The dying pig mother and her suckling piglets
The image above was created using text prompts on Midjourney. I didn’t want to create anything as photorealistic as my dream, but I will describe it in detail below.
Nightmare, August 29, 2022
I rarely have nightmares. Not all dreams evoke positive feelings, most are perplexing and paradoxical, but never this gruesome.
I come across a mutilated, dying pig mother. She is bloody and there is a litter of piglets suckling her. She is deflating and losing all of her life force. I want to help, but I don’t know what to do.
If her piglets continue to feed off of her she will flatten and die. She needs time to rest and recuperate, but the piglets are too young to wean off. They won’t survive without her warmth and milk.
There is no happy ending for this event, which makes this a nightmare.
The gift of this gruesome imagery arrived when I realized I am both the pig mother and the piglets. I can be draining and co-dependent and I can also give and give and give of myself until there is nothing left.
Love needs boundaries. When I feel imbalanced or unhappy in love, I ask myself who am I right now? Am I the dying pig mother or am I the draining piglets?
The waterless seal
Dream, October 24, 2022
I found myself regressed in an apartment belonging to my mother and ex-stepdad. The water bill was past due and I was told I could not bathe myself in their home. As I was packing my stuff to leave in search of a shower, I discovered a very dry mama seal floundering in the bathtub. I said, “I don’t care how much it costs, this beautiful creature needs a lot of water,” and I turned on the shower full blast.
The seal is a creature that can exist both in water and land — symbolizing perfect harmony between our inner world and the external world. As a totem a seal represents our creative and imaginative faculties. This dream felt impoverished and imbalanced but I could not let my seal spirit friend sit in an empty bathtub.
Spare no expense for your soul or your imagination or your dreams.
How to clarify your intentions
A public service announcement from my higher self.
Hold each intention up to the sun – see what drives you.
Message from a dream, September 20, 2022
Your intentions propel you through life.
If they are cloudy or driven by ego or fear then where you end up could be somewhere you don’t want to be.
If you want to see your future hold your intentions up to the Sun, one by one.
See what is really driving you.
Anything short of divine will is only cheating yourself.
An alchemical dream about Calcinatio
Calcinatio is the first process in Alchemy. It is the burning of prime matter into ash. This is from where the mythical phoenix rises. This is how you turn lead into gold. This is how you become something new.
Baptism in fire, by Midjourney
Dream, Saturday, April 9, 2022
It was supposed to be a baptism, only my head was set on fire. This is how you purify yourself, they said. Burn all your scripts and schemas, and then start all over again. How many times can I transform before I die? I wonder. My head a funeral pyre. My potential reborn.
The Devil and I gaze at the damned stars
The Devil and I gaze at the damned stars, by Midjourney
38th Birthday Dream, June 8, 2022
I found myself in Hell being led by the Devil into a house that looked a lot like my house. I thought this can’t be my birthday dream! This is more like a nightmare. And then I saw the sky and all the stars in the sky looked like heavenly stars, and I said to the Devil, “I didn’t know you could see Heaven from Hell.” He said he had never noticed the stars before and he stood there, awestruck. I could feel him falling in love. I knew then this was not a nightmare — this was a gift. I never wanted the moment to end. The Devil and I in Hell, both of us in love, gazing up at the damned stars.
The butterfly swan-dives into a teacup
AI art collage by Midjourney and me
In between states of consciousness — like wake and sleep — the psyche speaks in images. Last week, my psyche showed me a butterfly swan-diving into a teacup where a spider was waiting.
Related: The Mandrake Man Dance
Pro-aging skin treatment
Midjourney
I was an older woman in my dream. Someone said I had aged rapidly and it was most noticeable in my elbows. The skin around my elbows was loose and sagged toward the floor. I said, “I know. This is why I walk into every room with my arms up in the air — celebrating myself.”
Life advice from a Mexican day worker in a dream
This is a dream realm account from Tuesday, March 1, 2022.
I learned that night that not everyone you encounter is a guide with a message. Some dream spirits are just trying to do their job — but if you hound them hard enough they’ll scrounge up some wisdom to spare.
I found myself on a bus in the middle of nowhere, when it made a sudden stop. I got off the bus and followed two day workers to their construction site, asking questions along the way.
I said, “Tell me something that will help me in real life. Where do I go? Where should I go?”
The Mexican man didn’t want to give me advice. He wasn’t that kind of guide or spirit. He was just a day laborer — in another realm — doing his job.
But I knew we had the same blood, so I asked again. I hounded him for advice.
“You’re real, I know. Tell me something.”
He finally said, “Ok. When you are standing in a checkout line, always have your pesos ready to pay. Don’t be that person that waits until the last minute. Count out your change and have it ready in your hand. Keep the line moving.”
