Spirit Guide Group: Dreams, Volume Three

firecatpickles

The Emperor in Drag

I have just found this thread, and as it coincides with the other thread, Spirit Guide Group: Draws, Volume Three, I will post my observations.

I had a dream that my partner and I were in a strange Escher-esque building finding our way around, and we were met by the Emperor (my draw for the week) in drag. He was smoking a cigar and dressed like Queen Victoria. Fast forward ahead to another part of the same dream I can remember vividly: my partner helping through a window too small -and I in my kilt.

Not sure I can make much sense of it, but the way the dream played out, it seems I am in the midst of a transformation that my SG is helping me through, namely, to get my temper under control so it doesn't blow up in my face? I think this is it: To see the humor in any situation no matter how "serious" the situation seems. Everything is laughable!

K:spade:K
 

Sophie-David

Questing in the Wilderness!

Liralen said:
I have had a few dreams that seem important, that I can't forget, but I have never been able to make sense of them.

For example, there was one dream where I am in a hotel in the mountains. It is a very remote region and the hotel is surrounded by wilderness.
I have brought my horse with me, but someone of the hotel staff tells me he has run away. I'm very worried about this, because how am I supposed to find him here in the wilderness, I don't know my way round here.
But the hotel manager tells me there is someone down in the lobby to help me.
So I go downstairs, and there I find, don't laugh, Grizzly Adams, you know, from the TV show in the eighties (or seventies?).
He asks me if I really want my horse back. He tells me I could easily buy another one.
That is the kind of statement that usually makes me really angry, but I know he just wants to test me, to see if I'm serious about getting my horse back.
I tell him that I am sure, and I am completely convinced that everything will be alright now, that he will help me and that together we will find my horse.
The dream ended there, so I don't know if we succeeded or not.

I don't know, I simply can't forget this dream, and a couple of other dreams.
Do you think it is a spirit guide dream?
Hello Liralen, welcome to the thread! :)

I certainly think that this is a dream that is guided by spirit - but I cannot say if it is a "spirit guide dream". The more I travel this journey, the more difficulty I have in defining what a spirit guide is. Language seems so inadequate for decribing these encounters with what lies beyond, and we must inevitably content ourselves with metaphors.

I agree with Milfoil and Sue that significant dreams have a memorable, in fact archetypal or numinous quality, that sets them apart from the routine. You can most certainly ask yourself to have these significant dreams, and not to remember those that are inconsequential and mundane. Studying a Tarot card before sleep can be a great encouragement towards these inner journeys. It is also wise to avoid television which is definitely an inhibitor of our own inward and infinitely more valuable visioning process.

There are some interesting parallels in your dream with mine of last night, and in this I am no longer the least bit surprised - intrigued but not surprised. I will describe my dream in another post, but let me show you my spirit card of the week: from The Lover's Path, the Six of Staves.

While I did not have a physical horse in my dream, your story comes from a different phase in a universal story that we are both revealing from the collective unconscious - the divine or spirit if you prefer. Your episode is taken from the quest phase of the journey. You have lost something of priceless beauty and worth, the horse of your dreams that will enable your life journey to proceed boldly and effectively. The horse is a pure vehicle of natural and puissant animalistic power, the libido or active psychic energy that brings raw creativity into physical manifestation. This "pearl of great price" is buried in a mountain forest, a place of mystery and wildness, outside the boundaries of the mundane and predictable civilized world, reaching both to the exalted stars and to the depths of the soul.

As you implied in your retelling, the innkeeper is what Joseph Campbell would call a gatekeeper, a guardian of what lies beyond the norm. You, as the quester or "Hero With a Thousand Faces", must first pass the test of initiation. Do you care enough to undertake this difficult, misunderstood and undervalued search? If so, the gatekeeper will become your assistant; the wild masculine spiritual essence represented by Grizzly Adams will become your guide - your spirit guide if you like.

