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 The Video

 A short video about new content on metaphysics and ancient mysteries:

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 Elina Sitnikova on Unsplash

Dream School Update

I started Jungian Dream School last fall in response to a wonderful synchronicity involving Jungian analyst Murray Stein and the This Jungian Life podcast. 

As you may already know, dreams have been an area of interest to me ever since I had the dream I call the Spirit Dream in 2007 which changed, or possibly saved, my life.

I’ve recently written my Spirit Dream / autism memoir up to the point where what I learned in those first weeks of Dream School becomes relevant. So I went back to module one and worked through it again.

In doing this I reread On the Nature of Dreams more carefully than I had done the first time around. And there was so much there, I wanted to share a bit of what I learned. I hope I will do it justice and not get too much wrong!

How Dreams Bring Balance

In On the Nature of Dreams Jung points out our dreams are rarely in accord with the sensibilities of our conscious mind. To Jung, this means that the unconscious (which he calls "the matrix of dreams") must have an independent function. In other words, the unconscious functions separately from our conscious self (which contains the ego). 

In creating dreams, the unconscious may strongly oppose our waking paradigm. This is intentional.

The gap between our everyday attitude and the dream may be slight or great (or very occasionally absent). This relates to Jung's concept of compensation. According to Jung, the dream deviation is an attempt to correct (or compensate for) the errors of our conscious self.

According to Jung there are three compensatory possibilities:

1. If the conscious attitude is one-sided the dream takes the opposite position.
2. If the conscious is more in the middle, the dream may deviate a little from our waking attitude.
3. If the conscious attitude is correct the dream will coincide (though not mirror, because the conscious always maintains what Jung calls its autonomy).

The purpose of compensation is to restore wholeness or balance. This correction usually has something to do with what is going on with us at that particular point in time. Some dreams, particularly long series of dreams, are more far-reaching (this is addressed in Psychology and Alchemy which I will have not read).

It's important to note, that compensation is not black and white. Dreams have their own kind of logic. Their relationship to our waking life is nuanced, complex and expansive. Understanding a dream is always a process.

Who Can Interpret Dreams

According Jung you don't have to be an psychologist (or any sort of professional) to interpret dream. Which isn't to say that anyone and everyone can do Jungian dream interpretation. The characteristics required to "diagnose dream compensation" according to Jung are: intelligence, some knowledge of psychology and life experience.

But these alone are not enough.

Jung is adamant in saying that an understanding of mythology, folklore, indigenous cultures and comparative religion is also required.

I loved hearing that. While I have learned through Dream School that we must always consider our personal association first when approaching a dream, I find mythological themes to be very important in dreams. Right or wrong, whenever it is there I apply it.

On the Nature of Dreams also contains a warning for people who decide that the dream "knows best” or readily believe that dreams predict the future. According to Jung, those who take this approach may find that their dreams become trivial over time. This is because these individuals are over rating the subconscious function and under valuing the conscious.

The conscious, per Jung, must fulfil its own appointed duties. It has developed for a reason and has an important role in our lives. The dream, according to On the Nature of Dreams, may fill in the blanks, correct our attitude or move us forward after our best attempts have failed. This is not to say that they never provide real life guidance, only that most of what they have to tell us relates to our internal states.

Dreams tend to be mythic, symbolic and poetic. Because of this they offer much more than ordinary, everyday advice. While some dreams are precognitive (as Jung was well aware) most are not, and it’s important to properly understand the dreams role in our life.

Dream interpretation can be challenging. While a lot has been written on it by Jung and his contemporaries very little of that is what I would consider an easy read. The book Dream Wise written by three of my Dream School instructors makes Jung's ideas accessible—as do the writings of Jungian analysist Murray Stein. 

Stein’s short book Four Pillars of Jungian Analysis talks about dream interpretation in concise and understandable way. 

Big Dreams

Big dreams are different than other dreams because they contain symbolic images found in the collective unconscious of the human race. These images are reflections of invisible energetic forms Jung calls archetypes.

Archetypes have existed at all times in human history and in all places. To Jung, this proves that there is both a personal unconscious and a collective or universal unconscious accessible to all. Archetypal images include thing like dragons, initiations, fairy tale elements or alchemical substances. For me personally, they tend to present as specific deities, symbols and themes.

Big dreams come from the collective unconscious at critical stages of our lives. They may hard to interpret, Jung says, because of the lack of personal meaning. Often, we need to go back to the mythology in order to understand them.

This is why a knowledge of myth and folklore is so important. If we don't know these stories we may fail to recognize important elements and messages in our dreams.

We can identify big dreams by their mythic themes and "poetic force and beauty." Often these dreams haunt us, becoming the "richest jewel in the treasure-house of psychic experience." (CGJ) This, in my experience, could not be more accurate.

