Friday, August 24, 2012

Discovering the Meanings of Dreams

Examine any emotions which accompany the dream. If the emotion seems inconsistent with the thing you dreamed, pay more attention to the emotional content than to its apparent stimulus.

 Explore your associations with a puzzling symbol. If, for example, a dream person has blond hair, free associate on the phrase "blond hair," jotting down anything that comes to mind.

 After recording a dream, quickly and instinctively give it a title. This will often provide a clue to its meaning.

 Pay attention to any involuntary slips of the tongue, pen or fingers which you make as you speak or write about the dream. These are sometimes significant.

 Pay particular attention to symbols and situations which occur repeatedly in your dreams.

 On waking, imagine endings or continuations for your dreams. Record these and examine them along with the dreams themselves

 Waking, place yourself in the position of another character in the dream. How would the dream appear, and what would it mean, to that person? (For example, if you dream of being pursued by someone, place yourself in the position of the pursuer instead of the pursued.)

 Give creative expression to your dreams in drawings, poetry, dance. This extension will often fill in missing meaning in your mind.

Be aware that any one dream has multiple levels of meaning. The possibilities include, but are not confined to:

  • Processing and integrating experience from the previous day.
  • Wish fulfillment.
  • Messages from your unconscious to your conscious mind.
  • Self exploration and analysis; often one possible interpretation of a dream involves seeing each character in the dream as part of the dreamer.
  • Symbolic representations of physical conditions in your body.
  • Dream symbolism may include puns or plays on words.
  • Contact with spirits or Deities often occurs more readily in dreams than in waking.
  • There may memory of the distant past, of early childhood, or of other existences.
  • Experiences of precognition, telepathy and clairvoyance are more common in dreaming than in waking.
  • Your mind may use a dream to take control of a problem and solve it.                                                                                                                                


Waxing Moon


Magical work for fertility, prosperity, growth and plenty:
Harvest crops and herbs that grow above the ground.

Saturday, August 18, 2012

New Moon



(when the first sliver of the moon shows in the sky)
Divine the future (this is when the priestesses at Delphi prophesied)
Move to a new house

Trim hair or nails in order to make them grow faster
Sign contracts
Auspicious for:
Consecrations and initiations
Marriages and new partnerships
Major purchases
New enterprises, new investments, starting a business
When you see a new moon for the first time, salute Her by kissing your hand and saying, "New Moon, leave me as well as you found me."
(According to folk tradition, you are supposed to kneel on a rock while you do this, but in my neighborhood it is hard to find rocks large enough to kneel on.)

Sunday, August 12, 2012

CATCHING YOUR DREAMS



Probably the most important technique is to verbalize, orally or in writing, anything that you remember, as soon as possible on waking. Often memories which are vivid at the moment of waking will fade and disappear very quickly--especially as soon as you get up and move around. Keep a pencil and paper or a voice recording device near your bed, and if necessary a small source of light so that you won't have to disturb your partner. At first, do not worry about the quality or meaning of what you remember and record. If you wake during the night too drowsy to record a dream at length, often a few jotted words or doodled images will be enough to trigger your memory later. In fact, it is generally helpful to start recording each dream with just a few key phrases or devices immediately on waking, and then use these as notes as you write out the dream in its entirety. If you prefer to record your voice, be aware that if you want to use the material in any systematic way at a later time, you will probably have to take time to transcribe it into written form. For most purposes of magic and self-exploration, you need the dreams recorded in a form which you can easily browse through, sort, classify and retrieve.

Do not ignore what at first appear to be meaningless fragments. Usually the process of verbalizing or recording them will trigger a more complete memory. Often a puzzling segment will, on closer examination, turn out to be a sort of telegram from your unconscious--a small but potent message which summarizes a longer dream.

Use the present tense and not the past tense when you record your dreams. You will find that this triggers more complete dream memories.

Treat your dream recording materials with respect; choose aesthetically pleasing ones, consecrate them and guard them carefully.

Incenses are used in many cultures for purposes of dream incubation. The dream-inducing properties of mugwort are well known in European and Native American folklore alike. In the Far East, jasmine is credited with dream-inducing powers. Bay is also known as psychotropic incenses; bay laurel was the incense used in ancient Greece for healing dream incubation, and by the seeresses at Delphi. California bay is somewhat less effective for these purposes than the Mediterranean variety, but is still worth trying. Probably any scent that you choose to use for dream incubation will work well once you have established that association for yourself in private ritual. Ideally, of course, the incubation incense burns, tended by someone else for you while you are sleeping. But if there is no way to do this, (household slaves being a rare luxury nowadays), at least use the desired incense or oil before retiring.

