolved anger from the past.

Is that true for me? I don't know. Personally, I think it probably
has more to do with the mineral content in my tap water, but I can't
deny that I have a tendency to hold grudges, especially towards myself
for just about every infraction anyone could ever think of. I
reflected on this while meditating and suddenly found myself in a
place where none of that existed. No anger towards people who hurt
me. No resentment at past slights. No self-hate towards some (often
imagined) slight imperfection. I had a taste of what it felt like to
be separate from one's past.

Who was it that said, "Hate is like drinking poison and expecting the
other person to get sick"? That's what struck me today. For a moment
during my meditation, I felt clean, totally free of all the negative,
angry resentments towards all the wrongs I'd suffered and all the
failures in my life. For me, "failure" can be stuff like, "Remember
in the second grade when you did the math problem wrong at the
chalkboard? You are such a loser - why don't you just die already?"
Sounds harsh, eh? Like some mythical evil stepmother from a
fairy-tale. Is it any wonder I'm suffering all these weird physical
problems when that crap is floating around in my psyche?

So I'm really trying to remember that moment of freedom. It wasn't
peace. It wasn't acceptance. It was actual freedom, like realizing
I'd been walking with a ball and chain, and realizing I could just
unfetter myself and move forward.

Maybe "forgiveness" will be my next archmed.

Thinking about Patience

2008-10-08T10:26:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking about how to re-structure my meditations. After a
month of very basic healing work, I feel mostly caught up and I'm
starting to get bored.

I've decided to start with the exercises in Stephen LaBerge's book
"Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming." I've casually read this book
several times, but have done the exercises only haphazardly.
Haphazard. That's a nice word for what I do. My attempts at any
meditative or psi exercises usually go like this:
-Decide to try neat new exercise
-3 days pass with no success
-Decide it doesn't work and move on to the next exercise

Do I even have to comment on the foolishness of this approach? My dear
old father used to say, "Patience is a waste of time." I have
inherited that attitude, unfortunately.

So I'll start with a very simple exercise that seldom yields results:
dream incubation. It's one of the first exercises in LaBerge's book.
Dream incubation only seems to work for me if I'm extremely emotional,
like if I'm very angry about something and I want answers. I'd rather
have more control over incubation, so I'm going to try LaBerge's
exercise for a month, or until I have success.

Wish me luck. I started two days ago, and haven't yet succeeded in
incubating a dream. I'm fighting my urge to say, "This shit don't
work!" and plow ahead.

I'm also shooting for a twice-weekly archmed. I'm trying to take
advantage of some gaps in my schedule. More about that later.

Archmed health advice, and dream decline

2008-10-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

I fell asleep during my recent archmeds (of course), but a couple of highlights:
a) encountering a younger, lost part of myself. Very cool, and she reminded me to take joy in solitary creations, nature, and to let the "shoulds" of life pass me by.

b) Brandelys showed me a visualization technique to use during stressful moments. He said the problem is that the stress hormones accumulate in my body, and I try to clean them out afterwards. It doesn't work because it's like trying to bail water out of a boat with a hull breech. Instead, I need to be aware of stress as it occurs (no mean feat) and use a 'neutralizing chemical mist" to fill the areas that are absorbing the physical tension and stress.

It's just a visual. I don't know if it actually does anything to the hormone levels, but it does feel better. Remembering to do it, though, now that's a trick.

I'm inspired to start more seriously on my lucid dreaming attempts. More later.

Oh yeah, I also said I'd write about why I'm having less Totally Fantastic Dreams. In short, I'm more wrapped up in the grown-up world now, and that involves worry. Worry about money, the economy, job concerns, health concerns, social impressions, etc. Shoulds, shoulds, shoulds! Worrying takes up a shocking amount of energy and contributes to the stress hormone overload, which contributes to health woes. Any meditation becomes sleep, and any sleep becomes a frenzied attempt to heal the body rather than do extraneous things like dream.

I think that's why I encountered that younger part of myself during the meditation. She was trying to point this out. So ok. I will indulge my pleasures and passions, neutralize worry, and mock all "shoulds."

