What’s behind our dreams?

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Have you ever wondered who is directing your dreams? What intelligence is behind the nightly panaroma of drama and storyline? You can find this out for yourself in a process called lucid dreaming. You can learn to be awake during your dream state, to have control over what happens in the dream – even to conduct experiments in your dreams.

This has all kinds of interesting possibilities. You can choose to meet celebrities or dead relatives in your dreams. You can travel the world or visit other planets and dimensions. You can meet friends in your dreams, and compare notes the next day. Anything is possible. A great deal of research has been committed toward discovering the endless possibilities of lucid dreaming – including doing healing work in that state. You can learn more at www.ld4all.com, www.lucidity.com, and www.dreaminglucid.com, among others.

More importantly though, you can use lucid dreaming to achieve enlightenment. The Tibetan dream yogis who specialize in lucid dream training call this enlightened state the “clear light of seeing”. This is the state from which all manifestations arise. It’s where everything is before it becomes anything.

Spiritual guru, Adyashanti, tells us to listen to the silence behind everything. This also pertains to the concept of looking behind our dreams to experience the loving intelligence operative there.

In our waking life, we’re preoccupied with our interactions with people, events, and things. Tibetan yogis consider this awake state to be a dream, and scientific studies show that our brains don’t know the difference between the “waking” state and the “dream” state. These yogis would say that we need to wake up from both in order to experience life as it really is.

In the lucid dream, after mastering our ability to interact with dream people, events, and things, we can transcend all of them. We can allow all manifestations – including our own body, ego, and mind – to dissolve into the clear light of seeing. In that light, there is no identity to uphold, nothing to interact with, nothing to fear or fix. There is only that peaceful light and a sense of being one with it.

Isn’t it wonderful that we can use that third of our lives spent sleeping actually experiencing enlightenment?

Drop a line and share your lucid dreams. What adventures have you had? How did you first know you were lucid? What did you do to stay that way? I look forward to hearing your stories.

If this information interests you, and you’re in the Kingston, ON area, you can still sign up for Sunday’s course on Lucid Dreaming at www.tarotkingston.com/Workshops.html

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A Poem about Lucid Dreaming

I publish this poem to entice you to explore the lucid dream state.

Unfettered World

why would you not explore this unfettered world?

nightly, I write my ticket
deciding where to go
whom to see

travelling through the many worlds
calling to me others and shouting
“Wake up! Do not lose this chance to be free!”

why forsake the magic carpet?
why deny yourself the honest dream?

to fly, to dive the depths and know the highest peak
to walk through walls and conjure objects, people

do not slumber, do not fail
it is a brave soul who wanders the night’s terrain
who dares to break the bonds of physics

and if you venture forth
and when you’ve won your battle with fear
and when you’ve learned to make the dream

why then break the dream
arrive at the clear light of seeing
be a drop of the infinite

so when death comes
it will be no stranger
for you’ve danced in her doorway before

                                              Bonita Summers, Copyright 2010

Learn more about lucid dream techniques at my upcoming January workshop at www.tarotkingston.com/Workshops.html.

The New Rational Thinking – The King of Pentacles

The Aquatic Tarot. Author/Artist: ©Andreas Schröter 1995-2002

Drawing the King of Pentacles is a good reminder that science and rational thinking are valuable tools as long as we don’t allow them to run the show and subvert the intuition. Both aspects of consciousness need to work together for balance.

There are new possibilities opening up in the world of science regarding the value of intuition. Increasingly, quantum physics is serving to verify what metaphysicians have always believed – that the world of thought creates the world of matter. Quantum theory has shown that matter is affected at the atomic level by the act of measuring it. In other words, the observer affects matter by the mere act of observation.

It’s been extrapolated that we make up the world of matter each day, based on our expectations. We see what we expect to see. In other words, this material world is not that different from the dream world, except that here certain laws about gravity and matter seem to apply.

In the dream state, achieving lucidity means being as awake in the dream just as we are in the waking world. When we are lucid, everything appears as real as the waking world, except all bets are off when it comes to the laws of physics. Here, we can walk through walls, fly, swim without holding our breath, travel anywhere at the speed of thought, and change our dream scenarios just by thinking about them.

Years of research into lucid dreaming have yielded new realizations that affect our scientific view of the material world. People have trained themselves to share dream states and have corroborated details that verify having met in a dream. Healers are enhancing their skills by applying them to patients during the lucid dream state. Experimental subjects are finding ways to indicate to researchers that they are lucid while in the dream state. There is a crossover now between dreaming and the waking state that is consciously driven.

Moreover, very adept lucid dreamers are discovering a state beyond waking and lucid dreaming, known by Tibetan Buddhist dream yogis as the “clear light of seeing”. In this state, all objects and environments disappear and one is in a state of beingness where a personal identity does not exist.

So, science is now traversing new ground that will ultimately help us realize in a direct and profound way that the waking and dream states are still layers of illusion. Eventually, with training and practice aided by modern dream research and ancient techniques, we will experience reality as it is, free of assumptions and illusion. It is the balance between rational-based research and intuitive realization that will lead us to the deepest understanding of who we are and how we fit into the universe.

Honour your Creativity – The Nine of Wands

The Aquatic Tarot. Author/Artist: ©Andreas Schröter 1995-2002

Today’s tarot card warns us not to squander our creativity. The creative force is a natural energy running through all of us. By its nature, it seeks expression. When we neglect it, I believe we actually sacrifice our well-being.

Ask yourself how much of your stress is directly related to not doing something that you really want to do. Are you living your dreams or settling for what feels safe, secure and available?

