dream change
and time travel
This is the first in a series where I’ll offer more advanced practices and techniques. If you think of yourself as having a magical toolkit, these would be the tools that take a little more practice to use, BUT that can really elevate and streamline the hard work your everyday tools are already doing.
There are several things that make these practices advanced, chief among them is the ability to open your heart and try these things out and see what happens; rather than just thinking through the practice in your head and why or why not it will or won’t work.
A lot of times when we just think through magical practices, we never actually get around to doing the practice. Actually doing the practice is what makes it work. I can tell you from experience that these practices will work in direct relation to how often our nice big brains are brave enough to partake in them.
This relates to one of the big challenges of the next 20 years (Pluto in Aquarius) - to keep the head connected to the body with an open(ish) heart and not let the mind become so disembodied and so disconnected it runs off on its own - leaving the heart, body, spirit, soul and the rest of us behind.
To get where we want to go, as individuals and as a collective, only allowing our thinking mind lead the way, is not going to work. We need ALL our intelligences active to come up with new solutions and to find new paths.
Likewise, it is becoming increasingly important to not let our heads silo us off from not only our own bodies and hearts, but also the heart energy of others (human and more-than-human) within the collective.
Successful living in this time period will require the heart and the head, the soul, the spirit and the body ALL working together for both individual AND collective benefit. Remember, we live in an overculture that lionizes mental consciousness over everything else - especially the felt sense of things from the heart’s perspective.
The first technique I want to alert you to is your ability to time travel (in meditation).
As a collective, we are in A TIME right now. Don’t believe me? Go find a photo of yourself from before the pandemic and compare it to a recent photo of yourself. Then, have your feelings about that, and then treat yourself to a little time travel.
3 WAYS TO TRAVEL TIME
Listen to a meditation like Timeline to familiarize yourself with the road you are walking and your ability to travel forward into the future, backwards to meet up with your inner child, and obliquely to connect to parallel selves (that you might learn some really good things from that you can use in everyday “real” life).
Set a timer for a small amount of time, maybe 5 minutes. Forget about the timer and continue whatever you are doing. When the timer rings, quickly check in with your awareness and see if your consciousness is in the present moment, or if you time traveled in that 5 minutes to remembering something from the past or fantasizing or worrying about the future. Don’t get hung up on where you discover your conscious awareness (being in the present isn’t necessarily “winning” and being focused on the future or past isn’t “failing”) this exercise is more about being one who is able to know when and where their consciousness is focused.
Listen to a meditation like The Future to time travel to 1, 5 and 10 years into the future so you can “try on” the future life you are creating to make sure it’s a match for who you actually are. Very often we are spending a lot of time and energy on things that won’t actually satisfy us in the long run. Our society is very confusing and full of things we might want to do, but that also might not feel as good as we thought they would. Visualizations like The Future help us KNOW what we’d do well to head towards and help us have discernment about paths we no longer want to take.
The second advanced technique I’m bringing you today I call dream change. This technique is all about recognizing life is a kind of dream in and of itself, AND we can magically empower ourselves to create change by doing imaginal work within meditations, visualizations and other “day-dreams”.
Dream change is spending structured time in the imaginal space and working within our visions with intent.
For instance, maybe I am feeling scattered and all over the place, especially after spending a lot of time online, I might create a “home base” or “meeting place” in my inner realms and, as I meditate, use that space to gather all levels of my self (and my guides and teachers) back together.
Or, maybe I am feeling really alone and lonely. I might visualize myself as wolf, calling out for my chosen friends and family, sending out my call into the night sky and then seeing them all arrive and paying attention to how that feels.
Or, maybe I am feeling like I’m blocked at every turn in some aspect of daily life. I might visualize myself trapped in an egg or box and find a way (in meditation) to escape and transcend that limitation. (Personally, I have had great success smashing things in meditation.)
Or, maybe anxiousness is in the driver seat of my life too much. I can do a dream change where I thank anxiety for “protecting me” and then ask it to hop in the back seat and invite some other part of me (courageous? carefree? grounded?) hop into the front seat to drive.
And, then, when we emerge from these visions, we keep a tiny part of our awareness on things that change in daily life that seem to be responses to whatever happened in our meditation.
The inner experience feeds the outer and then the outer experience provides fodder or otherwise nourishes the inner.