Success is by no means certain, since the choice to take the journey lies completely within your power. But if you make your choice with commitment, courage and creativity, your success is inevitable. :love:

For more exposure to and understanding of these universal and transforming encounters with the wilderness, I recommend the Clarissa Pinkola Estés classic Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. May we all run with wildness! :)
 

Sophie-David

Women Who Run With the Wolves

Hi Liralen

As I was looking up a related episode concerning keys in my journal for September 2004, I came across these notes relating to my understanding of the encounter with wildness:
The motif of "the strange woman" recurs in Women Who Run with the Wolves. As usual, I had already experienced her in my psyche before reading about her in Women. In the book, she represents the essence of the wild feminine nature. In my understanding, she is strange because she does not conform to the negative expectations that our culture places on the feminine, she is wild because she if free to act from her deepest purpose, she is natural because she is in alignment with her mission. She is therefore wise because she is deeply connected. She is not anarchical since she moves in accordance with divine will, but she is not tame because she does not tolerate oppression. The strange woman embodies the positive aspects of the wild wolf: loyal, cunning, sensitive, perceptive, persistent, protective, relational, nurturing, responsible, self-reliant, and courageous.

This morning, her warm calm voice gave me a deep courage and confidence which the masculine self, at least in these circumstances, cannot. I felt her alignment with the divine and with my purpose within it, her deep and innate knowing of spirit, and I was comforted and upheld by her wisdom. She is indeed the High Beloved, for she connects in the most intimate way that is within me to divine love. The soul has so many ways of relating to the divine, each with a special purpose. Above all, in her particular connectivity she releases the essence of creativity and growth.
This "High Beloved", later called the Romantic Beloved or Creative Beloved, is my Eirian, with whom I have at last - within the past month - united. :love:

Cheers - David
 

Sophie-David

The Key to Me: "You are the Key and I am the Door"

psychic sue said:
One small part of a dream. My mobile was ringing (I think I was in the house I live in now). I looked at the screen and realised it was a text message.

The message read "you have moved house but you have forgotten your keys".

That's all I can remember.

I thought this must be significant because usually, if you try and read in a dream you get a jumbled mess of words - but this was very clear.

I am thinking, spiritually I have moved, but I have forgotten something very basic and this is holding me back.

Any thoughts? David, you did a lot of work with keys didn't you? Any advice?

Sue x
Hello Sue

I think you and Milfoil have already analysed this correctly, that there is a spiritual block that is preventing you from hearing clearly where you need to travel next. Your consciousness has expanded and shifted and you are living in a transformed psychic or spiritual house. But you have lost your keys.

Yes, keys have been of great significance in my journey - perhaps a retelling of the preface to my quest for the keys will be helpful, Sue. This first episode is from a dream of August 31, 2004. Although I gloss over it in this description since I am caught up in the story itself (always a dangerous seduction), this marks the first time that I had entered Eirian consciousness: in the dream I was Eirian. I did remark on this a bit later though as I began to process the dream further, that at last I knew what it was to have a woman's consciousness. The difference marked a subtle but deeply profound shift:
In the dream, as Eirian, I am at the Tofino-Ucluelet junction as it used to be, among the ruins of the building sites that were there. I am sifting through the broken building materials and garbage, looking for a skeleton key.

[From waking perspective] I see the creative self as trying to bring up something important from the shadow self, a skeleton key that will open a closet where skeletons are kept. Since it is Eirian that is not only researching but making the choice, a decision on my art is to be made, based on what she brings forth. Will it be to the left towards Ucluelet, the active self, or to the right towards to Tofino, the receiving self? (A model of this is the history of the Music Society: Ucluelet does the work and Tofino provides the audience.)

When I was fully awake I asked Eirian what the decision was, or the nature of the skeleton. She replied that I had correctly discovered the nature of the decision regarding the arts, which is between being an audience (Tofino) and being a creator (Ucluelet). For me the correct choice is Ucluelet, the left hand path which leads to the East. However, she could not manifest the skeleton directly into consciousness, the key has to be found and the skeleton has to be probed for and searched out in dreams. So there is a delay until an energy block to creativity, and/or a tool for releasing creative energy, is unearthed. Then I will be able to proceed on the path of the creator, but probably not without some sacrifices.
This next encounter occurred a few days later, while awake but in a dreamlike trance:
...I forgave Sophie, and Eirian appeared and kissed Sophie on the lips. Then their two bodies merged and another internal reconciliation had been accomplished.