When we answer our soul’s calling and find ways to express our creativity, we rediscover our personal power, our intuition, and our spontaneity. We find the child in us who sees all things as magical.

Ask yourself how you can be creative today. In small and large ways, seek to do what your soul desires. Be open to thinking outside the box and being silly and playful.

Sit quietly and ask yourself several times during the day what you’d really like to do in that moment and be open to the answer. Then, follow through as best you can. If you can’t give expression at that moment to your soul’s desire, make a list of steps to achieving it, and take the first step – even if that step is just researching scuba-diving schools on the Net during your coffee break.

As you take steps toward living your dreams, you give energy to meeting those goals. That energy frees up your path to take the next step, and the next. Before you know it, you’re doing what you’ve always wanted to do.

Take it from my friend, Susan Biali, a doctor who decided to become a flamenco dancer  - and succeeded. It’s never too late to live your dreams. Just take a chance… and take that first step.

Adventures in Lucid Dreaming

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Looking for a direct connection to your intuition? Look no further than lucid dreaming. You can successfully program your mind to give you answers to your questions in your dreams. However, your subconscious may give you a different response from the one you expect.

Before I fell asleep last night, I asked to be shown a picture of my future. Instead, I had a dream about a TV character whose job is to find the truth. She is shown her future and then sets out to ruthlessly create it in the now, deciding to buy the house she will have and to marry a man she just met, whom she’s been shown she will marry. In the dream, it’s obvious that the woman is rushing to create a future that was meant to unfold at its own pace. The message to me was clear: some things I’m not meant to know yet, because I would pursue them before their time.

On the other hand, I’ve had dreams where I was given specific information regarding my future. I learned my children’s sex before their births. Sometimes, this requires interpretation of dream symbols. For example, I had a dream that two young colts were galloping around our backyard. One was larger and russet-coloured, and the other was smaller and dark. Since I already had a red-haired boy, I assumed from the dream that I would have another boy with dark hair, since I was seeing the same type of animal, only a different colour. Sure enough, I gave birth to a boy with darker hair. Years later, watching my sons chase each other around the yard, they possessed the same playful energy as those young colts in the dream.

When I was pregnant with my third son, I had a dream that I drove in a car with relatives to the local dump where we found a black wooden cradle, brought it home, and painted it blue. The symbolism this time was completely obvious.

In my daughter’s case, she appeared to me in a vision during meditation, wearing a yellow bonnet. I conceived her three months later, and she received two of these yellow bonnets at her baby shower.

If you wish to program yourself to receive information from your dreams, you need to be very specific in your language and know how to interpret what you see. To learn more, consider taking my course on lucid dream technique. Sign up at www.tarotkingston.com. See you there!

Parting the Veil between the Two Worlds – The High Priestess

The Aquatic Tarot. Author/Artist: ©Andreas Schröter 1995-2002

The High Priestess stands at the crossroads between the conscious and the subconscious states. Drawing her is an invitation to surrender to your feelings, your intuition. Allow yourself to let go and cease trying to control your internal processes, for they will lead you to her domain beyond the veil.

The High Priestess beckons us to explore the mysteries of our inner terrain. She comfortably traverses it, because it’s her domain. For those of us new to travelling to that region, the ride can be bumpy. It’s not an easy experience, looking at your shadow, that part of you that usually stays hidden. It’s the part that we normally only give way to while dreaming.

Letting the occult bubble to the  surface – allowing what is hidden about us to become involved at the conscious level – is not a journey for the faint of heart. Emotions can be turbulent and overwhelming; dream images can haunt us during our waking hours; glimpses of the world beyond this one can have a transforming effect on the world of the mundane.

To truly connect with the divine, we need to embrace the invitation of the High Priestess, and allow transformation to take place. We must let go of the narrow sense of self hemmed in by ego and be willing to allow for the expanded Self that in truth exists eternal.

We are so much more than we seem to be. Becoming that means simply letting go and falling into what is.

Tarot Card of the Day – The Eight of Pentacles

The Aquatic Tarot. Author/Artist: ©Andreas Schröter 1995-2002

It doesn’t surprise me that I’ve drawn the eight of pentacles today. I’ve been given an amazing gift by a dear friend, a scrying mirror. Using this blackened mirror is like working with a crystal ball. You gaze into it and allow images to surface. I’ve also been exploring with increasing depth the experience of lucid dreaming and what lies beyond the dream terrain, something I’ll be discussing in greater detail in my upcoming workshop on lucid dreaming.

The eight of pentacles prompts us to recognize ourselves as divine beings. To do this, we have to use whatever means are available to us to plumb our own depths and discover what we are when we strip away our ego identities and all the material trappings that prop them up.

We can meditate, scry, and explore what lies behind the lucid dream. We can disconnect from the noise of the thinking mind and attain a state of pure beingness during meditation. We can interact directly with our subconscious archetypal material with scrying, and we can learn to realize clear light consciousness with further exploration of the lucid dream state.

We need no longer be content with stories from sacred texts and spiritual leaders. We can discover these truths for ourselves and know our divinity if we have the courage to traverse our inner terrain.

Upcoming Workshops

Sign up for my workshops at Tarot Kingston. Book all five and get one of them free! $150 value for $120. All workshops are being held at the Wellington Street Theatre, 126 Wellington Street, Kingston, ON on Sundays from 1 to 5 p.m.

Reading the Human Energy Field: Parts 1 and 2 – Jan 17, 24

Lucid Dreaming: Awakening in the Dream State – Feb 21

Tarot, Runes and your Intuition – Feb 28

Writing from the Inner Voice – Mar 7

See you there!