Dreaming the New World In

I have been recording my dreams since 1988. Today, on average I record about four dreams a night - down from twelve a night at the turn of the millennium. At that time, my dreams guided me through the death and rebirth of my gender identity. Dreams are so integral to my new identity that I do not have the capacity to do much of anything except work with dreams. I am as occupied with dreams as other people are with their career. I write a blog interpreting reader-submitted dreams called Ask the Dream Queen.

This article distills my understanding of dreams to the essentials: how to approach dreams and how dreams approach us. 

The more attention we give dreams, the more they say.

Practically anyone can learn to remember and understand their dreams. Like learning anything new, it is only a matter of devotion and practice.

When we get stuck in waking life, it can be useful to ask dreams for a solution. They will respond to any question, as long as it is sincere and persistent.

Dreams are not random. Each detail in a dream is meaningful on some level.

There is no correct interpretation to a dream, except the one that feels right. Similarly, music is not correct or incorrect, it just feels right. It is no wonder then that incredible music, like none ever heard in waking-life is fairly common in dreams.

A classic book for learning how to interpret dreams is Robert Johnson's Inner-Work.

When we alter our behavior and attitudes in response to our dreams, we leave behind the past and change how we relate to the present, and thence we alter the future. 

Dreams are a river flowing from an unconscious reservoir of unthought thoughts, unrealized capabilities, and unnoticed feelings and perceptions. If we are unable to admit something about ourselves in waking life, it will surely appear in a dream, whether it is unpleasant or marvelous.

Our dreams reflect us like a mirror of our whole selves. The mirror reveals us as a blend of the individual, collective, global and cosmic; of the mundane & sublime; of being, doing, feeling, knowing and belonging; and of gender, nature, archetype, story, culture, and the occult. Dreams know us as souls learning to incarnate the flesh, life-in and life-out.

Dreams routinely recount years of past experience to deepen our understanding of how we came to the present. For this reason, dreams sometimes elucidate past lives. For example, my dreams have portrayed me as a French monk in my last life.

In dreams, religious imagery is used to either reflect imbalances or to express the spiritual essence that institutional religions have such difficulty conveying. Dreams have told me that the church needs dreams. Dreams will destroy religion, undoing the need for it by propagating spiritual unity. Then the church, temple, and mosque will be the body, world, and universe.

I had a dream of Jesus and his inner-woman, naked. Their flesh was made of interlocking stars - his were yellow and red, and hers yellow and blue. His inner woman is named Sophia, which means wisdom. Her legs were open to me, offering me anything.

People who consistently remember their dreams have dreams about events of the coming days. Hence, dreams can act as radar, giving warnings about dangerous people and situations. Dreams reveal the distant future, suggesting that destiny - individual and collective - is already known. As an example, I had this dream about the momentousness of my gender-identity switch, ten years before it happened:

My girlfriend is an all-powerful being, and on the fourth day of the fourth month, four years from now, she will bring all things horrible and perfect into the world.

I ask, "Will you remember me?"

She says, "I will keep you safe."

Dreams' knowledge of the future is useful for knowing where we are going, whether it is to initiatory tribulation - as in the above dream - or to a better world, as in these dreams, both from 1998:

The new map is made up of circles. Each one represents a person who gives their heart to love. The circles are housed in color. There's no likeness between this map and the world map.

Walking from the old world to the new world is like walking from one room to the next. The room of the old world is black & white, while that of the new world is in color.

Dreams guide initiation - collectively and individually - into the new world.

Dreams have an agenda.

Dreams would have us act always from wisdom, without compromising to tradition or past trauma or socialization or any form of historical residue. Also, dreams would have us realize our full potential so they remark on everything stifling our potential and everything facilitating it. Our fullest potential is everlasting life through the flesh, attainable by adapting our viewpoint to that elaborated in dreams.

Dreams have a philosophical agenda not contained in any dream dictionary. As an example, here is some philosophy that came directly from dreams:

One monk says, "Desire is a boiling pot through which flesh is purified." Another monk says,  "We cannot destroy the world because of the Tao. The world is a showcase for the Supernatural Being."

Without anything worldly as the basis of exchange, love burns away impurity.

The only conspiracy is the conspiracy against love.

Dreams are true facts.

Dreams almost always present their message with metaphor. The genius of dreams is metaphor. Metaphor puts one thing in the context of something else, and in dreams it does so in a consistent, logical, and orderly fashion. As such, metaphor transmutes universal interconnectedness, the crown of which is the unity of male & female. God is male & female. Being made in God's image, people are metaphors of God.

The universe is whole and has a purpose, just like each person. Each person is a microcosm of God. To the extent people are unaware of this, dreams promote awareness of it by putting forth perspectives on perspectives on perspectives that lead past the horizon of the imagination, to Heaven.

Images by daybeezho, used courtesy of a Creative Commons license.