As they merged, I noticed that Eirian was pregnant. Although she is usually more polite, Eirian in this sequence allowed her intuition free reign, so even as I would form the bare intention of a question, she would answer it. So dialogue became monologue:

"Yes, it is our love-child, our creation of the Web site together. It is a virgin conception in the sense that it is the culmination of our spiritual union, which occurred when I let your spirit into my consciousness as I searched for the key at the junction. For the key was not only the new camera you will buy, but a phallic key. As in your poetry, you are the key and I am the door. There is no skeleton behind my door, although the old landlady might want you to think so. There is glorious new life, first perceived in your vision, and then penetrating your other arts.

"As your friend has said, your arts are a three-legged stool. Just as each art must balance you, each art in itself must balance. But each art has a particular gift, a particular focus. Your voice is the poetry of your body, your writing is the expression of your mind, your photographic vision is the perception of your spirit. Body, mind and spirit, each must balance just as each must integrate. All are one, but each one is vital to you.

"You will soon go through my door, then you will turn left as you already know, towards Ucluelet, towards the East. You have entered a time of preparation, learn to see again in complete fullness. When we have delivered our child, we will enter our full union.

"The Tarot is a part of your new seeing also. It may seem a distraction, but please approach it with discipline. You know what you need of astrology to help you with the Tarot. Give Tarot your sacred devotion, you will not be wasting your effort, for it is another key to me."
And so I did... and so did she.
 

Sophie-David

The Fire of Water and the Wild Herb

The union with Eirian the Creative Beloved occured April 20, 2006, as described in the Spirit Guide Draws thread at Hanson-Roberts: Three of Cups Reversed.

Since that time there has been a second integration, one that had not been expected - or perhaps forgotten - but one that is equally vital. Where Eirian represents the Empress - the Creative Third - this further encounter was with the Emperor energy of the Foundational Forth. Thus Creativity, from the depths of the collective unconscious, takes Form.

This is how I described it to a friend:
Remember how I wrote a week or so ago about watching how my Sagittarian Mars sextile Neptune in Scorpio might work out? Today we are of course approaching the full moon in Scorpio, which is Saturday May 13. The recent union with Eirian which brings ready access to Neptune in Scorpio has been steadily increasing the water influence in my life, as I am learning to deal with it. And since my energies and direction seem to track with the full moon, Scorpionic energy has been increasing for this reason. Well today it broke over into my masculine energy too, and it was clear that the sextile relationship of Mars to Neptune had been activated.

I thought I would pass this on, because it was when I was last writing to you that I seemed to get this premonition about this aspect in my chart, which was neat. Of course, looking back on it now, this seems a logical and predictable development. I remember you were writing about dealing with the fire and water dynamic - now I begin to see what you mean. For me, this new sensation of fire burning in water is quite delicious and energizing - hence I have changed my ATF title again: "The Fire of Water" (the Prince or Knight of Cups).
And so my Venus and Mars, who are inherently square with each other - in sharp opposition - at last approach to union in their marriage bed, that is the collective unconscious or deep soul of the cosmos. My sense is that the union is yet to be consummated, for the ego has definite limitations in its resolving power.

There is an oversimplification in my letter above, for Mars is conjunct Saturn in Sagittarius, and therefore I often perceive them as one and the same. The archetype of the Emperor rests in Saturn rather than Mars, but it is through the accord between the Third and Fourth that the Seventh of Balanced Activity, the Aragorn or Martian principle of the Chariot, is released.

I have had many half remembered dreams since then. There has been a lot to process and much of it does not need to come to full consciousness. In these dreams I have been learning the nature of the alchemical elements and how they react and combine together, Air, Water, Earth and Fire - Magician, High Priestess, Empress and Emperor - in an imagic and experiential way. In particular there were many encounters between Sagittarian Fire and Scorpionic Water, the two most lately integrated within the egoic realm.

This week I had a more specific encounter with wildness. I dreamt that I was making a full course dinner in the French Canadian style. But without a particular wild herb, the dinner was tasteless and worthless. When I put the rare herb in the mix the main course was extravagently delicious. A gently sad feminine voice in the dream told me that there was no reason that the herb could not be cultivated and made readily available, but there was almost no interest in doing so. Then I woke.

