About Dreams 

I discovered Carl Jung through a lovely synchronicity. And, to me, a good synchronicity carries more meaning than any intellectual process. So I paid attention.

I enrolled in a Jungian Dream School and joined a Jungian dream group. I took a Jungian tarot course. I bought Jungian books.

It has all been good and the group has been the best of it. So I wanted to say that first.

Dream groups work. Dream groups are a call back to thousands of years ago, when people sat around the fire  and shared the magic they encountered in the night.

These weren’t just any people, either. They were our people—navigating life by dreams and signs and sixth-sense intuition. Or that’s how I see it, anyway.

About The Dream

So I think about my dreams a lot and this morning I was reminded of an old dream about a numinous woman in blue and a scribe who began as a healer, reflecting on a part I'd never really understood.

In that part, the scribe letters monuments to my parents and my mother’s monument transforms into an ornament. I am to go to the farm where she grew up and hang it. When I get there I see that a tree has been cut back for that purpose. So I hang the ornament and leave.

I wrote revisited the dream in my journal then scrolled on Substack, until an article caught my eye. And this part spoke to me very directly:

I finally found what runs through that line. I found the colour of the flame held inside those lineages, expressed through the colours of those lands. The sapphire. The indigos. The azzurro, the water. - Selvia Filteau, The One Lineage Nobody is Allowed to Reclaim

If you've read my dream The Spirit Dream, you'll know why that part resonated. But it wasn't only that passage. It was the article as a whole which was about connecting with your ancestral spirituality. Trees were mentioned specifically and color and what is handed down through mothers and grandmothers.

So it all worked for me and I thought, maybe that’s it. Or part of it. 

Or a lead.

And I think lead is the best word here because that’s my system. I let dreams lead. I don’t connect them back to the everyday. I am not psychological. I don’t look for insights into my relationships or my work or any aspect of my secular life.

Like Jung, I know dreams have meaning. Like Jung, I think the symbols in dreams are expansive. And, thanks to the dream school I attend, I have learned the difference between a symbol and a sign.

But I have my own way of understanding that difference.

My Approach to Dreams

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

📖 The Backstory 

I started this blog in 2010. 

Three years after my life imploded. Deep in what I would later learn was autistic burnout. A state that was the inevitable result of a lifetime spent pretending to be someone I wasn’t.

This was not my first experience of burnout, named or not, and I knew what to do with it. I returned to the spiritual and creative interests I’d left behind years earlier.

I did yoga. I wrote stories. I went back to school for graphic design. I read mythology and literature and vampire stories. I got a job at our local paper.

But it wasn’t enough money, and I had kids to think of. So I went back to my old life. And this time, when I burnt out I sought help and was immediately misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Heavily medicated and unable to engage with the things that I loved, I sunk into a deep depression. And then I had a dream.

🌙 The Dream

The dream was unlike any dream I’d ever had before. It was complex and vivid and remarkably coherent. It was so numinous and beautiful I knew it came from somewhere else—somewhere not-me.

I called it the Spirit Dream. And while I had no idea what to do with it things were different in its wake. I had other unusual dreams. I had spiritual experiences. I noticed synchronicities I could not dismiss.

Nobody in my day to day life understood what was happening to me then, or cared, so I started The Mystic Review because I needed a place where I could make sense of my experience.

I blogged my way through the New Age, Spiritualism, earth-based practices, and everything in between. I loved everything I was doing but I did it too hard. Things went wrong. I got burnt out again. I went back to the church.

I set The Mystic Review to private. I stopped writing down my dreams. When something seemed synchronistic, I dismissed it.

Until I couldn’t.

Because spirit wasn’t done with me yet.

✨ What Happened

In 2022 I was diagnosed with autism. In 2023 I hit a wall with my writing and took my first parapsychology course.

I began my first Substack newsletter, Writing on the Spectrum, in 2023 in an attempt to make sense of my autism and later ADHD diagnoses.