The Stages of Dreams

A key point in On the Nature of Dreams is a the idea examining a dream through its structure.

Jung provides four stages that describe the structure of most dreams.

1. Exposition: The statement of place, introduction of key dream characters and the initial situation of the dreamer.
2. Development: The plot of the dream as it becomes more complicated and tension develops.
3. Culmination or Peripeteia (a Greek word for an unexpected reversal or point where the situation changes dramatically): The point where something decisive happens or something changes completely.
4. Result or Solution: While not every dream will have a fourth stage Jung looks at this last stage in relation to the solution sought by the dreamer.

I like to look at the structure of the dream and question each stage keeping in mind that every aspect of a dream is there for reason. 

There is a lot to be learned from the structure of the dream. The setting, key characters, action and turning point are all important. When I look at my own dreams, I always consider the result or solution. Sometimes this fourth stage is little more than an idea or impression which may be easy to overlook—but it is still important.

Context and Associations

It is also crucially important to do what Jung calls "taking up the context" by exploring personal associations for each dream element.

Because dreams are closely tied to our lived experience, it's also helpful to think about our current situation as we try to understand how our unconscious might be trying to restore balance in the here and now.

Most dreams are not big dreams. But every dream we have is important in terms of our day to day life. Many apparently "lesser" dreams can be mapped as part of a dream series that may be factor into our individuation process (a Jungian term that describes the process of becoming the person we are meant be).

Dreams offer an immediate and crucial course correction as we journey from day to day. They do not (in the vast majority of cases) tell us what to do. Instead they help us orient ourselves to a life that aligns with our greater purpose.

I'll be writing more about what I'm learning about dreams and Jung in future posts!

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I've had a few dreams I consider big and one that figures prominently in my memoir and in my life as a whole. You can read it here: The Spirit Dream. You can read about my Murray Stein experience in my A Creation in Time post. You can learn more about Jungian Dream School via the This Jungian Life website. 

What Is Shared Death Experience? 

I heard famed near-death researcher Dr. Ray Moody speak on NDEs and shared death experience in 2015. But I didn't fully understand what a shared death experience was until I read Glimpses of Eternity (affiliate link) earlier this week.

A shared death experience occurs when a person takes part in the spiritual experience of someone who is dying. This experience can take many different forms. And Glimpses of Eternity does a great job of showcasing that.

Accounts of Shared Death Experience 

Dr. Moody didn't hear about shared death experience until after his ground-breaking book on near-death experience, Life After Life (affiliate link) was published in 1975. The shared death phenomena has been studied before however (as doctor Moody points out), going all the way back to the early days of the Society for Psychical Research.

The 19th century book Phantasms of the Living (affiliate link), written by two prominent members of the Society, includes multiple examples of what were once called deathbed visions. Several cases from Phantasms of the Living are included in Glimpses of Eternity.

Shared death experience has also been discussed by Melvin Morse. MD in his book Parting Visions (affiliate link).

Like most of Dr. Moody's books, Glimpses of Eternity, features a wealth of first-hand accounts. These accounts include full-fledged out of body NDE-type events, the observation of  unusual phenomena around the dying, extraordinary dreams and more. 

I enjoyed reading these reports and feel there is a lot that we can learn from them.

Elements of a Shared Death Experience

In Glimpses of Eternity. Dr Moody provides a list of features common to the shared death experience. He is also very clear in saying that shared death experience may include several or as few as one of these elements and that he is aware of no shared death experiences that includes them all.  

While most shared death experience occur in a waking state, Dr. Moody cites some that have occurred in dreams, including the 1988 shared death experience described by Melvin Morse. MD in Parting Visions.

The fact that some shared death experiences occur in dreams was of special interest to me because I once had an unusual dream about someone who was near death and then recovered. This dream included some of the elements Dr. Moody associates with shared death experience:

1. A change of geometry, where rooms either change shape or appear to open into another reality Dr. Moody describes as a "different and larger dimension."
2. A mystical light that Dr. Moody considers to one of the most profound features of a near-death experience. This light is often described as having substance. According to Dr. Moody it is "no ordinary light" but one that may lead to mystical experience and spiritual transformation. This light may fill the room, be observed in the eyes of the dying or in the translucent glow of the entire body of the person near death.
3. Music that has no physical source but can be heard by the dying and others present.
4. Co-living a life review similar to the type reported in a classic NDE except in this case the dying and healthy observer share the experience.
5. An out-of-body state which Dr. Moody describes as a "fairly common" element of a shared death experience. This element is cited in some of the most profound and NDE-like shared death reports.
6. Encountering unworldly or "heavenly" realms which may include a border or barrier. As with many NDEs this border may be a bridge, river or other boundary.
7. The appearance of a fine mist that may have a human shape and tendency to drift upward and disappear.