Ritual baths were an essential part of ancient Greek incubation ritual. Before retiring, the incubant was bathed in order to cleanse away all influences which could interfere with the dream, and leave a clean, open place for the Deity to do its work.

Deities who can help you with your dream work should be invoked prior to retiring. I have good luck with Hermes, Lord of Words and Guide Between the Worlds--although the dreams I get by invoking Him sometimes bear the mark of the Trickster as well.

Experiment with ways of focusing yourself mentally as you go to sleep. It may be helpful to induce a trance, using drums or music on a tape or sound file which will play to the end and then shut itself off. In the trance, give yourself the suggestion that you will dream and remember what you have dreamed; if you like, you can narrow it down to a specific subject. Then pass from trance into dream. Another technique is to focus your attention, as you fall asleep, on an image which you know to be of great psychological or spiritual importance to you.

If you have trouble remembering dreams, try increasing your intake of B vitamins. For many people, this seems to affect body chemistry in such a way as to improve dream retrieval. If you take a B vitamin supplement, use one which provides a balanced complement of all the B vitamins since increasing one of them to the exclusion of the others may induce deficiencies of those which are neglected.

If you awake with no dream memory, try moving your body into its sleep habitual sleep position(s); often this kinesthetic cue will trigger dream recall.

Find ways to give creative expression to your dreams. You can do this with poetry, art, movement. The creative process will often trigger memory of forgotten parts of the dream.

Dreams are best remembered from daytime naps, or from periods of morning sleep when you wake and then fall asleep again for a few hours. In the latter case, a dream may summarize other dreams which you have had during the night. Try to arrange opportunities for this kind of sleep. 

Women tend to crave more sleep and have more vivid and important dreams just before or during their menstrual periods. Try to allow time for sleep and dream work at this time of the month, if you can.

Dream charms can be made to keep under your pillow while you sleep. Mugwort dream pillows are popular, due the the well-know dream-inducing properties of this plant. Another charm is a bit of the herb or a bit of red string, tied in a circle to represent unbroken memory and magically charged for that purpose.

Monday, August 6, 2012

The Time of Harvest


(The flowing Water Tide, from Lammas to Mabon)

This, like the planting time from Eostara to Beltane, is a period of intense hard work. It is a time when work comes to fruition, and the rewards of past work can be reaped. There will, however, be a lot to do to accomplish this, and it may feel as though the time is too short. It is a time of intense activity, both work and play.

The Mother at this time is at the height of Her power, her breasts flowing with milk at the very sound of a child's cry. Honor Her with works of healing and compassion, and by with a portion of each thing you earn or reap. The Mother of All Living tells us that she demands no sacrifice. She tells us this because she needs make no such demand; a portion of every labor and every love returns to Her by the law of Nature. When that return is brought to Her consciously and with gratitude, she rewards Her children by opening to them the storehouse of Her wisdom;  the truth which lies there is our own, which She has saved for us from our gifts of past seasons. Thus at this season we eat new fruit and old meat, new achievements and old wisdom.

Love and labor are one in the Mother at this season. Seek to perform all your work with love, and work to sustain your love for others.

 Like the Planting Time this is a season which, in the old days, required the give-and-take of community effort, as large teams harvested one farm after another. Look carefully at the patterns of reciprocity in your relationships with those love and care about, ask yourself whether they are balanced and fair, and what you can do to improve their equilibrium.

Try to float to the surface of the Tide, to take a long and broad view of things so as to maintain your perspective. Take time from your full and busy days to study and contemplate the huge expanses of space and time--the shape and time of the Universe, karma, your past lives. 

This is the most productive Tide for trance divination, for traveling in trance and dream the roads that lead to the future and the past.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Wort Moon

The full moon that falls in Leo is sometimes called the Wort Moon because its waxing is the auspicious time to gather certain worts, or herbs useful for the leafy part that grows above the ground. (Dried herbs of this type are medicinally and magically effective for only about a year after they are picked, a fact that is ignored by most businesses that market them.) Two herbs traditionally associated with this time were mugwort and vervain.

Mugwort is plentiful in California, and known since Native American times for its power to induce dreams. Drink it as a tea, and fall asleep intending to dream what you need to know. Some herbals give warnings about its possible toxicity, but you would probably have to drink gallons of the stuff to do any harm, and there's no reason why anyone would do that. You'd be up all night peeing, and never get any dreams at all.

Vervain is traditionally used for kidney stones and bladder problems, also to drive away vampires. The Iroquois used it to drive away anybody they didn't want to deal with, but this strategy doesn't seem to have stood the test of time. It apparently works better on vampires than on white people. Vervain has general protective qualities, though, and is also used in divination; you can see the future by gazing into a fire through vervain. Or add some to your mugwort tea for prophetic dreams.