In 2024, I returned to dreamwork. Later that same year, I discovered Carl Gustav Jung. Synchronistically.

I saw the Spirit Dream in a whole new way—and I knew it was time to come back here to The Mystic Review.

I set the blog to public. I republished many of my old posts. And I started sharing some of those posts to substack at Writing on the Spectrum.

I finished a novel in 2025 and started another. And in between I wrote a neurodivergent spiritual memoir I called The Spirit Dream.

In 2026 I finished my paranormal romance novel and the memoir.

📝 What I’m Writing Now

With two books finished, I was interested in learning more about publishing so I took a workshop through Hay House. On day 3 of the workshop  Colette Baron Reid led us in a connect-with-the-spirit-of-your book meditation. I saw an 8 pointed star—a symbol I strongly associated with the spirit of the spirit dream.

I had been going back and forth on what to do with the memoir, knowing it probably wouldn’t get read on Amazon. The meditation brought me back to source and source seemed to be saying what the spirit of my book really wants is to be heard.

So I started serializing it to Writing on the Spectrum.

Then I started thinking about what The Mystic Review might want. And my intuition was that it would like its own space on Substack. So that’s what I’m doing.

The Mystic Review will continue here at this URL indefinitely, but all of the content will also be availble in the Mystic Review Newsletter. 

You can sign up for it here:

In this video I share bit about the concept of the map maker in dreams and spiritual experience. I talk about why I think that sharing these experiences matter.

The video shares a recent experience triggered by somebody else’s dream. Whether you consider this second-hand dream guidance or a synchronicity, I think it says something about what is available to us.

I also talk about my nonfiction project which is a part AuDHD memoir and part spiritual journey. Probably the most interesting thing about all of this, is how it helped guide me back to that project.

I think that matters.

Thank you for watching!

To follow me on YouTube, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/@MysticReview

To sign up for my newsletter, please go to https://barbaragraver.substack.com/ (if you just want to see the site just click through the signup)

This post is about my renewed commitment to the blog and the dreams and synchronicities that influenced me. 

Dream Guidance

For reference: I spent the last couple of weeks working on a romance novel based on a short story I wrote some time ago. There were issues with the story and, for a time, it consumed most of my attention. I put my metaphysical writing and interests on hold during this period.

Last week, I had a dream that seemed to speak to this. The dream began in a lovely old-fashioned red and gold lobby. I was attending an event, even though I felt drawn to different event at another location. There was a scheduling issue, so I’d chosen the event/program featured in the dream. When I reached the auditorium I learned that the event I had chosen was about weddings or wedding planning.

There were other characters, conversations, and indications that the wedding event was fluff and not a good fit for me but I didn't leave. Throughout the dream, a feeling persisted—I would have rather been somewhere else.

Two nights ago, I dreamt I was sitting down with an assistant who had been inattentive in the past. I ask her to begin with my day book, looking for conflicts. I feel that she should pay special attention to the energy. In the dream, the energy I mention has a magical feel to it. It is significant and alluring.

The wedding in dream one put me in mind of the romance novel. The scheduling issue in dream one suggests that time is an issue. It occurs to me that I can only choose one.

The assistant in dream two hasn't done a good job but I'm giving her another chance. Scheduling conflicts and a kind of magical energy are key.

My Reaction

Dream one seemed to indicate a core conflict around my personal focus. There is the suggestion that I am focusing wrongly and that time is limited. The color red featured in the lobby reminds me of the alchemical process and the potential for transformation. 

As a result of this dream, I decided to give myself time away from the romance writing. Almost immediately, a feeling of enthusiasm for metaphysical writing poured in.

I decided to be more involved here with the blog and felt good about doing that. Still I wondered if I was being reactive. That was when I had the second dream which seemed like a variation on a theme.

In Waking Life

I felt that this idea was being reinforced in my waking life, too.

The last few weeks have been hard everyone in our family has been sick. Because I have family members with serious health problems, illness always reminds me that nothing about the future is guaranteed. When my dog Luna, became ill with hemorrhagic vomiting and had to be treated at the animal emergency something shifted for me. I started to think about what matters and what does not. Thoughts about life purpose and the limitations of time occurred to me.

