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.

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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

Photo by Ali Alauda on Unsplash

The Podcast

I discovered a wonderful new podcast this week. It's called This Jungian Life and it's hosted by three real-life Jungian analysts. Each episode presents a topic, and ends with the analysis of a listener's dream. I have really enjoyed the dream segments and like doing my own analysis to compare to that of the hosts. I also like the topical portion of the show. A lot.

The hosts are articulate and knowledgeable and so unexpectedly funny I found myself laughing out loud as I listened. More importantly, I feel I've already learned things from them. 

I have heard several episodes (including two on the shadow which were excellent) already but the episode I want to talk about in this post is called Unlock the Power of Symbols (video follows). The guest in this episode was Murray Stein, author of Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction (affiliate link) and I was so impressed with him that I bought his book the second the show was over.

When I was in my New Age phase I talked about synchronicities a lot even though I didn't really understand them and to be honest I'm not sure I understand them now. But when Stein quoted Jung as saying that a synchronicity is an act of creation in time I felt like I was being shown another, more theoretical perspective.

And an example followed.

The Spirit Dream

So there I was, doing the dishes and listening to the podcast and wishing I could ask Murray Stein to help me make sense of the Spirit Dream. I was thinking that I wouldn't even have to get him to take on the whole dream. I would just ask him to help me figure who the lady in blue was and why she seemed so important—and what was up with the whole color thing (read The Spirit Dream in full if you'd like more context). 

I have often thought that the spectrums of blues I was shown in the dream  exceeded anything I've ever seen witg ordinary waking vision. Sometimes I have wondered if there isn't something reminiscent of an NDE in that, but I've never been sure about any of it.

The interplay of red and blue in the Spirit Dream seemed significant to me from the start and I have always supposed that color was the key to the dream. 

Murray Stein

I was thinking about these things and how nice it would be if Murray Stein could tell me about my dream. I wouldn’t even ask him about the whole dream, I decided. I would only ask him to explain what blue meant in the context of the dream and why it felt so important. 

And just at that exact moment he said:

So there are archetypes and there are archetypal images... [and] Jung makes a very important distinction (you can read about this in a paper he wrote called the Nature of the Psyche in Volume 8 and I use that a lot in my book Jung's Map of the Soul).

He [Jung] lays out a spectrum [and] says the psyche is like a spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared.

On the infrared side it disappears through a psychoid membrane into the body, into physiological processes and there's an interplay between body and psyche—the psychosomatic interplay. The psyche can affect the body. The body can affect the psyche through that psychoid membrane.

He says on the other end of the spectrum there's the ultraviolet end of the spectrum that's blue—the psyche disappears again through a psychoid barrier or membrane into he says "what I can only call Spirit,.." and that's where the archetype exists.

And the archetype emits... [and] influences the psyche. The archetype influences the psyche by giving it images so when you have powerful images coming into your dreams, for instance, we call them archetypal images [or] Big Dreams that are related to mythology and fairy tales and all that.

The archetype... beyond the psyche in the... spiritual world is emitting some energy and it's coming into the psyche and then it takes the form of a couple of things: It can be an image or it can be a big idea [that] can be an inspiration, you know, suddenly [the] aha light goes on [and] you understand something.

So... the psyche disappearing into the spirit world on the one hand... [and] the psyche disappear[ing]     into the material world on the other hand... Now there's where Jung tried to tie that together—the material world and the spirit world—in his theory of synchronicity: Something happens in the material world and in the psychic world at the same time. It has meaning. 

It delivers meaning.

Afterward

The Video

My Takeaway

I like science and don't spend nearly enough time thinking about it. It surprises me that so much of it is metaphysical in the popular sense of the word. Here are a few very basic facts on the frequency of color:

1. Frequency refers to the number of times light passes a given point which can be thought of as vibration. Colors with long wavelengths have a low frequency. Colors with short wavelengths have a higher frequency.
2. Red has the longest wavelength and lowest frequency of any color in the visible human spectrum. It has a low vibration or frequency and less energy than other light. Red represents earth and courage and the life-force. It is associated with the root chakra.
3. Redder than red refers to a red whose wavelength is too long for us to see. Infrared light exists beyond the color we perceive as red.
4. Violet has the shortest wavelength which translates into a very high frequency. This color contains the shortest waves we can see. It also contains the most energy. Ultra-violet is a very high vibration violet not visible to the naked eye.
5. Color exists which has a higher frequency than violet. It is invisible to humans and known as bluer than blue. It interests me that blue corresponds to wisdom, spirituality and communication. Blue is significant to me personally, as is red so that made the outside the human spectrum stuff interesting to me. For more on my personal dream experience with color symbolism please see the following entry: The Spirit Dream
6. There are many other wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum that which aren't visible to humans. The chart above illustrates this fact as well as all others mentioned.

According to Web MD: “The ability to create mental images exists on a spectrum. On one end, are people who can create extra-vivid mental images. Most people are somewhere in between.” On the other, those with complete (or total) aphantasia are unable to conjure up any kind of mental imagery. Though they are able to dream because dreaming is involuntary. 

My aphantasia was and is, total. Like many people with aphantasia, I grew up thinking that everyone was like me and that the ‘image’ in imagination was a metaphor.

 But there was one "psychic" advantage to my condition. I couldn’t deliberately make up a vision if I tried.

So when I began to see visualize spots of color during a guided chakra meditation I was overjoyed.  As the meditation progressed, a distinct circle of violet light appeared, and I felt as if I was looking through this circle of color into another space. 

Then, very abruptly, I found myself surrounded by color. 

A bright endless blue. 

It was almost as if a giant curtain had fallen or a bright blue screen had blinked into being and wrapped completely around me. 

For a moment, I panicked. Thinking that I was having a seizure or even a stroke, I opened my eyes to an ordinary room. But when I shut them again, the color was waiting. This continued for a good ten or fifteen minutes before I decided to keep my eyes open and get on with my day.

Later, when I sat down to record my experience in The Mystic Review, I remembered the swirling spectrum of blue I’d seen in the Spirit Dream. While the blue I’d seen in meditation was only a single shade, it had reminded me of some kind of screen. 

Thinking about it now, I think it was almost as if my attention was being drawn away from my New Age interests, and back to the dream.

UPDATED: 2024

I will be returning to this experience in a future post and wanted to update the original with an updated version.

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The update to this post is excerpted from The Spirit Dream © 2024 All Rights Reserved