Updated 3/20/08. Several new add ons, and an overhaul throughout….

 
I used to be somebody who felt that dreamtime was distinctly different from our waking time — one was real, the other was clearly not. I wasn’t into analyzing my dreams, because I felt they were just nonsense that our brains invented to keep it entertained while the body rested. Now I have a completely different perspective on the matter, but it didn’t happen overnight. Over the past few years as I’ve become more conscious and have incorporated a more spiritual view into my reality, my dreams have evolved, to reflect the change. Because of that, I’ve come to realize that there is definitely more to dreaming than just nonsense brain firing. In fact, there are several possibilities that can happen when you lay down for that nap:

• Brain gunk. Bits and pieces of things we saw, heard or did throughout the previous couple of days can manifest in our dreams in strange and bizarre fractured sequences. It’s the mind’s way of processing all the miscellaneous tidbits that our brains captured, but didn’t do anything with. (On a related note…our brains do this while awake as well, which I’ll get into in a moment.) This would be considered the “nonsense” aspect of dreaming. Add in those dreams where you believe you’re at work and are racing against some deadline or impossible work load, and the “looping” dreams where you or a dream fregment keep repeating itself over and over, until you finally wake up like, AHHHH! Yup…brain gunk.

• Meaningful messages. Then there are the meaningful symbolic dreams, the ones with some semblance of plot, chock full of objects and vivid situations that can all be found in a handy dandy dream dictionary. Those are the fun dreams, the ones where your subconscious and/or higher self is speaking to you through the universal language of symbols. The trick is to remember them, which is why dream logs can be handy, if you have the time and are so inclined. Something is trying to talk and convey a message to you, so you may as well listen.

• Portals to other realms. Moving up from dreams with plot and vivid situations are dreams that go into the category of virtual reality. Dreams where you were visiting places you’ve never been, but yet it felt so real to you in the dream that it was like you were really there. And who knows…maybe you were. Dreams where you meet up with people you know and maybe haven’t seen in a long time…or who may even be dead, but are paying you a visit. This is when dreams begin to act as actual portals. It’s the sort of thing I didn’t used to know about or believe in when I was younger, but have since had experiences which have shown me otherwise. Another aspect of dreaming can involve visiting parallel realities that we have, because for every choice we or our parents made for us, there’s the choice we/they didn’t make, which exists somewhere, out there. So I think we can connect to those parallel realities when we sleep, we get to see what we would be doing if we were “over there” instead of “over here.” Some do this via astral travel as well, leaving their bodies and flying around. When we sleep there’s that great potential to flit around, meeting up with people, having pow wows you could call it, going to other realms, learning things, even if we don’t consciously remember them when we wake. Many people also describe going to “class rooms” where they are taught things while they sleep. And they may very well be doing just that.

• Screen memories. “Dreams” which are very real feeling, vivid and strange, involving aliens, whatever they actually are, UFOs and military personnel abductions can also possibly be screen memories of an abduction, for those of you who are abductees. The number one place to get clues about your abductions if you can’t consciously recall things would be in your dreams. They can often be real and semi-altered memories of events that took place, or at least a screen that has been put in place by you, or them.

So apparently, a lot can happen when you sleep…much more than I ever realized when I was younger. Pay close attention to your dreams and sleep experiences to get clues. A dream log is a useful tool, and I finally got around to getting one going this year (2008) after previously claiming to never have enough time in the mornings. For the past three months I’ve been in self discipline mode, and a big part of that is getting up 2-3 hours before I’m due to be at work. !! A miracle for me, somebody who loves their sleep. So logging dreams, when I can remember them, is now a part of my daily checklist of discipline to engage in. The more you log, the more you seem to have I’ve noticed, once reality realizes you’re paying attention. ;) What I’ve also found amazing is the way in which many times, a group of objects or symbolisms or actions/happenings will appear in a dream and on the surface they don’t seem connected, yet, when I look up their meaning in a dream dictionary it turns out they all connect and relate together. !!! How it’s possible for the subconscious to know these symbolisms’ meanings when the conscious doesn’t is beyond me, but it’s amazing.