And other events in my waking life seemed to expand on this.

A video by tarot reader Julie Poole talked about purging to make way for the new energies. A This Jungian Life video talked about Carl Jung and the Age of Aquarius. Points made about duality and Christianity and the Age of Pisces reinforced some of my old ideas.

I realized that I was still clinging to some of my old programming.

Old programming had a lot to do with my decision to put The Mystic Review on hold in 2017 at the height of its popularity. A family member had come close to death. I was scared. Returning to the Church felt safe. As time passed however, it began to feel restrictive. The Catholic approach to elevating virtue and repressing vice didn't work for me. Shadow spilled into my fiction writing. Eventually I began to question.

I took classes at Rhine Institute. I connected with Jung. I returned to the blog.

All of that happened in 2024. But I didn't fully commit the blog and everything that goes along with it then. Now, I have.

I hope it will be of interest to others!

My Full Moon Tarot Reading

This is my full moon tarot reading on home / family (row 1, bottom), my media (row 2) and return to the blog, and my nonfiction writing (row 3) and related new ideas. 

Note the position of Temperance (which I associate with Aquarius). This card reflects points made in the This Jungian Life video about the tension of the opposites. I will dive a bit deeper into the Age of Aquarius material (and this reading) in my next post. 

The Videos

I found both these videos resonant. The Age of Aquarius video is produced by the Jungian analysts who teach the Dream School course I'm studying. The tarot video is by a reader I like.

The Aquarius video was especially helpful for me because it aligns with my own thinking about organized religion and where I'm at now.

Photo by Andrea Leopardi on Unsplash

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. 

It was almost three A.M. on a summer night in 2007 and I was wide awake.

So I passed the long sleepless night on the computer, drifting from one website to the next, until I stumbled upon a bible passage I knew by heart. 

The 23rd Psalm.

I remembered how I had committed this psalm to memory as a child and how I used to recite it before bed from time to time in the years that followed. So I said the old familiar passage right there over the keyboard and then I set aside my laptop and fell asleep.

I woke up the next morning with a sense of excitement I hadn’t felt in what seemed like forever. 

I didn’t usually remember my dreams, but I remembered this one. It was detailed and magical and absolutely breathtakingly beautiful. 

Heart pounding, I turned on my laptop and captured my journey through the night as quickly as I could.

Aside from the headings and a few minor edits, what follows is the account of the dream, as I typed it out that morning.  

Part I: The Hospital

As the dream opens, I’m approaching a big hospital. I’m working as a nurse again and this is the first day of a new job and I’m not sure where to go (a common problem in many similar dreams). I go to several outside doors and find them locked. Finally, at the last door I find an elderly woman on the ground in severe pain. She tells me that she has had two difficult surgeries and that she will die before she goes back to the hospital again.

I don’t know what to do or say, so I go in through the door. I’m looking for the emergency room and at first I am lost. After asking for (and not understanding) directions (another common work dream problem) I wander onto an elevator. There is a young doctor in a brilliant white coat inside the elevator. I tell him what has happened, and he gets off and goes with me to see the woman and her relatives, who are there with her. He tells them that she doesn’t have to come into the hospital if she doesn’t want to and they take her away.

I am at a brightly lit a nurse’s station. I have the feeling that I’ve been working here for some time. And that there are no bad feelings associated with that (which has never happened to me in dreams about nursing or in my nursing career in general). The young doctor is at the station too, looking at charts. After a moment, he stops and says that he has to move away soon and that he needs to learn the route by traveling it. He suggests that we all need time away from our work and that we should go on an adventure together.

Part II: The Journey

We take two cars. There is an odd assortment of women (presumably nurses). One is very beautiful. Her eyes are a vivid sea-water blue and her face is high-boned and delicate. She wears a layered gown of shimmering blue silk and I find her very exotic. Around her neck hangs a deep blue sapphire necklace and some of the bluest lapis I have ever seen.