What Can Shared Death Experience Tell Us?

When I heard Dr. Moody speak, he was quite excited about shared death experience. This was because the shared death experience contradicts the main argument people make about NDEs. This argument--that an NDE is the product of a dying brain--cannot be applied to perfectly healthy people who share the experience of someone else's passing.

Some first-hand shared death experiences described in Glimpses of Eternity involve entire groups of (healthy) people. In these cases, members of the group perceived varied - though coherent - phenomena. One or two observers might perceive light or a vision of the departed, for example, while others only hear music or have a sense that something unusual is happening. This supports the idea that the shared death experience is telepathic in nature. 

Sometimes shared death experiences are predictive. At other times they announce that someone has died in another location. The fact that certain elements repeat from experience to experience is compelling.

The part of Glimpses of Eternity (affiliate link) that impressed me most, however, was the idea that shared and near-death experience may have played a part in the formation of religious beliefs about the afterlife. Noted individuals like Egyptologist Cyril Aldred, NDE researcher Kenneth Ring, PhD and Dr. Moody himself have all made this suggestion. To me, this makes sense. 

Instead of undermining religious belief, I think it supports it.

Please check back for future posts on dreams, mystical experience and more, including my upcoming video about my own experience!

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Video Write Up 

I’m not sure when the vision I called a "waking dream"* first started, but it came and went throughout my twenties and thirties. And it was always the same.

I would be fast asleep when an overwhelming fearfulness would shock me awake. When I opened my eyes, the dark shape was there, shapeless but malignant. Absolutely black against the lesser darkness of my room. 

I would scramble backwards in bed, pressing myself up against the headboard as if I could somehow push myself through the wall and into the next room.   

By then, I was completely awake. But the shape would remain, hovering ominously next to the ceiling. I would fumble for the lamp in a panic, but even after I got it on, the dark shape would persist for several agonizing moments before it dissolved slowly into the light.

My ex-husband never saw it. But other people did, including our upstairs tenant and a no-nonsense handyman who told me in all seriousness that our house was haunted. People in that house, and the one we would live in next, often felt like they were being watched, mechanical toys turned on on their own, electronics failed unexpectedly, and the clear sound of a woman laughing was heard by two individuals at the same time.

In both locations, my middle boy was subject to night terrors so extreme that he would wake up screaming. In the completely unretouched picture (above), you can see him, completely overshadowed by a hovering black shape.

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Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

Lecture and Meeting with Dr. Ray Moody  

I heard Dr. Ray Moody speak on the topic of near-death experience in 2014. Like many people in the audience, I had been influenced by Dr. Moody's first book, Life After Life, and  considered him an authority on near-death experience (a phrase coined by Moody himself).  

Written in 1975, Life After Life, is based on case studies of people who reported having had very similar, apparently spiritual experiences when very near death. The book became a runaway best-seller and near-death experience (or NDE) became a household word.

I found Dr. Moody to be a charming and articulate speaker. His presentation covered a range of NDE related topics which included history, philosophy and the nature of the NDE itself.  In this post I will touch upon some of them.

According to Dr. Moody, the common elements of the NDE included the experience of a hyper-reality which is largely indescribable, vivid color, a warm and loving light, the presence of deceased loved ones, a tunnel or passage, and a panoramic life review. In some NDEs a being of great compassion conducts the review and tells the individual that they must return to their former life. 

This was of special interest to me because I had experienced NDE like elements in my dreams. These included hyper-reality, ineffability, vivid color, beings of warmth and love, meetings with the departed and various passages (train tracks, board walks, halls). These were not NDEs obviously but I did receive information I hadn't known about before. In several such dreams in fact, I learned of the death of people I'd lost contact with through the dream.

While I was aware of some of the similatities between these dreams and NDE at the time, there was one connection I did not make then, but have only come to recently.

The Influence of Ancient Greece

When I asked Dr. Moody for book recommendations at the close of the lecture, he gave me the names of two books on necromancy, The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation and Greek and Roman Necromancy. Both of which I bought.

One thing that stood out to me about the lecture then was something Dr. Moody said about a life almost wholly devoted to the study of NDE . Everything I have done in life, he told us, is because of my interest in ancient Greece.  

Not faith. Not science. Greece.

At the time, I was just begiining to learn about Greek culture. So, I loved the fact that Dr. Moody and I shared the same interest.   

Years later, the fact that Dr. Moody had recommended books on Greek necromancy made me uneasy. I even recorded a podcast saying that I was suspicious of NDE, due in part to it's connection to necromancy.

