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Dreams and Synchronicity (new video)

October 10, 2024

About the Video

In this video I talk about how a recent synchronicity showed me how to apply a bit of Jungian theory to my dream, The Spirit Dream. Three things stood out to me in this experience: It explained what a synchronicity was, provided and example AND helped crack a dream I've been wrestling with forever! (Though there is still a lot more work to do.)


PLEASE NOTE: I misspoke when I was talking about Jung's concept of the self. It is psychoid membrane NOT memory :)
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Dreams and Synchronicity (new video)

A Creation in Time: Jungian Synchronicity, a Very Special Dream and My New Favorite Podcast

September 13, 2024

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.

Does it ever.

Afterward

I stood in the pantry until the water turned cold, lost in the possibilities.

The Video

This is the video of that episode. I prefer to listen via podcast but it's nice to have the video to share, You can hear the content I quote above at the 35 minute mark but I encourage you to listen to it all. It is incredible.

My Takeaway

Does the Spirit Dream all make sense to me now? 

No. Not yet and maybe not ever. But I feel I'm much closer to understanding the central mystery of the dream: The identity of the woman in blue and why she appeared to me.

I will be returning to the Spirit Dream again better prepared to understand it. And I will be reading Stein's book and, hopefully, some of Jung's as well.

As always, there is a lot more to learn but I believe that the overlap of This Jungian Life and the Spirit Dream was a meaningful thing.

I won’t be ignoring it.
__________
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A Creation in Time: Jungian Synchronicity, a Very Special Dream and My New Favorite Podcast

Synchronicity Times Three: Coming Full Circle, From Confusion to Clarity

December 19, 2016

For me, one synchronicity is never enough.  So I always set an intention to receive three.

The last intention I set was about my book.  Not the "Be Your Own Card Reader" ebook that pretty much wrote itself but the big book - the full-length nonfiction book on energetic beings and the messages they share.  

Writing this book has been challenging for me. While, the the information is there, putting it into context has been surprisingly hard. 

There are a lot of reasons why this is the case.  One has to do with the way I receive my information. For me, communication comes spontaneously most of the time whether it comes in dreams, waking visions or inner voice communications. As a general rule, I do not do Q & A style channeling sessions.

On one hand, I like receiving these out of nowhere communications. Allowing the information to drop in spontaneously means that there is very little of me in it and to me that is validating. But operating in the manner means that I don't get an answer to every question.  And there has been a question I needed answered.

It was where is this information coming from?  And who are my guides exactly?

They are real to me because the experience they share is evidential.  By this I mean that it checks out. And the info they have given me on themselves checks out too. I have learned things from them about history and geography and mythology that I just plain didn't know before they told me. 

But I was never sure quite what to call them. I tried thinking of them as angels or spirit guides or deities.  Each of those categories sort of fit and each sort of didn't. None was exactly wrong but none was exactly right either. And I needed one to be right. For the book. For the blog. For myself.

I needed to know. So I asked. And three synchronicities followed.

The first synchronicity came at the last place I would have expected - the October MUFON UFO conference in Philadelphia PA. In a way it was odd that I even ended up at the convention. I don't remember how I heard about it. But somehow I knew that I had to go.  

Sitting in the audience, I was surprised to hear that while many of the speakers did think of extraterrestrials in the traditional 3D way, others saw them as energetic beings trying to help the planet earth.

This struck a chord because, just a few weeks earlier I'd received a specific and completely out of the blue message about extraterrestrial beings. In that message, I was told that as highly advanced beings ETs have the ability to appear to us as energy beings and that they have been doing this since the very beginning.

On the long ride home, it occurred to me that, my message and the convention information I'd heard had created my first synchronicity.

My next experience involved a very trustworthy friend who shared her own personal extraterrestrial experience, explaining that it was something she never talks about but decided to share with me after reading something I'd posted. Her experience was seemingly 3D but she experienced energetic communication as well.

I was touched by her courage and impressed by her absolute credibility. It occurred to me that of all the accounts I have heard this was completely believable to me because I knew and trusted the person involved.  This, I realized, was synchronicity number two.

The third synchronicity happened when my friend Tara dropped by unexpectedly to exchange tarot readings.

One of the cards that came up when she read for me was the Hermit card.  As Tara looked at the card, she had a vision of a red Merkaba star and clearly saw red lines transporting the energy from one point to the next.  A few moments, later she pulled a card from the Doreen Virtue Ascended Master deck that had a very similar image.  

A Merkaba, as you may know, is considered to be an energetic vehicle capable of transporting someone to the higher dimensions by some - or an alien space craft by others. That both these concepts are represented by the Merkaba mirrored the information I'd already received.

Oddly, this is where all of this began for eight years ago.  First I met my guides in the dream I call the Spirit Dream.  Then I began to have experiences I could not explain. When I began to read New Age and channeled material those experiences intensified.

For me, however, there was too much about the New Age approach that felt a lot like imagination. I didn't want imagination.  I wanted the truth and for me the truth has high standards.  Now I can see that I wasn't wrong to have standards.  I was just wrong to feel like I couldn't deal with so-called New Age concepts in my own way.

