Dreaming of Tarot

February 28, 2025


The Dream 

I go to a lake and see a white swan. I like it so much that I pick it up and take it home. It is hauntingly beautiful, with bright, white feathers. At one point it looks at me, turning its neck in an odd, angular but graceful, way and I see its eyes are not really like animal eyes. Instead they seem human and are unusually beautiful and expressive. 

I decide to keep the swan in my room because I know my family won't approve that I've brought it into the house. I let it sleep next to me in bed and it is warm and I take comfort in knowing it is there. At one point in the dream I am telling someone about the swan and how it was not like other swans, that even its feathers were soft like fur, etc. and how wonderful it was.

Later in the dream, I'm sitting in my room on my bed with the swan and I notice it is surrounded by tarot cards. It picks up the cards one by one in its beak and lay them out for a reading. In the dream, I am fascinated instead of surprised. I see some pentacles and the death card. My dog, Luna, is in the room (in real life and also in the dream). In the dream she starts growling and barking at the swan.

My Perspective

While I do believe that certain dreams can be prophetic, to me, the most common purpose of  dreams is to help us better understand ourselves and situations we may be facing. I think that dreams can be spiritual or "psychic" but not prophetic.

In the case of the swan dream, signs that this might be a spiritual dream included the tarot card piece coupled with the unusual beauty of the swan. I tend to look outside my own personal experience for dreams like this especially when I don't have any real experience with a particular element. 

In this case, I don't have any particular experience with swans aside from really liking a bas-relief I saw once of Leda with the swan and couldn't find again. While I love Keats, his Leda and the Swan never really spoke to me.

My favorite book on symbols did have something interesting to say, however:
Combining the two elements of air and water, the swan is the bird of life: the dawn of day... It also symbolizes solitude and retreat and is the bird of the poet; its dying song is the poet's song... ~ An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols by J.C. Copper
I do have a lot of experience with tarot and used to read professionally. I have been thinking about using tarot again for personal insight and reflection. I have been worried about getting pulled back into predictive reading, however, which I would like to avoid.

My dog Luna is my best friend in the world and I feel she was being protective in this dream. I don't think that necessarily means there is anything dangerous about the swan or tarot, however, because Luna is a barker and too protective of me at times. She also extremely aware of my moods. So I take her behavior as being more about inner conflict than an actual threat.

I actually think that this dream is more about writing than it is about tarot, because that has also been something very much on mind as I get older. I love blogging but I really would like to finish and publish a book. Possible my swan song.

The fact that Keats wrote a poem on this topic, isn't irrelevant, in my opinion. I don't love that particular poem and I don't love a lot of my own work either. Book Cooper and my own associations (Keats) suggest a connection to poetry or possibly poetic writing.

In it's highest application, I think of tarot as a tool for person insight. So I'll consider what insight might be relevant to my writing. According to J.C. Cooper, tarot may represent esoteric insight. That's interesting to me because I've been conflicted over just how much metaphysical content I should include in a current project.
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The Story of a Dream

February 12, 2025


I've gone back and forth on the topic of writing my "dream memoir" a lot. On one hand, it seems completely ridiculous for an ordinary person who has not achieved anything unusual in life to write a memoir. 

On the other hand, I lost hope and a dream saved me, and I feel called to tell that story.

I honestly don't know at this point if I'll be sharing that story here in the blog or in a long-form format but here is the intro:

In 2008, at the lowest point in my life, I had a dream I couldn’t explain.

Unlike the murky, sepia colored dreams I was used to, this dream was sharp and bright and saturated with color. A spectrum of blue, unlike anything I’d ever seen. Vivid reds. Shining white light. A beautiful woman with deep-water blue eyes, radiating love.

Filled with sparkling gemstones and mysterious beings, the dream told the story of a journey to and from an amazing location, and it told that story coherently.

As the woman in blue guided me from one dream experience to another, separate themes played out, like story-lines in a movie. When the dream finally ended, each loose end came together in a memorable and emotional conclusion.

I woke up convinced that my mysterious dream guide was someone special. I knew that the things that she showed me meant something. And even though I had no idea who she was or what she was trying to tell me, I was determined to find out.

This was the beginning of a spiritual journey that carried me through the New Age, in and out of Spiritualism and Wicca, halfway across the world, on pilgrimage to Israel, back to Christianity, through parapsychology, and onto the doorstep of Carl Gustav Jung.

And it all began with the dream, I would come to call the Spirit Dream. It was the initiation to the mystery and, ultimately, the key to deciphering it. The journey itself, however, was a process. 

For me, this process was a breadcrumb path of spiritual experience, odd synchronicities, and a host of lesser dreams. These smaller events guided me from one spiritual realization to another, like stepping through the dark—and I would have been off the path and well into the weeds without them. 

And so in the pages that follow, I have shared them all.

In the rest of this chapter, I talk about the life events that set the stage for the dream. In chapter two, I share the dream itself.

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