I stood there for some time in the front yard of the house they were working on. I looked both ways down the road. I wondered if another bus would come to take me somewhere. I knew eventually, yes.
Explore your mental floorplan
Mental Floorplan, (Dream, February 25, 2022)
We all gathered in the living room, my dream selves and I. There were many of us. We began to crowd each other.
I knew there were many rooms in my house. I could see the layout of my mind.
Sometimes we gravitate toward the same room over and over again. We think that's all we know. We forget there are mansions in our minds.
Look at your mental floorplan. See all your rooms. Keep exploring.
Disembodied spirit check-in
"You're on Earth. There's no cure for that." ― Samuel Beckett
We gathered in a dream — a check-in for disembodied spirits.
A man told me I was looking bright and brilliant — better than I had before. There was a loving warmth in his words, and a familiarity in the way he spoke to me.
I alluded to a recovery. Another spirit stranger piped in and asked if I had been dying. He thought by recovery I meant a terminal illness.
I was surprised at his question, as if he should have known me better. I said, “No, I’m on the life path/plan right now — same as you — we’re all dying.”
When I woke up I knew that by recovery, I meant something in the heart chakra that needed restructuring. A healing had occurred that made my spirit shine in the dream realm.
I was grateful for my disembodied spirit check-in. We were a family of souls catching up on each other's reality progress.
I considered how I could accomplish this in my waking life. How to conduct a disembodied spirit check-in with myself.
There's a divorce that needs to happen – between reality and the spirit. A disentanglement of your identity from your life path.
“How is it going?” Your spirit friends will ask you.
Failure, disappointment, heart break — you all laugh about it together.
That's just what it's like on the life track, someone will say.
You see humor in the hurdles.
You see the finish line and are in no hurry to get there.
No one is competing.
You hang back. You catch up with your friends.
You all look bright — like new stars just birthed.
On reality tunnels
We are all in a cosmic movie theatre seated on our own alien tapestries. Each of us is watching a private screening of our reality. I peek over to other people’s screens but they warn me:
“There are messages meant only for others.”
They’re only going to show me what I can handle. Anything else is too much. Keep your attention on your own reality tunnel.
[Dream message, July 7, 2021. Psychic dream imagery collage created by MidJourney and me]
The lonely woodworker who was not lonely
This was a vision from a psychedelic journey on June 4, 2022
A man sat alone with his chisel carving animal totems out of wood. To outsiders he appeared lonely, practicing his dead art. But beneath reality — what they could not see — was that the man was never alone. He was a man who lived in two kingdoms.
His wood was infused with the wisdom of ancient, guardian trees, and the animals he carved out of them were ancestors and spirits who guided and inspired every cut he made.
Each creation of his was a merging of living energies and because of this he was always connected and beaming with life and never, ever alone.
Note: This post is an excerpt from my weekly-ish newsletter called Many-Worlds Vision.
The sad girl & the island
On a ferry floating across a body of water, I meet a young girl on her way back home. She is sad. Her eyes well up with tears.
She had lived her whole life on an island she thought was paradise. Before this voyage, she never knew what it was like to leave. Now, as her island comes into view, it begins to feel too small for her. She had caught a glimpse of a whole new world, and because of that she now had to answer to a new mind and a new heart that made her want more and more for herself.
The girl mourned her past perspective which had kept her satisfied and safe. She now understood she could never go back home. She was being pushed toward the unknown, and even though the guiding force is divine, and every new discovery would be life-expanding and destined for her, she was still sad and she cried and I cried with her.
Things that do not belong to me
For the past month, I’ve been dreaming a lot about things that don’t belong to me — things like houses, lovers, jewelry. I covet them. I steal them. I fall in love with them. But in the end I wake up with none of it.
When I was a child, I would sometimes burst into tears upon waking, because the really cool thing I found in a dream did not exist. I still remember how badly I wanted those x-ray glasses, or the treasure chest filled with gold, or that fallen star gleaming in my hand.
I don’t cry about that anymore. As an adult I learned the hard way that not every beautiful thing belongs to me. “Sometimes the grown-up thing to do is ooh & ahh & walk away.”
But there are dream gifts that you can pull into real life. They come in the form of words, or images or in the spatial dimensions of an emotion.
I pay closest attention to Full Moon dreams, New Moon dreams, dreams while traveling or menstruating, birthday dreams, and even dreams on holidays can carry gifts.
Last night’s Full Moon dream had edges.
I found myself at an open house. As I walked through, each room was more beautiful and extravagant than the last. Exalted ceilings, ornate wood, gilded mouldings, stained glass. There were murals and mosaics and unearthed marble tile that had been restored. All the colors were rich and lustrous, and my heart ached to be bathed in their light.