I’m sure you get the idea - when we play around with dream change techniques in meditation it changes our relationship and energy as we approach our daily lives and somehow - magically - our daily lives react to that and give us new material to work with.
Almost every meditation in the shop has some aspect of dream change working at its core, but this is a practice you can absolutely learn and then freestyle in your own way.
DREAM CHANGE, STEP BY STEP
Decide on your main visualization (home base, back seat, calling in, un-blocking, smashing, etc.) before you start your meditation
Go into a meditative state of being
Allow all things to be known
As thoughts come up, touch them with your awareness and check to see what insight they might offer you
Then, quickly, engage with your chosen visualization (the simpler, the better). This can be as simple as smashing your “problem” with a hammer, all the way to receiving a comprehensive mystical healing
Then go back to your chosen meditative state and feel free to repeat your dream change imagery as often as any related issues come up in your awareness
Accept that even if your whole 20 minute meditation time is spent fine-tuning your dream change vision, then that session was a success. (Notice, if you do this repeatedly, that life will change its behavior in response to your new modes of being)
When your meditation ends, thank yourself and the energy of All That Is for helping you develop this new way of being in relation to all things. Keep all promises of returning to the inner realms to continue the work of dream change.
Dream change meditation works best when we practice it regularly, repetition here will lead to mastery.
Once you get the hang of it, we can repeat this process often, whether we are “in meditation” or not, even for a minute or two.
Stay tuned for future Tuesday posts in this advanced techniques series - we’ll be covering important things like - building our own inner cosmologies, how to understand the symbols we receive in meditation, how to work effectively with magical imagery, how to set up and deepen our relationships with mystical VIPs, how to engage magically with nature and more!
Until next time,
Jess
"Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist."
- Bill Bryson
In the very earliest time
When both people and animals lived on earth
A person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen -
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That's the way it was.
- Nalungiaq (an Inuit woman interviewed by Knud Rasmussen, early twentieth century)
“There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been the first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we've got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we'll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation."
- Ray Bradbury
"What I tell my students, when they feel singularly unfortunate to be born in this moment, is this is your moment, the moment your soul showed up incarnate. In this world. It is an astonishing moment to be alive. You could have been born into a lull - instead you were born into a tipping point. It's your one life and you've entered it at a flexion point - a point when everything you do matters. How often in history does a soul get to live in such an era? Don't waste it. Show up for it. With everything you've got. Some will invent, some will organize, some will witness, some will grieve, some will console. Live this life now. Even if in fury and grief, live it. You don't want to die not having lived. It's incredibly easy to find a way around experience rather than through it. But you will have cheated yourself out of your only possession: your life. You are here now. Now is the time to live fully, not hide, not escape."
- Jorie Graham"
“Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that's all."
- Albert Camus
"Why is it that the look of another person looking at you is different from everything else in the Cosmos? That is to say, looking at lions or tigers or Saturn or the Ring Nebula or at an owl or at another person from the side is one thing, but finding yourself looking in the eyes of another person looking at you is something else. And why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?"
- Walker Percy
"To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable."
- Rebecca Solnit
"To the extent that this world surrenders its richness and diversity, it surrenders its poetry. To the extent that it relinquishes its capacity to surprise, it relinquishes its magic. To the extent that it loses its ability to tolerate ridiculous and even dangerous exceptions, it loses its grace. As its options (no matter how absurd or unlikely) diminish, so do its chances for the future."
- Tom Robbins
I step into the painting of the four blue horses.
I am not even surprised that I can do this.
One of the horses walks toward me.
His blue nose noses me lightly. I put my arm
over his blue mane, not holding on, just
commingling.
He allows me my pleasure.
Franz Marc died a young man, shrapnel in his brain.
I would rather die than explain to the blue horses
what war is.
They would either faint in horror, or simply
find it impossible to believe.
I do not know how to thank you, Franz Marc.
Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
is the piece of God that is inside each of us.
Now all four horses have come closer,
are bending their faces toward me
as if they have secrets to tell.
I don't expect them to speak, and they don't.
If being so beautiful isn't enough, what
could they possibly say?
- Mary Oliver
"There is another world, and it is in this one."
Paul Éluard
Thanks for your generosity and sharing, Jessica. Deeply appreciate.
💖