So once you acknowledge that your dreams are chock full of meaningful symbolism and otherworldly occurrences, what about your waking life? Is it really all that separate from the dreamtime? Should you tackle your waking life the way you would when you analyze your dreams, complete with a dream dictionary and all??

If you’d asked me that question even five years ago, I would have laughed and thought that was ridiculous. Not anymore. I pay attention and have also recorded the things that happen in my waking life, as evidenced by this site. You’ll see excerpts from my logs regarding number sightings, ear ringings, deja vus and synchronicities…all of it is tackled the way one would when analyzing their dreams. Anything unusual that manifests in my reality, any objects, animals, numbers, names, etc. which appear in a strange way, I look them up and analyze it exactly as I would any dream.

Why?

Because our waking life isn’t really that much different from our sleeping state. Some would say there’s no difference at all. I say there is a difference, but it’s small. In your dreams, you don’t “really” get injured or die, nor do you “really” do the things that you do, but yet there is that potential for connecting to parallel realities, meeting up with others, astral travel or having premonitions about things that do end up happening when you’re awake. So in that sense, reality and fiction become blurred during dreamtime.

Same as our waking state. Things are more solid and real when you’re awake versus in a dream, you can get hurt, bleed, die, and are actually interacting with people, but yet, there are so many glitch in the matrix moments, and surreal times when bizarre stuff is happening that it leads one to question….exactly how real is this, anyway??

Our dream state and waking state are really just two sides of the same coin. And this becomes very evident when you try to be as conscious and aware as possible while you’re awake. I’ve been trying to do this off and on for the past three months and it’s been……..eye opening, to say the least. Time and again I’ll have the intent for things I want to do during my day as well as things I don’t want to do, such as time wasting bad habits, and time and again I’ll realize that I completely bungled it all up. How? By falling “asleep” even though I was awake. !!! It’s exactly the same way we lose ourselves when we fall asleep and enter into the dream state. When you slip off into dreamland you lose control over yourself and your mind, and forget most everything you are as a person when you’re awake. Your whole daytime life just goes……poof, gone. Unless you’ve mastered lucid dreaming, then you’ll just be like most people who get swept up in your dreamtime happenings with silly plots and strange adventures and random characters, being taken along for the ride instead of being in charge and directing how things go. And that’s exactly what can happen during the day as well, if one is not completely conscious and aware at all times, every second of every moment. With myself, there I’ll be in front of the computer, intending to write something maybe, or print something out, or look something up as research, and then I get a whim to click on a different website instead, which leads to another and another and another, then I’ll have the urge to open my music folder and start playing some tunes, and next thing I know two hours has gone by and I still haven’t done any of my original plans. Instead I wasted time. I “lost myself,” and “fell asleep” even though I was wide awake. It’s alarming, once you begin noticing it and are trying to not be that way! Although when it comes to this, certainly everybody is going to be varying degrees of worse or better than others. I may beat myself up for being easily sidetracked by the computer, but then I have to keep in mind two of my male supervisors, who seem very much asleep at the wheel and often times are kind of glazed over and “lalala.” So much so that to me they come across as very pliable, and easily spun off into any direction, to the point where I have to be careful not to inadvertantly change their minds or confuse them about anything because their minds will just go wherever I nudge them. It’s really scary actually. And I think a lot of people out there in the world are this way, it’s not just my two supervisors, and it’s why someone like Derren Brown for instance, the illusionist/mind control master from Channel 4 in England, is so successful at his tricks.

This morning, 3/20, I embarked on an exercise in mental awareness where I paid attention to every single movement I made. It’s hard, that’s all I can say, as the brain relies on autopilot to accomplish most tasks that are second nature. You have to concsiously slow yourself down in order to keep up with monitoring your every movement as well as tracking your every thought that pops into your mind. And what I noticed with the whole thought tracking thing in particular is that while much of my internal dialogue chatter could be traced to its triggering origins, some of it however could not……and in fact was merely random neuron firing. !!! Just nonsense flashes that popped into my head with no traceable origins for what triggered it, which is exactly what happens when we sleep many times. Very eye opening. So yes, it’s even more proof for me that sleeping/dreaming and our awake daily lives are just two sides of the same coin.