This is probably horribly written due to my exhaustion, but I really wanted to write this down before I forgot any more.

"Things in the Sky" dreams

2008-10-02T21:46:00.000-07:00

While I was on the PsiberDreaming Conference Boards, I answered a question about UFO dreams. I've had several. But here's something odd - UFO dreams are a subset my "Dreams of Things in the Sky" category. These dreams have a particular quality of stunning vividness, low-level lucidity, higher-level sensory experiences like smell and taste, and sometimes a sense of transcendence, merging with the divine, or even a deep sense of fear. I've seen UFOs, flocks of birds, giant mechanical parrots, impossible cloud formations, geometric patterns, star charts, gears, and even two warriors in a hot air balloon's gondola, asking me if I wanted to join their vision quest. Last night I saw a thin, spinning disc (more like an "O") hovering in the sky, going in and out of view as though it were behind fast-moving clouds, even though the dream-sky was cloudless.

What does this imply?
I'm still trying to figure this out. Usually the "Things in the Sky" dreams feel like an intense dream that must have actually taken place outside my own brain. That's why the UFO dreams are usually scary, and the others are merely awe-inspiring and beautiful. I could argue that I really am seeing alien spacecraft on an astral level, and my fear reaction prompts the "aliens" to mask it as something more pleasant.

I could also argue that any "Thing in the Sky" is a particular symbol, and the day's emotions are influencing the image that I see. A bad day might produce a scary UFO. A good day might produce a beautiful hot air balloon. I should start charting this (yesterday: good emotions). Maybe it's precognitive and is alerting me to some important event coming up (today: nothing too shocking).

But what is the symbol? It must be something extremely important, because a Thing in the Sky is jaw-droppingly impossible to ignore. It always fills me with excitement and I start shouting, "Look at that! I can't believe it! Do you see that?"

Can you re-train biological responses to stress?

2008-09-27T23:26:00.001-07:00

I have a cold. It WILL be gone by Monday.

I felt twinges of it yesterday, but it really blew up after watching a friend's play with some unexpected violence that really disturbed me. So annoying! Theoretically, it's very interesting how my body reacts to a stressful event, even if it's fictional and not mine. I think a virus was hanging around but couldn't get a foothold, and then my body reacted physically to a "stressful event" and the virus was like "Yes! Strike now while the body's defenses are pointlessly focused on something else!"

In practice, though, it's damned annoying. I wonder if I can re-train my body's biological responses? I mean, how often is a fight-or-flight response really appropriate? Normally it's a social "threat" and the biological fight-or-flight response is actually a hindrance. Though I'm not sure how I'd go about it, this might be a job for biofeedback.

...
...

Ok, I can't resist: "THIS might be a job for ... Biofeedback Woman!"

I tried to do an archmed today and immediately fell through the cave into a room of my inner house. It's kind of like a healing spa - guess I needed it.

Heavy post: identity

2008-09-25T21:32:00.000-07:00

In her blog, PJ discusses practicing remote viewing and suddenly becoming aware of several aspects of herself arguing for the chance to present the target information to her. She writes:

In pure astonishment, I observed this group. It was a large group of people, all separate identities, and yet I understood that they were all "part of what makes up the energy I think of as me.

This makes perfect sense to me. It also freaks me the fuck out. My brain has written a haphazard little poem (it does that while under stress, but it usually has more curse words and stories about chickens dancing in the moonlight):

I am composed of many identities
joining together to make "me."
I join with others to make
something larger
until finally we are All.
This also means that
"I" do not exist.
My ego objects fiercely.
Like if I admit this
I'm dead
and so is my world
and maybe,
like the New Agers say,
I'll eventually reawaken
as some lovely divine awareness
but I don't have
the vacation time accumulated
to die and be reborn yet.

When I was ... uh ... altered - and yes, I realize this automatically invalidates the experience for others, but it happened to me so I can't dismiss it as a meaningless hallucination - I had an interesting experience. I was suddenly aware of several small entities buzzing around inside me and sniping at each other in a mean-spirited way. They were watching me like I was on a movie screen. I was this glorious, larger-than-life being full of light and life. They believed that I was a god, and that they were the lowly worms. They were continually arguing and putting each other down; they created the ceaseless buzz that way. As I became aware of them, I sunk from the screen to their level and floated among them. They really resented me being among them and not buying into the lowly worm business, so they focused on beating me down by trying to convince me that I didn't deserve to be me! It didn't work, but it took a lot of work to overcome. It was highly unpleasant.