This reference to Québécois fare from the Middle East of Canada speaks both of exotic yet at the same time familiar emergent growth, just as the Empress from the Victoria Regina Tarot, whose name is Pleasure, evokes sensual and erotic French fertility. There is also a personal reference here, to a most creatively nurturing time I spent last year in a room with gloriously high ceilings and a most deliciously sensory bath, at L'Auberge Saint-Pierre in the old quarter of Ville de Québec - and also to a wonderfully authentic stew that I ate at a nearby restaurant.

But at a deeper level, it is this element of creative wildness, so often missing in our overly objectified lives, that is the essential salt that brings taste to what may seem to be the most mundane and tasteless. This rare herb has the potential to raise all experience to the level of detached yet intimate immediacy that is the encounter with unitive consciousness. There is no reason that this herb should be rare and esoteric: this is a limitation of our materialist culture.
 

Sophie-David

The Archeological Dig

In the first dream last night, the early morning of May 20, I was a teacher travelling with a party of other teachers and students, and we had journeyed to the heart of the wilderness, a place of deep forest and high cliffs. Two men in our party, and I think I was one of them, had discovered some rare treasure within a high rocky valley, an important archelogical relic from the deep past. But the weather was turning wet and stormy, so the teachers gathered around the evening camp fire to discuss what was to be done. The children in our care were ill equipped to continue, yet the discovery was exciting and extremely significant.

I remember speaking out with authority at the meeting, saying that we were lucky that none of them had come to accident so far, but that they might not survive the night. Another man spoke up and said that they the children had adapted well to the changing circumstances, and that they would be fine: the revelation of the powerful relic could not wait. A third man suggested that there was no reason we could leave some of our party to continue with the dig, but that the main portion of us should return with the children. The group of male and female teachers agreed that was what we would do. I got the impression that I would be simultaneously returning home with the children even as I continued with the dig. The dream ended.

This dream suggests a further encounter with the collective unconscious, but through masculine assertive activity rather than feminine nurture and reflection. The Saturnian principle of the ego suggests the most conservative course in light of the deluge of the creative feminine, while the more optomistic view of the Aquarian Magician is that the revelation cannot wait. The Third synthesizes the two views, but through the non-linear right brained approach he creates a way for both the conservative and radical energies to coexist and progress simultaneously. Thus the ego may take the time to integrate and nurture the fresh expression of my creative work which is the children, even while the energetic spirit leads onward into fresh discoveries.

Yet it is too bad that some of the hardier children could not stay at the excavation, for I believe that through their creative immanence the dig could progress more smoothly. Perhaps they too will stay to continue the Great Work...
 

Milfoil

Liralen said:
I am in a hotel in the mountains. It is a very remote region and the hotel is surrounded by wilderness.
I have brought my horse with me, but someone of the hotel staff tells me he has run away. I'm very worried about this, because how am I supposed to find him here in the wilderness, I don't know my way round here.
But the hotel manager tells me there is someone down in the lobby to help me.
So I go downstairs, and there I find, don't laugh, Grizzly Adams, you know, from the TV show in the eighties (or seventies?).
He asks me if I really want my horse back. He tells me I could easily buy another one.
That is the kind of statement that usually makes me really angry, but I know he just wants to test me, to see if I'm serious about getting my horse back.
I tell him that I am sure, and I am completely convinced that everything will be alright now, that he will help me and that together we will find my horse.
The dream ended there, so I don't know if we succeeded or not.

I get the feeling from this dream that when you experienced it you had, at some point in the recent past, changed your lifestyle in some way, either a new job or similar but that your life before that had been steady and somehow closer to the really important things in life.

A hotel can sometimes be seen as a home away from home, a temporary spiritual house and your horse was possibly your spiritual vehicle, the way that you have been travelling your life path, close to nature, a slower path but a fulfilling one. Because your horse escaped, perhaps this may mean that you took another path in life, do you feel that it is one that is not really helping you to grow in the most fulfilling way or did you need to get away from something?