 
Real life dream-like symbolisms

For a period of time in 2004 I kept encountering stuff relating to RV’s (recreational vehicles) as I went about life. First I had a dream about being in an RV, going up a huge mountain on a gorgeous sunny day with piercing blue sky, so high up that it seemed like we were flying in the RV. Next, about a week later, my boyfriend found himself doing some web design work for a couple who were putting together a website regarding their travels in an RV. Finally, I had a bad roller blading accident on Summer Solstice, where I was flying along ;) on my roller blades and wiped out in front of an RV that was idling in a driveway. I either sprained or fractured my wrist during that wipeout – on Summer Solstice no less – and it all occurred in front of yet another RV. By the second RV occurrence I’d already stopped to take notice, but by the third….I actually looked it up in the dream dictionary to see what the flip was going on. !

Then there were the silver dimes. At the beginning of 2004 I’d been thinking about old silver coin money prior to 1964, and I had the offhand joking realization that I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a silver dime. In fact, I wondered if there were even any in existence. ! And wouldn’t it be cool to see one? Boy, I want to see a silver dime!

Soon after that, I began receiving silver dimes…..but only at certain key moments in my life. I don’t just get them at random times for no good reason. I’ve only gotten them during times I made an extremely positive change in my life, or positive choices that lead me in a good direction where I need to be going. Then coincidentally, within a day, I’d get a silver dime in my change, or find one in my wallet. In fact, the weekend I had the bright idea to formulate this website I received a silver dime. I have four total now in my possession, and all of them came my way at key times.

Dimes are denominations of 10. Two dimes: 1010. The dates on all the dimes I have happen to be 1964. 1+9 = 10, 6 + 4 = 10. 1010. During the time that I received my first two silver dimes, I began getting 1010 synchronicities as well, which overlaps with meaningful number sightings too I guess. At any rate, I looked up all the symbolisms in a dream dictionary — silver, dimes, coins, and 10, tackling the situation as if I were interpreting a dream.

At the tail end of 2003, going into the first week or two of 2004 paramedic/fire truck sirens and car alarms were everywhere, at every turn. Car alarms going off in the middle of the night repeatedly, paramedic and fire truck sirens frequently day and night. It got so obnoxious and noticeable that I looked it up and interpreted it as a dream symbol. Sirens are a normal part of life in an urban area, but this was something else. It was happening so often to such an extent that there was just no dismissing it. Only when I finally acknowledged it and looked into it…did it cease.

Another time I’d had a very crazy, vivid MILABS-related dream. After I awoke and got ready for work, I left my apartment to head to my car, and then found a baseball cap lying on my car. A blue New England Patriots cap just lying there, on the hood, waiting for me. The whole thing was just so bizarre, especially considering the dream I’d woken up from only a half an hour before. As I approached my car, seeing something lying there on the hood, it felt surreal, dreamlike. I ended up interpreting that incident using my intuition and the trusty dream dictionary — hat, cap, the color blue, car hood, patriots, football / game, anything I could think of relating to it, as well as interpreting the dream I’d had. All of it was lumped together in one big group, and I treated the hat incident as if it was just one continuous extension of the dream… because in reality, it was. Interestingly enough, the symbolisms of hat and car hood are actually closely related. Both have to do with concealing and hiding something…which tied into another recurring dream symbolism I’d been having during that time period involving yellow eyes…yellow, as in coward, eyes, as in seeing. Being afraid to see something. And here I had a hat lying on the car hood…stuff that was hidden, concealed. A little too coincidental. But there are no coincidences really. Consequently, two months later when the Super Bowl was going on, I predicted the Patriots would win, only because the hat had been lying on my car hood two months before. And they did. Too bad I didn’t make any bets. ;)