But wait ... if I was suddenly among them and they were convincing me that I didn't deserve to be the ME on the screen ... then who was the me on the screen?

Furthermore, why was Screen-Me so great? She works in an office all day, lives an average life, isn't in the greatest health, has never been skydiving or anything amazing, isn't well-traveled, and is fairly undisciplined. She does have a fantastic romantic life :) But a god? No. What they saw was not my perception of me. The person they saw was like a movie character, a creation, an ideal. I could sense some truth to it in the sense that we are all gods when we remember to realize it fully, which is easier said than done, but my overwhelming sense was, "Wow, this idea of ME is a creation. I am separate from Her."

So what's that mean?

You could say that it was the Higher Self looking at the ego and the character. The character was the person on the screen. The ego was the cumulative effect of all the little swarming beings being possessive of the character - kind of like a group of middle-school girls arguing over what member of the boy band is "theirs." And the person observing all of it was the actual me, separate from the identity and the aspects.

Or it means that nothing in my life is real. I'm composed of a bunch of smaller awarenesses who can be peeled away like an onion skin, and there's no real "me" underneath. There's just the character that we adopt.

And THAT just makes me want to lay down and die, or to at least look around and say, "Well, I'm done here, I guess that dream is over" and wake up. There's a possibility that waking up would be indescribably beautiful, just as there's another possibility that it could be the most horrific thing ever with no escape. But it's almost a certainty that I would also lose everything here.

And that's a strange echo, isn't it? That's exactly what the little bastards were trying to convince me of. The layers make me nauseated.

Coincidentally, here's what I dreamed this morning:

I dreamed I was a teenage girl and I was moving away from my parents. I was too young to be on my own but I was determined to ditch the boring 'rents. Man, they were always holding me down, refusing to let me grow up, and telling me what to do! I left and wandered around, always unsure of myself and my safety. I walked into a small-town gathering where the majority of the townspeople were Native Americans. I talked to a few older ladies about the shawls they were wearing, which were tied/draped in interesting ways.

There was a time-skip.

Dave and I were in some kind of doctor's office/laboratory. We were both very tall and slender, and we were not human, at least not in the way we are now. We were ancient, yet ageless, bonded in a deep, time-spanning way. My emotions were calm and I knew that little perturbed me.

The doctor came out and showed us something that looked like a mandrake root. It was burned a little and twisted, though not on a physical level. The doctor said, "I'm sorry, this one didn't take."

