Dream Magic

During the different stages of sleep, our brain and consciousness relax enough to where we begin to experience light or lucid dreaming. During dreams, we may experience familiar situations and people, we might confront our personal demons, we may see things that are otherworldly and unnatural and inexplicable. Some people remember their dreams, many do not. Some people can control or direct their dreams, most can not.

If prayer is us asking for information, and meditation is us listening, then dreams are us experiencing.

There are different ways to interpret ones dreams. When we dream of people we love, it usually highlights issues we are emotional and sensitive to. When we dream about objects, it often reflects what we value. When we dream of places, it allows us to be different people in those different places, within the context of the dream.

The first step to being able to remember, understand and even control your dreams is simply to prepare for them. What is the best way to prepare to dream? By getting plenty of physical activity during the day. Work your body so that at night, your body can find rest and your mind can come out to play. Avoid anything intoxicating or caffeinated late at night – sodas, coffee, even chocolate. Those substances, while not dangerous per se, will block your ability to fall into restful sleep and even to remember your dreams in the morning.

It helps to put yourself in a state of total relaxation as you prepare to sleep. Turn off your devices. Turn off the lights. Blue lights (as in computer screens and cellphones) are particularly disruptive to healthy sleep patterns.

Your body has a natural circadian rhythm that encourages sleep at appropriate times and wants to remain asleep as long as required. Which is typically around 8 hours per night for most people.

There are healthy supplements you can take at night which will help you reset your circadian rhythms such as melatonin, which won’t have any harmful effect nor will it impair you cognitively to where you wouldn’t dream or wouldn’t remember dreams. It just makes you want to sleep at the normal times you usually do.

Another excellent way to reset those circadian rhythms is with a Himalayan Pink Salt lamp. I have one in my bedroom that I leave on a very low setting (so there is just a hint of a warm glow) and this does wonders at helping my brain and body recognize when it is time for rest.

Part of preparing ourselves for sleep is also the physical preparation. If you just walk into the bedroom after a long day, and you take off your clothes and jump in bed, you may not fall into restful sleep right away. You may think of pajamas as something only little kids wear, but I’m telling you that changing your clothing ahead of sleep actually sends your body a signal that it is time to wind down.

My recommendation: at least one hour before bed, change into something comfortable. It doesn’t have to be pajamas, maybe it’s just a tshirt and sweats or shorts, or a comfortable cotton dress. Wash your face, take off your makeup, give yourself a little bit of a scalp massage. Drink a glass of water about ninety minutes before bed, so that hopefully you can get rid of it well ahead of sleeping. Dim the lights in your home. Turn off appliances that aren’t being used. Close the blinds or curtains. Set your phone down.

When you get into bed, find a comfortable position first that is not just lying down. So, prop up with a couple pillows, maybe read a chapter of a book, or do a little meditation. Going from sitting to sleeping isn’t always an easy transition. When you break it up from standing, to sitting and reclining, to then lying down, again you let your body know what is happening and what to expect.

Some people find certain scents helpful at bedtime. Lavender and chamomile essential oils, either diffused or maybe a couple drops on a lit candle. Of course, make sure the candle is snuffed before you go to sleep.

Set your alarm. Try to set it for the same time every day, even on weekends. Again, you are programming your body according to the schedule you need to rise and wake, and rest and sleep each day and night.

When you first lie down, you might want to do a little memory work. Think about the best parts of your completed day, or even things from the past that you remembered during the day. You may want to place a crystal under your pillow, if there is something specific you want to occur during your dreams (even just to remember them) and you might set an intention for your dreams such as:

·         I wish to resolve my conflict with XYZ and I ask my dreams to reveal ways to help us mend our differences

·         I wish to connect with an ancestor who has passed

·         I wish to connect with my spirit guides

·         I wish for clarity in this particular matter

·         I wish for improved health and wellness

·         I wish to find a solution to my troubles

As you progress in your magical workings, you will begin to develop rituals before bedtime, during bedtime, and as you sleep. Be open to these rituals, they will be ones that you choose and create and refine.

One of the rituals you may discover and use for yourself is the rite of entering your inner temple.

Your inner temple is a personal world that is only for you, only seen by you, and masterfully built and crafted by you. It is a place where you can always retreat to find answers and calm and clarity during difficult times, but it is also a place of peace and restoration for anytime you seek peace. Only you alone enter your inner temple, and those that you invite in such as your spirit guides, archangels, ancestors, and ascended masters. Many practitioners of magic have and do use inner temples in order to find safety within their practice in what sometimes feels or is a hostile and misunderstanding world. During times of persecution, practitioners use their inner temples as the only sanctified and secure place in which they can do their workings.

Your personal temple will look exactly as you wish it to. It may look like a chapel, a cozy nook, a garden, an island, a camper, a cave, a portal, a bubble in time and space. Depending on which magical practices you wind up leaning toward however, likely your temple will get decorated and filled in with all the tools and elements required for your workings.

Just like any other tool, I always caution my magi friends to keep the most sacred parts for yourself. My own inner temple resembles a very real place that I have visited in the past, one that already had very sacred personal meaning for me, and one that I knew intimately and could explore. I have a ritual in which I enter my temple, rituals for once inside, and then my magic workings can begin. Some people will simply retreat into their inner temples in order to pray or meditate. Others wish to connect with their guides or ancestors. And some do actual ritual work within theirs. I do all three. But that’s completely your preference, each of you.