I knew I could never own this house. It wasn’t for sale. They were only looking for a subletter, anyway. Someone who would live in the smallest room, without a view, and remain fairly unknown. There would be no lease or binding contract. No proof that I ever belonged there.
At the end of the dream, I stood there in the largest room — a Turkish-style bath — staring at the fairy-tale like murals. So much history that I was not a part of, so much future that I would never know. And I cried. Not like a child. Not because I couldn’t have something beautiful. I cried because I loved it anyway. I cried because it existed, and I appreciated it, and I would never forget it. And it didn’t matter who would live in this house or own it, I was here now, grounded in the moment, surrounded by walls that I loved — walls that I would let keep me forever.
Even after I awoke, I was still within those walls. That is the gift I brought back with me. My heart had a new shape — as if the dream had tugged on its edges and stretched it out further into the world. A new appreciation for all the beautiful things that will never belong to me, but that I get to see and love anyway.
Updated: Dreaming as a technology
Dream imagery: Mental Clouds
Dreaming is a technology. Every night I become more adept at translating the language (symbols) of dreams.
On March 8, I dreamed someone who loved me hired a skywriter to write my name in the night sky in neon light, but there was so much cloud coverage that I could barely see it.
When I woke up, I had a knowing that the clouds were my thoughts getting in the way. My mental body was building a wall between love and me. Suddenly, so many other dreams from before made sense!
From Symbolic and the Real by Ira Progoff:
If the dream goes unheeded, or if it is not understood, and if its subject matter remains important, the dream will usually be repeated, either with the same or with equivalent symbols. It seems that if an important part of the process taking place in the depths of the psyche is not recognized on the conscious level so that the person cannot cooperate with it and draw it forward in the acts of his life, the process of growth is stymied. The individual then remains in a condition of self-stalemate until he learns to recognize the tendency of his inner life and manages to bring his outer life into accord with it.
I thought about the other coded symbols I had unlocked (specific to me or universal):
Water/Waves/Ocean — subconscious, different levels of consciousness or what is repressed.
Landscapes/Cities — usually depicts the state/shape/territory of my heart.
Movement/Transportation/Airplanes/Buses — journeys, mental/subconscious/emotional or otherwise.
Spaces/Rooms/Furniture — usually calls for rearranging of mental structures. perspective shifting. mental baggage.
Clouds — my thoughts, a system of intelligence that differs from my intuition or emotional body.
Dream imagery does what self-help books cannot do.
How dream imagery works for me: First it is the image, then the understanding or knowing of what the image represents, followed by the emotion that’s anchored to the dream which makes it so meaningful and has the power to transform something inside of me.
UPDATE:
El Candado (the Spanish word for padlock) is a provoker-symbol in dreams. It show me doors I’ve neglected to lock or unlock. Sometimes there is an intruder, other times I’ve locked someone out when they needed to be let in.
Dream language will never be entirely translatable — but the energy from dreams is what we need to carry with us in our waking lives.
When I dream of El Candado and wake up, I ask myself throughout the day: who I am locking out or what I am letting in?
Every dream has a request, and when I dream of El Candado, it is asking me to pay attention to my emotional boundaries and physical space. So I do exactly that.
Landscapes and movements as symbols
Last night around 1AM, I woke up from a dream about Oakland. The cities and towns you live in have energies and histories and destinies, just like we do. I found myself there when I was at the lowest point in my consciousness. Oakland cradled me when no one else cared.
My apartments were shit holes. I was chased, cussed at or threatened everyday. I listened to a man get stabbed and bleed out right underneath my window. I heard my neighbor — a young mother and sex worker — get bargained down to a ten dollar blow job. My best friend’s car riddled with gun shots. My building raided by the FBI. West Oakland was a ring of Dante’s Inferno, but it was my lovely hell.
The ley lines of cities map your heart. I was poor. I was broken. I was depressed. There were no pretenses. I was sad and so was everyone else around me, and I found solace in that.
In last night’s dream, I parked my car at the top of the highest hill in Oakland, got out and set off on foot to search for my love. The town became the edge of a cliff. There was no railing, just a single-track trail. I almost slipped twice, and I was scared, but I kept going. Eventually, I hit a chain-link fence and remembered how I tore my wrist open climbing one just like it when I was 8, so I chickened-out and turn back toward my car. At that moment, I woke up.
A love note I wrote in 2010, while living in Oakland.
Some dream symbolism is so blatantly obvious it slaps you in the face. I still have chain-link fences posted up in my heart. It keeps me from loving the way I want to love. I need to tear those fuckers down.
Our personal journeys to evolve/ascend/bloom-then-wither-gracefully unfold like archetypes and legends and myths. The key to discovering what story you might be living, and obstacles you are to overcome, is to learn your symbols and patterns and rhythms. There has been movement since the beginning.