So here I am.  Having come full circle, right back to the place that I started from in 2008, thinking about Pleiadians and Sirians and ancient aliens and angelic beings and energetic communication and DNA activation and all of that crazy stuff.  Except that it isn't crazy.  It's real.

And I guess it's taken that long for me to get to a place where I have the courage to believe, and write about, something that a lot of people don't understand or might even make fun of.  Good for me.

* To read more about the Hermit please see the following post on my favorite tarot card: Happy World Tarot Day: Please Pick a Card!




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Synchronicity Times Three: Coming Full Circle, From Confusion to Clarity

Evidence of Spirit: Synchronicities and What They Mean To Me

July 17, 2011

Sammy napping.














While I don't necessarily believe that there are no coincidences, I do believe that there are a lot less of them than most of us suppose.  I think that many of the events we write off as coincidences are in actuality synchronicities between the spiritual and the physical, connecting points if you will between conventional reality and what's beyond.  Because of this belief, I feel that the messages synchronicities give are always significant.  

To put the spiritual 'evidence' synchronicities represent into perspective, however, I want to first mention other sorts of evidence.  These are occurrences that many of us, even most of us, accept without ever really analyzing.  Relatively common events such as paranormal experience for example occur at least occasionally to a great many people but somehow become part of the world view of only a relative few.  Faced with solidity of our visible world it is all too easy to dismiss an event that 'couldn't' be real.  People may even say, 'I couldn't believe my eyes' and mean it!

Case in point:  I heard my first ghost when I was sixteen years old.  It was not my first experience with spirit but my earlier experiences were either heart centered (felt) or 'heard' in the form of interior dialogue.  This experience was different.

I was sitting in the kitchen of an old farmhouse when I clearly (really) heard people talking outside, though the words were muffled.  It was objectively obvious to me that they walking around on the old wooden porch preparing to come in.  I wasn't alarmed because people were expected.  "Here they are," I thought.  The old screen door squeaked.  Then nothing.  Perplexed, I got up to see what the problem was, opened the door and - you guessed it - found nobody there.


This experience should have convinced me of something I already half knew.  The reality of spirit should have become a cornerstone of my belief system.  Instead I set this experience, as well as a series of disturbing dreams and a second event that occurred in the same location, aside and did not revisit the memory for several years.

Experiences such as these  should lead each of us to question the apparent nature of reality (one very positive reason for the phenomena of ghost energy in my opinion) but the truth is they frequently don't or, as in my case, a couple of replays and few really blockbuster events (which occurred elsewhere) are required to really get the ball rolling.  Examined or not, however, displays of paranormal activity are not only evidence of spirit, they are evidence of  an invisible reality and as such should pose important questions about spirit, space and the universality of physical laws.  Questions that far too few people ask.

So where do synchronicities fit in?  If visions and auditory phenomena are true 'eye witness' accounts, synchronicities are admittedly merely circumstantial evidence.  This does not mean that we should discount them.  Quite the contrary, in my opinion; we should actively look for them.  They may be easy to miss but they are very important.  In a court of law, circumstantial evidence lends credibility to evidence which may seem extraordinary, making the layering of circumstance an important part of building a case.  The more circumstance there is, the more believable a given scenario becomes.  Small things take on significance. 

And this is true of synchronicity as well.  Once a person learns to pay attention, it is my experience that they will notice that synchronicities happen a lot.  Far too often, in my opinion, and too exactly to be written off as random.

If the direct experience of paranormal phenomena gives evidence of an invisible reality, what do synchronicities say?  They may be considered evidence of the unseen, of course, but they tell us something about this invisible realm that the experience of ghosts for example does not.  Because they are frequently helpful or instructional, synchronicities speak of a caring and compassionate universe, spiritual or God-force.  Or at least they do to me.

My most recent synchronicity concerned my dog, Samson who has been sick these last four years with what has become a very severe case of kidney disease.  Three years ago I was told he had a had few weeks to live.  We have been on borrowed time so to speak for a while now and that time is running out.  What he means to me is beyond the scope of this article and perhaps beyond words altogether.  I will say that he is best friend in the world and leave it at that.

My goal at this point in his treatment, which is both extensive and costly, is that he will have a good summer and I have prayed about this a lot.  Last week he took a sudden turn for the worse.  It seemed hopeless but after a visit to our wonderful vet and a lot interaction with spirit, I decided to admit him to the animal hospital for a transfusion.  The proposed treatment may see us til the end of the summer in the emergency vet's opinion, then again it might not.

The cost of the transfusion was $1086 which was far more than I expected.  I had 570 dollars in hand and a three hundred dollar check from my oldest son.  My middle boy who had accompanied me had exactly 216 dollars in his wallet.  Between the three of us we paid for Sammy's care without a dollar left over.  As my son took his worldly wealth out  of his wallet, he said "I guess it's meant to be."  An offhand comment from a very committed spiritual skeptic but perhaps it is a start.

Events like this are easy to dismiss and we do dismiss them more frequently than we are even aware of.  It is far better in my opinion to look for their occurrence, far better to be open  and to reflect on the messages they share:  Life is not easy.  Suffering is everywhere.  But compassion is just as available and it is accessible to all of us.  And of course, most importantly, beyond the visible a mysterious and wonderful reality awaits. 
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Evidence of Spirit: Synchronicities and What They Mean To Me
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