"Oh. That's ok," I murmured, staring curiously. Well, the baby had incubated but had not grown. It happened sometimes. We had eons to create another one if we felt like it. I had the sense that this creature would have grown into a being like us, and that it was created from psychic interaction between two people deeply entwined.
~~~~~~~~~
Go figure.

Sleep Deja Vu

2008-09-23T20:04:00.001-07:00

Nothing new to speak of in my meditations - just the standard healing stuff.

Something on a forum reminded me of dream deja vu. The topic was "remembering past dreams while you are dreaming." It occurs to me frequently and I view it as an indicator of low level lucidity - I'm aware enough to think about dreams I've had in the past. Of course, I seldom move onto the logical next step of "So I must be dreaming now!"

But then there's dream deja vu. I'll be flat-out wrong about dreaming about something before. I'll wake up and realize that no, I really haven't had that dream before. Even weirder is the sleep-talk deja vu. D talks in his sleep frequently and I wake up just enough to say, "You said that last night, too" or "Why do you always say that at this time of night?" In the morning, we both realize that he never said any such thing. And the strangest thing? Sometimes he agrees! In his half-asleep state, he confirms that yes, he definitely remembers saying whatever on a previous night. In the morning, we realize that we were both wrong.

It could be that in all instances, I really am remembering something that already happened, but the memory is only accessible in a dream state. Or it could be a weird misfiring of the brain, which is what some researchers think about deja vu in general. It could be some grand cosmic scheme to draw my attention towards a valuable dream element, hell, I don't know. Is it weirder than my sleep-dressing or prior years? I'd get up in the middle of the night, say "I have to get dressed because we're having visitors," get fully dressed, then go back to sleep. Oh, that isn't creepy or anything.

Sometimes sleep phenomenon is weirder than dreams.

Archmed: Lifeless photo

2008-09-20T10:14:00.000-07:00

I woke up early this morning and decided to use this time to do an archmed, which is a term I'm borrowing from PJ to describe Edwin Steinbrecher's Inner Guide Meditation. Through discovering your Inner Guide, you use him/her to help create archetypes of any problem or concept that you want to deal with or explore.

You're supposed to start out in a cave. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't. Today the cave looked more like an underground temple with carved pillars and engraved floors, rather than rough natural stone. I climbed my way out and saw Brandelys at his usual spot, reading a book at a streamside picnic table. This time I parachuted down. Ha! Fun :)

I'd been thinking about various archetypes I could ask for, but nothing stuck out, so I asked if we could focus on whatever would be most useful to me at this time. He obliged. It took me a long time to realize that the arch was composed of mirror fragments reflecting a person, and that I was supposed to reassemble them. That was easy enough using the lovely psychokinetic abilities I have in dreams and meditations (not in waking life, damn it!). I realized it was actually a cube and I went around each side defragmenting it.

When I finished, I stood in front of a mirrored cube that was reflecting an image of myself, except the details were wrong (for instance, I'd never worn that hairstyle). I had no sense of what this was about. Since archetypes often require healing or an energy exchange, I climbed on top of the box and tried sending healing energy in, but my efforts bounced right off. I unscrewed the hinges on the box and carefully took down the mirrors. The picture inside was lifeless and no amount of healing work did anything.

"What's going on?" I asked Brandelys. "What can I do with this?"

"Put it in a photo album where it belongs," he suggested.

I did a split-consciousness transfer to a photo album in my inner-house (didn't know I had a photo album there - I'll have to browse that later) and waited for something to occur. Nothing happened. I snapped back to the clearing with Brandelys.

"It didn't do anything. What's wrong?," I asked.

"You're doing the right thing."

"But I thought archetypes were supposed to represent a personal energy that you could interact with, speak to, resolve things with, merge with, all that."

"She needed to be let go and that's all."

Then D performed one of his massive sleep-twitches next to me and jarred me completely out of the meditation.

I've never had a meditation like this where the archetype had absolutely no energy at all. I don't know what to make of it. The dream I had after this was unpleasant with themes of theft, doors with broken latches (something I haven't dreamed about in a long time), and D doing dangerous things that scared me, so perhaps some energy associated with that picture has left me. But ... I mean really, what the hell was that?

IASD Conference and the ramifications of old emotion

2008-09-15T21:19:00.001-07:00

I bought a membership to the International Association for the Study of Dreams and will "attend" their 2 week online conference. I'm excited! Of all my weird hobbies and interests, dreams are priority.

Today one of my favorite lucid dream inductors was kicked to the curb. My chiropractor says that sleeping on the couch aggravates my neck problems. Damn! Sleeping somewhere other than your bed can unsettle your body just enough to make it ask, 'Wait, where am I?" causing lucid dreams. Unfortunately it also causes my neck to go, 'WTF is this sub-standard sleeping arrangement?" Ah well. It's definitely not the only induction method in my files.

I've held off on serious lucid dreaming pursuits this year because I've been sick and I need my sleep, and lucid dreaming experiments disrupt my sleep schedule. I'd like to get back into it on some level without sacrificing my health. I'll have to ponder that this week.

~~~~~

Healing endeavors: while working on my lower abdomen, a particularly troublesome area, I had a sudden flash of an old high school crush. His name was Alvaro, and he was a gorgeous Central American college student. My dad would have never let me date him, and I was too immature to be dating a college guy anyway. I always feel a deep sense of embarrassment when I think of it. My automatic voice (you know, that one that lives in the back of everyone's heads) said, "OMG, I can't believe you were such a moron." Of course, everyone is a moron to some extent when they're 16. But as this flashed through my mind, I felt a stabbing pain in my gut, the kind I might take no notice of ordinarily because it's so fast and frequent. I tune them out.