Many people reading this may already be familiar with another website called Crystalinks, put out by Ellie Crystal. www.crystalinks.com For awhile, (back when I used to read the site on a regular basis) the content of her daily blog would just so happen to coincide with stuff that I, and many of her other readers, had either recently been thinking about, dreaming about, or directly experiencing. The first time it was cool, but the second, third and fourth time this happened, it was just uncanny. I mean, what is going on here that we’re all experiencing, seeing, thinking or dreaming the same things, the same symbolisms, the same general themes? In a nutshell, it’s a grid-wide symbolism you could call it, something which is out there in the program, the collective unconscious, however you choose to define it, and which many are simultaneously picking up on at the same time. Kind of like “The theme of the week”, as I call it. The reason I mention this is because there have been a few occasions where I experienced unusual symbolism in my waking life which I took note of and looked up in a dream dictionary, only to find the same symbolism being mentioned on Ellie’s daily blog. One time the symbolism involved feathers. During the same time period where feathers were a topic on Crystalinks, I also had a feather encounter. I was with my boyfriend at a Laundromat and we were planning to go sit down at the base of the stairs to read while we waited for our clothes, and at the very spot where we planned to sit, there were two different types of feathers waiting for us on the ground. Another time the symbolism involved ducks, of all things…..! Yes, ducks. Kept seeing ducks all over, and then one flew directly across the road in front of my car while I was driving down the street to my apartment. It seemed so pointed and unusual that I took note of it, then found Ellie talking about unusual duck encounters as well on her site that week. So the grid-wide theme of the week was “ducks”.

Indigenous people are noted for being very in touch with their environment and nature, and that includes interpreting the things that happen around them. Everything is taken to mean something, which contrasts greatly with our modern Western world where nobody notices anything it seems. Unless it involves money, nifty gadget toys, clothes, cars, TV, the movies, celebrities or entertainment, people don’t notice or care. One time during 2005 I was at a get together with a group of about twenty people, one of whom included a woman of Cherokee decent. She was psychic and very in tune with things. When a wasp appeared in the room, hovering about in one particular corner, everybody else just perceived it as a pest to get rid of. For her, it was a pest as well as a symbolic omen. She stated that it was a bad sign, and for her it indicated that someone present in the room was closed off and negative. Interestingly enough, the wasp was focused over one particular man who always sat there, arms folded, closed off, and who illicited ear ringings from my boyfriend every time he spoke. He would later turn out to be greatly incompatible with the group and would have a temporary falling out with them. Go figure. So something was definitely up with him, whatever it was. The signs are all around, if only we’d open our eyes. There’s a whole world of symbolisms to be interpreted as the universe is constantly communicating to us.

They say that reality is a shared dream of the masses. They also talk about reality being a grid, a program, a “matrix,” zoo and experiment. I think it’s a little of all of those. It’s definitely not what mainstream science and school conditions us to believe it is. It’s time to wake up and start looking around, see what’s right in front of us. Everything means something. Nothing happens by accident, there are no coincidences. If a particular animal, object, number or theme pops up in your life in an unusual way, well, then it means something. Especially if it happens more than once. So why not pick up a copy of a good quality dream dictionary and see what you find when you start looking.

© 2006-2008
Carissa Conti

 
Mary Summer Rain’s Guide to Dream Symbols — by Mary Summer Rain. Over 15,000 symbols defined. Highly recommend!

or better yet….

In Your Dreams – The Ultimate Dream Dictionary – by Mary Summer Rain. The new, revised and expanded edition with over 20,000 dream symbols defined. The best and most comprehensive dream interpretation source I’ve come across yet! Even more important to note is that with the Mary Summer dream symbol books, the interpretations are more accurate and correct than the random dream book you’d find on the shelves of your local bookstores. I couldn’t imagine reading any other for that reason. It’s funny too, because in MSR’s first book “Spirit Song,” her Chippewa shaman teacher No-Eyes told her that someday she’d write a dream guide – and people would know “here” (she rubbed her heart area) that it was right, versus other books. It’s true, and I felt that myself.

www.dreammoods.com – Good site to use in conjunction with Mary Summer Rain’s book. Although dreammoods tends to give more stereotypical, almost “cartoonish” explanations for things. But it is pretty comprehensive, with an A- Z dictionary and search function, and even groups symbols together by category. So it’s useful in that regard.