There is an older woman, as well. She looks like a woman I know in real life. She is sweet and lost and seemingly lonely, just like her real-life counterpart. There are several other women. One is young and withdrawn; the others have already faded. As it turns out, this is a journey of discovery. There are moments of awkwardness because I don’t know anyone well, but there are other moments that seem almost euphoric.

We are on a train and I spend time alone. I am sitting in a day car with many windows. The car is rushing through a sunny countryside though I am more aware of the streaming sun than I am the scenery. As I sit, an idea for a book overtakes me. The images and characters and dialogue are vivid. And they stream through my mind so quickly it is all I can do to write them down. The story is about a man involved with two women. One is young and beautiful, but she is also married and in the end, he chooses the one who is unencumbered. The manuscript flashes by from beginning to end. Somehow I capture it.

A lot of different things happen. Sometimes we’re on the train and sometimes it seems that we have disembarked along our way. We are in a jewelry store. I see many lovely things. I look at a small locket depicting a traditionally Catholic guardian angel with children, but it’s small and drab - nothing like the beautiful pieces worn by the woman in blue. I sense that it is all that is available to me but I don't buy it. In another scene, the women and I decide to swap clothing. I have a single article of clothing I’m proud of—some sort of gold and red top. I offer it to the woman in blue and she accepts it.

Part III: Our Destination

It seems that we have arrived at university or school. The woman in blue shows me a sort of screen that is not a television but a bright flowing blue divided into many different shades which appear as if pressed between two panes of clear glass. The screen swivels like an old-fashioned chalkboard and the many shades of blue swirl together in changing breathtaking patterns. It is vividly blue and has a shine to it that is almost metallic. It reminds me of a sand art item I saw once in a variety store but much, much better. Its beauty and the spectrum of blue is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

The women and I are together in a classroom. A book review or lecture is being delivered. A man is showing us pictures from a book he has written. At first the content seems Buddhist and then it’s something else, but I don’t remember clearly just how it is different. We’re all moved by his presentation and find it very inspiring. For some reason, we know all about him and are surprised he’s become so spiritual. It seems that he was famous in some way earlier in life and that he had a bad reputation at that time.

Then I am outside with the young doctor. He asks me about my parents and I tell him something. briefly, without going into detail. He letters a sort of monument to my father (in cobalt blue). He invites me to letter the one for my mother myself, but his lettering is perfect and I have terrible handwriting (in dreams and in life). So I ask him to do it for me and he does. The monument only has my parents' names. Or I think it does because I don’t recognize the characters or letters. The monument includes no information about who they were or what they did. But it seems complete as is.

My mother’s monument transforms into an ornament made out of clear glass with deep blue lettering. I know that I’m supposed to hang it in a tree at our family homestead and, all at once, I am there. It’s not the big main farmhouse where my mother grew up but something similar to the smaller house that she lived in before my grandfather inherited the farm. There is something about the tree having been cut back in preparation. I hang the ornament on a branch and leave.

Part IV: The Return Trip 

I find myself back on the train and discover an old book. The cover is a work of art—old fashioned, intricate, tooled leather. It is dusty and a bit worse for wear, but still handsome. I’m very impressed with it. I open it and see I have written it. I’m surprised but, at the same time, I remember.

Finally, we’re at the end of our journey. We sit at a big table and talk about how we have changed. I’m wearing a sparkling red ruby or garnet bracelet. We decide that we should exchange jewelry as souvenirs of our trip.

I don’t want to give up my bracelet, but I offer it anyway, secretly hoping that the woman in blue will give me some of her lapis. Instead, she gives her jewelry to the older woman (who has nothing to offer her in return). I feel disappointed but understand that this is the right thing to do. Although my desire for the beautiful blue gemstones is strong, there is no associated envy or bitterness. I feel strongly that all is as it should be.