I wonder how many problem areas have ... well, like old emotion lodged in them. On closer inspection, the old emotion's visual was like a razor embedded in flesh and forgotten. No wonder I have so many problems there. If such minor incidents are involved with health problems, who knows what more major things have done?

Layers and Sub-layers when Healing: pellets

2008-09-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

Today when doing healing on D, who is suffering a flare-up of his respiratory problem, I noticed what I can only describe as "like shotgun pellets" in each layer of the area I was working on. Easy enough to remove, but weird. I've never seen them before. My lesson is to keep checking the sub-layers. Something can look fine on the surface and even 10 layers in, but on the 30th layer I might find something nasty. I always go inward, but I wonder if I should also be going outward into the aura. For some reason, that seems more intimidating. More space to cover, I guess.

I took a day off and was going to go hiking in the foothills today, but it's cold and rainy. I might still go and just brave the rain. Or maybe I will sit at home listening to silly Coast to Coast broadcasts while working on my giant basket of clothes to alter/repair. I must walk around the neighborhood, at least. There are blackberries and tiny little apples to pick. The small size is good for me because it gives me a sweet treat without putting too much sugar into my body. Sugar will knock me out and ruin my healing efforts.

I need to do some standard clearing meditation now.

I like my new job but I really wish I had more "off" days like this. Working only 30 hours is a possibility, so I try to keep that in mind. When you have a gazillion health appointments, have to cook all your own food from scratch, need to meditate and exercise to stay healthy, need time to lay flat each day to ease chronic pain, etc., working 40+ hours just sucks the life out of you.

Biogram Experimentation

2008-09-12T00:28:00.001-07:00

Tonight I was slammed with intense waves of love for my wonderful husband. I always welcome this and the energy exchange it prompts. And then, of course, I'm wide awake until 4am while he sleeps peacefully. Energy influx right before bed = insomnia. Ah well.

I experimented with the Biogram theory, based on PJ's write-up. My only biofeedback equipment is from the Wild Divine game, which I imagine is limited in comparison to real clinical biofeedback gear. I was amazed at how steady I could keep my energy while doing a body-energy scan. I used the hidden numerical meter and kept seeing it stop for several seconds, then continue lowering. That never happened before when I played in game mode. The numbers were always in motion. There's something about focusing on the energetic body that keeps the numbers still or constantly dropping (a good sign in this game).

While I didn't see large jumps, I did see the numbers flicker up briefly and then back down. I used those flickers as my "sign" from the body and asked my body to vent whatever stored emotion was there. I had no physical reactions, but we'll see if it shows up in dreams.

Maybe the fact that I had such intense energy before bed was a sign that something was released. I don't know, but I'll take it.

Nothing of note today in my meditation, which took place during acupuncture.

Pondering post-death connections

2008-09-10T20:13:00.000-07:00

Random thought: sometimes two people develop energetic cords to each other, especially people in a close relationship (family, best friend, romantic relationship, etc.). The energy exchange may or may not be beneficial to all parties. Sometimes it's downright parasitic.

I wonder what would happen if someone suffered a parasitic cord from a bad relationship, and then the "feeder" person died and remained a ghost? Would the ghost still feed off that cord? Or would the cord crumble upon his/her death because it somehow relied on living human bodies to function?

When I start pondering thoughts like this, I know it's either time to go to bed or write a short story. Because I'm lazy, I'm going to bed.

Thoughts on self-healing after a long absence

2008-09-09T18:16:00.000-07:00

I couldn't keep focused after 20 minutes of listening to Hemi-Sync. It always puts me in a trance state, which is great, but my mind wanders into mini-dreams. Lately I've read that these mini-dreams are important in their own right. I believe this, but I'm weary of the constant snapping-to and falling-off. Health-related meditation absences prompt these kinds of problems. When your physical body is so taxed, any relaxation immediately transforms to sleep. I'm hoping that chi kung and daily energy raising exercises will help with this. I'm depleted.