The ways we protect our hearts
The ways we protect our hearts. “He took certain liberties to protect his heart.” Only in costumes, only comedies, only short plays. But then he said we could wear whatever we wanted to wear on stage, and write our own lines, and as he told us his new plan for our show, his whole face lit up and I thought I saw God in the room.
Answer all your self questions or else they float there like your lost bodies
The younger version of me could not be pulled through the dimension. Her skeletal frame was frozen and split and hanging from a branch. Her consciousness could not translate. I was sad but I accepted it. What else could I do? Answer the question, they say. Answer all your self questions or else they float there like your lost bodies. The girl drops from the tree as an egg 🥚. I bend in between the worlds to pick myself up. The egg is glowing. Obviously I’m fertile. A man is speaking on a PA system. I only hear the words … “Come be …. Your future is bright.”
A still-frame from a dream
I’m out in the backyard of a strange home that is my home. The sky is dim, like a French noir film. There is a little girl bathing in a kiddie pool. She is not mine, but she is an aspect of me — the young, feminine psyche baptizing herself in the shallow end of her subconscious. I look up and see an inflatable pool toy in the shape of a butterfly floating across the sky. It is colorful and striking against the grey light. The butterfly is both the spirit and the psyche and it belongs to me. It has broken free and glides across the forefront of my mind and thoughts. I reach for my phone to take a picture. I knew it would make a beautiful picture.
Claudia, The Growler
Three nights ago (02-08-2022), I felt embarrassed in a dream. The polar opposite of this dream experience:
Another version of me resurfaced from The Wild. She was on the news, and word had gotten around that she was me, and she was called Claudia, The Growler.
A Growler is someone who one day leaves behind their life and recedes into the wild to go crazy in peace. My mother had wanted to be a Growler too. (This is what I knew to be true in the dream).
Apparently, she had been in exile. I was embarrassed because now everyone knew that this Claudia existed, without ethos or etiquette. And that whoever I had become in the past 37 years would be replaced by this wild woman. Then I woke up.
I immediately thought of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the mother figure to all wild women. I went back into the book “Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype” and searched for solace and clarity. What I found was a manifesto and a newfound responsibility for my life and self:
The things that have been lost to women for centuries can be found again by following the shadows they cast. And make a candle to Guadalupe, for these lost and stolen treasures still cast shadows across our nightdreams and in our imaginal daydreams and in old, old stories, in poetry, and in any inspired moment. Women across the world—your mother, my mother, you and I, your sister, your friend, our daughters, all the tribes of women not yet met—we all dream what is lost, what next must rise from the unconscious. We all dream the same dreams worldwide. We are never without the map. We are never without each other. We unite through our dreams.
Dreams are compensatory, they provide a mirror into the deep unconscious most often reflecting what is lost, and, what is yet needed for correction and balance. Through dreams, the unconscious constantly produces teaching images. So, like a fabled lost continent, the wild dreamland rises out of our sleeping bodies, rises steaming and streaming to create a sheltering motherland over all of us. This is the continent of our knowing. It is the land of our Self.
And this is what we dream: We dream the archetype of Wild Woman, we dream of reunion. And we are born and reborn from this dream every day and create from its energy all during the daytime. We are born and reborn night after night from this same wild dream, and we return to daylight grasping a coarse hair, the soles of our feet black with damp earth, our hair smelling like ocean, or forest or cook fire.
It is from that land that we step into our day clothes, our day lives. We travel from that wildish place in order to sit before the computer, in front of the cook pot, before the window, in front of the teacher, the book, the customer. We breathe the wild into our corporate work, our business creations, our decisions, our art, the work of our hands and hearts, our politics, spirituality, plans, homelife, education, industry, foreign affairs, freedoms, rights, and duties. The wild feminine is not only sustainable in all worlds; it sustains all worlds.
Let us admit it. We women are building a motherland; each with her own plot of soil eked from a night of dreams, a day of work. We are spreading this soil in larger and larger circles, slowly, slowly. One day it will be a continuous land, a resurrected land come back from the dead. Munda de la Madre, psychic motherworld, coexisting and coequal with all other worlds. This world is being made from our lives, our cries, our laughter, our bones. It is a world worth making, a world worth living in, a world in which there is a prevailing and decent wild sanity.
The imagery of spreading the soil of my psyche in larger and larger circles until it becomes a continuous land, resurrected from the dead, is the same imagery as last week’s resurfaced audio. The Universe confirms your journey over and over and over again until you pay it attention.
I can’t be embarrassed or ignore Claudia, The Growler. I know the answer is to not feel embarrassed, and to instead wear her like my soul. She’s returned from exile. She wants to live beside me. I breathe her wild and it infuses everything I do.