The young doctor thanks us and tells us that he now knows the route he should take to his new home. He does not return to the hospital and I am not sure if the women return either. I have a sense of parting. It is bittersweet, but I know it feels right and I have no regrets.

Part V: Back to the Beginning

Finally, I am back at the hospital. Someone is holding a funeral for the woman who was lying in pain just outside of the door when I first arrived. The funeral is being held on the other side of the large parking lot. It is far away, at the edge of the lot, but I can see a seated effigy draped in red and understand that this effigy represents the woman who has died.

I am now inside the hospital. A patient on the floor where I work has passed and I remember that he was the man who taught us when we were away. I know his history, so I’m not surprised that he died alone. I’m not sad about it either because I remember his lecture and know that he was at peace.

As I am leaving his room, or perhaps the floor, a young girl comes in and asks for the man. She says that she is his granddaughter and I tell her he is gone. Surprisingly, I find the right words. I tell her that it’s alright, that he has changed, and for some reason her tears are cathartic for both of us. We leave the hospital together and I have the feeling that everything has come full circle.

Afterward 

I finished typing out the dream and turned off my laptop.

I was sitting on the same couch I’d slept on, wearing the same sweat pants and t-shirt I’d worn the day before. The room was still small and cluttered, and the stereo from the house next door was already blasting.

But everything had changed.

_________

This post is excerpted from my upcoming book The Spirit Dream.

It was originally published here on the blog thirteen years ago under the title Dreaming of Sapphires.

© 2026 Barbara Graver. All rights reserved.

On October 31st (Samhain) I did tarot with a friend. Later that night, I incubated a dream about a possible change in spiritual direction. I had a series of four dreams that night. This was the second:

I’m watching a video of a group of women meeting in someone’s living room. I know it’s some kind of spiritual group. I’m drawn to it. The room is warm and inviting and I have the impression of bright, autumn colors. The women are probably in their thirties, sitting in a row of chairs that may be part of a circle. There are three of them or maybe four, all laughing and obviously happy to be together. They are attractive, and colorfully dressed with lovely long hair. One has dark hair, and I think another’s hair is auburn. They have pretty Celtic style spiral tattoos that I am very taken with. I realize that I am with them. My hair is short—a sleek golden blond. ~Incubated Dream, Samhain 2025

Possible associations

The setting and the women have an archetypal feel. The golden hair is could be about identity or alchemy or something else but, either way, I think it suggests being in a good place. But I’m only viewing it. Close, maybe, but not really there.

And then there is the spiral.

According to one of my favorite symbol books, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Symbols by JC Cooper, the spiral is a complex symbol known since paleolithic time. It is found in ancient Egypt, Crete, Mesopotamia, Asia, India, pre-Columbian America, Scandinavia, Europe and Britain (all cultures that have spoken to me at some point in my life). Cooper mentions too many associations to list here but ones that spoke to me include the energy of nature, the great creative force and the Mother Goddess.

For me, personally, the primary association is the divine feminine.

How might this apply?

Dreams rarely tell us what to do. So I’m not taking this dream as advice. Instead I’m trying to see the it as insight. A recording of dream me is with the joyful Celtic sisterhood but the POV me in the dream is watching the scene, not taking part in it.

Video and media were features in the other dream scenes that night as well. I associate media with communication, specifically how I communicate so I feel this scene is meant to communicate something to me. I don’t do groups, so it isn’t about a waking life group.

Maybe it’s about the ancestors or everything I have to learn or the idea that, even if I’m not there yet, my attention is in the right place. And maybe it’s not.

Life has been a bit of a slog lately but this dream makes me want to do better. To try harder. To earn my place in that happy group.

All of which reminds me of something Native American author and physician Lewis Mehl-Madrona says about the ancestors in The Spirit Of Healing.

And everyone loves a hero. Spirits are no exceptions. Whatever your heroic journey is, the more impressive it is, the better for you.

________

For more on Dr. Mehl-Madrona's book please see When Healing is a Hero's Journey

The photo for this post is by Robert Lukeman on Unsplash