Anyway, I was doing Hemisync for a reason. I'd heard an interview with Bruce Lipton, author of the Biology of Belief. I haven't read the book yet, but as far as I can tell his basic idea is to coordinate the two brain hemispheres while "reprogramming" yourself verbally. So ... Hemisync and affirmations, right? I'll try this for a few weeks and see what happens.

Today after the basic clearing meditation, I decided to explore the mental body that harbors thought constructs and beliefs. It was gunky from several months of stress and reduced meditation time. This will be a multi-day project. I can't say what all the tiny disturbances are related to, though I'll probably gain insight while working on them. Is it best to simply disassemble the geometric forms rather than try to analyze their sources? You may need to know causes to prevent problems from reoccuring, but I wonder if residual belief structures - you know, stuff I've outgrown that I've never bothered to clear out - might be permanently removed with one or two purposeful clearings.

I wonder how much technique vs. theory I should put here. My right side has a prominent object that will require a lot of work. It looks a bit like a rubber nipple. Fabulous imagery there.

When I came to, it was 11:11. Funny! This number has cult status, and people give it all sorts of planetary and spiritual meaning. I don't know what it means, really, but I see it frequently. You could argue that I see it because I am expecting to see it, like I've been conditioned by the meme. Maybe. I wonder if I set out to find 10:29 if I would notice it more often? Alternatively, could I assign a meaning to 10:29 and manifest it some way by noticing it?

Or maybe it means lovely planetary peace and stuff. That sounds great. Bring it on.

I finally began

2008-09-08T20:30:00.000-07:00

I've been talking about a separate, topic-oriented blog for awhile now. I wanted to make my esoteric musings available to those who may find them useful, even though I know it will only be a handful of people. I'll be honest and admit that I don't know how long I'll keep this, and that this is an experiment. I'm a private person, mistrustful of the general public, and a non-protected blog is a great departure from my usual web workings. But how can I connect with like-minded folks if I keep my silence?

I have loads of things I could write about, and projects I want to work on. However, my current goal is to get back to daily, lengthy energy meditations and whatever it leads to. My daily meditations are my foundation for more involved experiences. My foundation was ripped out from under me this year due to harsh employment and family emergencies. I'm recovering and healing. For this month, I'll be writing about energy work, healing work, relevant dreams, the effect of nutrition on experiences, etc. Next month I'll probably focus more on what fellow blogger PJ calls "archmeds" and will probably do some this month as well.

And being a writer, maybe I'll try to make this, you know, interesting. Sage told me I need to work on my voice because years of academic writing corrupted it, and now it's dry and formal. I guess my alter-ego emerges in my humor writing, and I should try mixing the two. There, "mixing." Is that a more engaging word choice than my original word "merging?" Or not?
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Dream this weekend: Dave introduced me to some young men of Middle Eastern descent. They had invented a free-energy source they called the Einat Amber Plug. It was developed along with something they nicknamed a Sand Bag. I saw diagrams but don't recall much about them. Something about a flooded city and a political race (that's probably residual day imagery from current events in the news).

Einat is a kibbutz in Israel, and the name of an electronics company that specializes in optical engineering. I can think of no reason why amber would have anything to do with energy, unless it's in a metaphysical sense. I have no experience with any of them.

I don't know. Sometimes dreams are just processing. But when I get the "Device Dreams" I perk up. They're usually very vivid and stick with me for days.
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I'll make this blog pretty later. I have a book to finish. It's the worst editing job I've EVER seen (I want to take a highlighter and highlight the mistakes on each page, and send it back to the publisher with an invoice) but the author raises interesting points. He focuses on the San Luis Valley here in Colorado, one of my favorite spots. It's the kind of place that will make your heart sing if you're attuned to the dry atmosphere and scrub landscape. The Sangre de Christos stand imposing and indifferent, unlike the Boulder Flatirons that (to me, anyway) seem warm and welcoming to human presence. The Sangres are wild.

I like wild things. Sometimes, I am one. But usually I type too often against a background of electronic music and cafe hum.