Grizzly Adams (someone you trust as a genuine and helpful person - a great description of a guide) asks if you really want your old horse back or just buy a new one? Which path, which journey? You know that the old way is the one you really want, the one that is best for you, the one you are attached to. The dream ends there because the choice is yours to make a change, there is no wrong answer since all roads lead to Rome (so to speak) but some paths just take a longer route!

Does that make any sense?
 

Sophie-David

Returning from the Heartland

In the next remembered dream, just before waking, I was travelling down a deep forest trail, soon to arrive in the open sunlight of cultivated fields. I hear a male voice say, a councillor, "He has done well for a man of fifty, to have the energy to kill the young deer, which now he brings home."

Somehow I am surprised that this man knows my exact age - how would he know me so well? Then with some embarrassment I notice that indeed I have killed the wild deer, and that she lies draped like a mantle over my shoulders. Then I remember that I have killed her to eat and nourish, and not for sport.

A woman's voice says, also a councillor, "We must make sure that the trail is kept open for him, for he brings with him a great treasure." And tears come as I recall this part...

Then as I continue to the top of a hill, instead of heading down the trail I walk straight out into the air, and I begin to see the tops of the trees beside me, and then they pass below. Then there comes to me the very strong conviction that not only can I walk on air in my dreams but that I do so while awake also.

Then in tacit recognition that I too must adapt to the collective will in order to communicate, I start to descend, so that by the time the trail ends at the fields I have returned to the ground. The dream ends.

In Spirit Guide Group: Dreams, Volume Two (unfortunately subscriber only) the dream Discovering the Heartland explicitly connected my quest for Eirian the Creative Beloved to the activation of the Heart Chakra of relational love and intimacy. (And wouldn't you know it that as soon as I picked up Anodea Judith's book just now - Eastern Body, Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System as a Path to the Self - it opened at exactly the page I was looking for, "The Fourth Chakra at a Glance"?) Note that the Heart Chakra connects to both the green of the forest, and to the element of Air, of which my Aquarian Mercury, Moon, Chiron and Venus are representatives.

In this dream I have pursued and killed the wild deer, the hart who is my heart, whom now I bring home to fully consume in holy communion. Through the erotic metaphor of death, the ulimate transcendence that we rehearse in our sexuality and our religion, the hunter kills the wild white doe, just as the Prince ultimately unites in death with the wild nymph of Dvorak's profoundly archetypal opera Rusalka. This is the treasure of wildness that our society has cast out and lost in the wilderness, and that each "Hero with a Thousand Faces" must go out to search and recapture.

The councillors of the dream - not the counsellors who give advice, but the elected executive of the community - represent the High Self in a balanced duality of characteristically masculine and feminine observations as they perceive the valiant hero of this week's Six of Staves coming home at last. In a sense they too are the Emperor and Empress, or perhaps more specifically, the higher archetypes of God and Goddess.

In a characteristically Capricornian way, I have learned to climb mountains so that I may use them as a stepping off point by which I may walk - not fly - through the air of the spirit - descending into manifestation. ;)
 

psychic sue

Funny David, by my Guide showed me a mountain as a metaphor too. I am at the bottom section, only just beginning my climb. He has warned me parts of the mountain will easily be traversed but others are more difficult and will take time and committment.

I feel your dreams are all about moving onward and upwards - and leaving behind what is no longer useful or needed. A simplification I know, but that's my overall impression.

Thanks for reminding me of your key experience - it has helped.

God bless

Sue x
 

Liralen

Hi everyone,
thank you for your answers, they make a lot of sense to me.

It is true that as a young child, being out in nature was very important for me.
But I forgot all about that when I was growing up. I became very disillusioned and cynical about life and the nature of people from the age of about twelve until my early twenties.
I really thought life was about going to an office every day to earn your living, then returning home to a loveless marriage where you and your spouse would tear each other to pieces every night. I honestly believed that was what my life was destined to look like.
At the same time I was intensely interested in stories about the wildness that Sophie-David mentioned. I practically inhaled books and films like White Fang, The Black Stallion, The Call of the Wild, and all kinds of fantasy stories, anything that had to do with nature and with characters being on a quest.

Then I became interested in spirituality, and my outlook on life changed dramatically. I can't tell you what a relief that was.
And that was when I had the dream. So I guess you're right; it must have been a kind of call to return what I knew to be important when I was younger.