Whatever your intention as you fall asleep, say it to yourself. Either think it or whisper it or even write in in your dream journal. You can write down “I wish to….” and whatever, just before you turn off the light.

Now, many people do not sleep fully through the night. As you sleep and wake and sleep and wake you may pass into various different dream states. Those can include:

REM (Rapid Eye Movement) Dreams

Deep Sleep

Lucid Dreams

Waking Dreams

Nightmares

Night Terrors

You can dream during each of these, but the types of dreams and the meanings of them will change. Obviously, nightmares and night terrors will bring up darker images, frightening images and experiences. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still learn from them.

How do dreams become not just interesting stories, movies that play in our mind while we’re sleeping, but magic? It is when we connect to something more powerful than us within our dreams.

Now, bear in mind, most of the time you won’t actually remember these interactions whether they be with spirit guides, ancestors, archangels, familiars, even your own past or future selves. But it is in working with dreams and recording them, to the best of our ability, that a path toward using dreams as magic becomes possible.

If you dream of certain animals, you may call upon that animal energy to assist you in ritual work

If you dream of certain places, you might astrally travel to those locations

If you dream of ancestors and other people no longer with us, perhaps they have an important message for you that can aid in your own magical abilities. Do you know whether you had a loved one or even distant ancestor who was involved in magic? They might become a guide for you in helping you navigate your own magic journey.

If you dream of objects, perhaps those objects would like you to use them during ceremonies and ritual work.

But in addition to mining your dreams for things to use in magic, you also can do magic within your dreams. It’s a part of lucid dreaming in which you actually control what happens.

Now, your dreams are still going to take on a strange and ethereal quality, different than waking life. Things won’t look entirely the same, they may not even be the same. People will wear masks in your dreams – sometimes a loved one or friend might look like a famous person. I once dreamt my dad looked like Bob Dylan. He wasn’t Bob Dylan in the dream, but he looked like him. Upon waking, I asked myself: what message was I receiving that wanted me to see something of Bob Dylan in my own father? A song of Dylan’s came to mind, which didn’t remind me of my dad, but did remind me of a particular time in my young life, and that time frame did have special significance for my relationship with my dad and me. This kind of interpretation isn’t magical per se, but there are other elements that are magic within dreams.

Portals, for instance. As you progress in your magical workings, you may find yourself experiencing what we would call a dream within a dream. You are lucid dreaming, only to enter a phase of your dream in which you go into deep dream states where you are able to communicate with your guides or your own higher divine self, and then you return first to lucid dreaming where you remember what you experienced in that portal, or pocket. And then when you wake, with careful work and time, you may remember that working. Maybe you were healing a rift, or discovering a new truth about yourself. Maybe you met up with your most magical future self and went on an adventure.

Magical Dreaming is aided by recording your dreams in whatever way you are able. Write it in a journal as the most practical method. Jot it in a notepad or even in your phone’s note app, if that’s all you are able to do. It might begin with just a few images, a sense that someone you knew was there, a color or even just a feeling or thought. Write down whatever it was. Sometimes what you glean from your dreams doesn’t come in one dream but in several. Write down for one week the most powerful image you saw in a dream for each night. Eight days later, what story do those images tell?

You will begin to communicate with your spirit guides, a topic I’ll be exploring more in upcoming weeks. Your spirit guides are there to help you stay true to your path. If they cannot communicate with you in waking life, they likely can and will while you are sleeping. Be open to that. Communicate with them. Let them know as you begin to fall asleep that you wish to hear from them and that you are prepared to document your conversation (what you remember of it) when you wake.

Don’t expect too much from dreams as you begin. Be open, relaxed, easy. As your intuition develops, your dreams will more and more become a channel between you and spirit.

Oneiromancy (from the Greek όνειροϛ oneiros = dream, and μαντεία manteia = prophecy) is a form of divination based upon dreams, and uses dreams to predict the future. The dreamer feels as if they are transported to another time or place, and this is offered as evidence they are in fact providing divine information upon their return. I have these dreams quite frequently. I may not always know the future, but I often feel that something very important is being revealed to me if I could just decipher what it was.

As time goes by, you will actually be able to control your dreams. Yes, all kinds of dreams (even the erotic ones!) You can manifest for yourself exactly what you want, on the grandest scales and the most wonderful ways. The refinement of the self works most powerfully at your etheric and energetic levels and that, my friends, is what is actually alive in your dreams. It carries all your memories and uses them to tell a story, but the deeper meaning of the story is the story of your spirit. As you begin to decipher the images and experiences in your dreams more and more, you understand your life’s purpose more clearly. When partnered with an active magic practice, dreams become an arena where you can perform your greatest feats. You’ll not only connect with your ancestors – I’ve had amazing brunches with my grandparents (and could literally smell and taste the sumptuous feasts of bagels and lox) and attended a kegger with an old friend who passed many decades ago – but you’ll also meet yourself in all incarnations. And it is in the realm of dreams that your higher self shares information with your current self. You prepare for that meeting by understanding more clearly the landscape of your dreams.

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