But my views have charged. An NDE is not necromancy, or at least not necessarily, and I am interested in the phenomena. 

My Changing Perspective

For me, the most significant information given in Dr. Moody's lecture was something that didn't seem especially meaningful at the time: Dr. Moody's (then) current research interest in shared NDEs. 

A shared NDE is when one individual's near-death experience is psychically shared by a second person, oftentimes a friend or family member of the dying. 

I had a dream experience that may have some elements in common with a shared NDE and this is definitely something I want to look into. I will be talking about this dream and what I learn in a future video or podcast. 

Where I'm at Now

I have been writing about dreams, spirits and psychic phenomena for thirteen years now and my thinking has evolved. I no longer accept everything the way I did when I first started out but I don't discount things out of hand (as I did in the early days of my return to the Faith) either. 

I'm now very interested in the possible connection between NDE and psychic dreams. My most important dreams have NDE-like  elements. This is something I want to explore further. So I decided to begin taking courses at the Rhine Research Center in order to do that.

I have just started my first course but I plan to continue with the study of parapsychology and eventually get my certificate. The name of this course I'm  taking now is Dreams and Altered States of Consciousness which is absolutely perfect. Just like God's providence.

As always. I will keep you posted!

 Dr. Moody and Me

Dr. Ray Moody is a lovely, gracious man who has made an amazing contribution to our understanding of NDE and I am honored to have met him!

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 

From the temples of ancient Sumer to the forests of Native America, the owl appears as a frequent and remarkably consistent symbol of the spirit world.

First drawn on prehistoric cave walls, the owl can be associated with religion as early as 2000 BCE as evidenced by the The Queen of the Night Relief, a 4000 year old terracotta base relief presently located in the British Museum in London.  The relief depicts a  winged Sumerian goddess flanked by two large owls and the owls are not decorative but highly symbolic. 

The goddess was called Inanna or 'Divine Lady Owl'.  She was  strongly linked to the underworld through The Descent of Innana.

The story is told on a series of clay tablet from the Queen of the Night period and tells of Inanna's descent into the underworld during the dark of the moon. 

In Pagan Europe, the ancient Celts also saw the owl as a symbol of the underworld while in other cultures the symbolism centered on the soul.  In Australia the aboriginal people believed owls to be the souls of  women. The  Ainu of Japan held the Eagle Owl to be alternately a a divine ancestor or a messenger of the gods.  In Romania, folk tales say that forgiven souls fly to heaven in the guise of Snowy Owls. 

In the Americas, the Aztec god of death, was often depicted with owls and the Hopi god of death was believed to be an owl.  In Mexico, the Little Owl was called "messenger of the lord of the land of the dead", and flew between the land of the living and the dead.  In the Sierras, native peoples believed that the Great Horned Owl captured the souls of the departed and carried them to the underworld.  Several different Native Northern American traditions including the Mojave believed that the soul turned into an owl at death.

The mythology of multiple cultures places the symbolism of the owl firmly in the spirit world.  His mythic role however is largely positive.  As a messenger of the gods he is sacred, a bearer of divine knowledge and a facilitator of communication between the worlds.  As a guide, he bridges the gap between life and death, but more correctly: the space between this reality and the next.

Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash

One of the first unusually vivid dreams I can recall was a dream I had in high school. 

In this odd, but memorable dream, a single bright section of an orange transformed into a tiny infant right before my eyes. At the mall a few days later, I saw an album in a record store window. On its cover was a dreamy sort of image of a baby. The name of the album was Tangerine Dream.  

I made the connection and bought it on the spot.

Later, listening to my new album through my headphones, I had a vision. In it, a group of men in dark robes were trudging up a hill. Behind them, a grove of trees had been cut down, and on each stump a man had been beheaded.

I had an interest in King Arthur from an early which may be why I recognized the men as Druids. Given that interest, I'm sure a lot of people would just chalk a vision like that up to imagination, but because I have aphantasia visions are few and far between for me (and those I do have are not deliberately self-generated). So it was unusual for me to see any kind imagery in any state. 

What really got my attention however was the emotion I felt. 

The scene was grisly, but I wasn't the least bit horrified. Instead, as the hauntingly beautiful music built to its crescendo, I felt a bittersweet sense of loss. I understood those retreating figures. I knew their way of life was ending and that loss moved me.

It wasn't until many years later, that my interest in Celtic spirituality would move me to become a member of the OBOD (Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids). 

Did my dream and the resulting vision predict this interest? Or is there something genetic that travels downstream through time that speaks to us? Or is it only coincidence?

That is the mystery.

You can visit the OBOD website at Druidry.org

St. Brigid's Cross (made by me)