I must say that I don’t take these dreams at face value.  Some people come to this blog looking for dreams of earth changes.  For whatever reason, earth changes and upheaval in the sky have been common themes in my dreams ever since I was a child.  Maybe for you, too.  In this case, the latter two dreams might seem suggestive of earth changes, but I can easily trace them to concerns of my conscious mind.  Taking them one through three, they are progressively more cataclysmic in theme, but they are also progressively more rooted in my conscious mind, as opposed to the subconscious. 

The conscious mind reasons, worries, rationalizes and speculates.  It fears and desires.  The subconscious, on the other hand, is connected to something deeper than ego and personality.  It might actually have a clue.  I don’t think my subconscious was speaking up about coming earth changes in these dreams.  I see something else at work. 

Here are some thoughts on the three dreams, in reverse order:

Third Dream

I had this dream right before the Fourth of July.  I had been reading about North Korea’s plan to fire test missiles in Hawaii’s direction on America’s ‘big day.’  Clearly this dream picked up and dramatized those conscious concerns.  The beach = Hawaii.  A tailgating atmosphere and mindless cheering = Fourth of July.  The unacknowledged shadow crossing us = the crisis of global capitalism while the mainstream is still looking for signs of “recovery.”  

To me the most interesting detail is looking in the mirror and seeing another person as my reflection.  You could say that I saw myself as an Asian woman as a loose connection to the North Korean situation.  Maybe that’s all there is to it.  But as far as I can remember, this is a new phenomenon in my dreams – looking into a mirror and seeing someone else – a stranger – looking back at me and matching my every move. 

Another interesting detail is having too many bags.  The bags are attachments.  They slow me down and make me less nimble in a crisis, represented by the fiery wound in the sky.

Second Dream

A pale blue mountain turns molten red.  A volcano eruption, right?  Maybe, but I see that dream mountain as standing for something other than an actual mountain.   As I mentioned in Book of Tokens, I have been meditating upon the Tarot Keys every day.  The craggy mountain is right out of the Tarot. 

Free associating, I connect Atlantis with lost civilizations and thus with lost wisdom and ultimately with ancient Ageless Wisdom.  Therefore, “Atlantis rising in a surprising location” represents attaining higher consciousness within the mundane world.  So then it is not surprising I painted a long ridge leading up a craggy mountain.  The long ridge is the Path and the mountain is the Great Work.

First Dream

This dream is the least rooted in my conscious mind.  I can’t say that I’ve ever dreamed of beetles before or thought much about them, metaphorically or literally. They have not been a meaningful part of my experience or symbolic vocabulary to this point.  But they are indeed most important in ancient Egyptian iconography.  In that system, they are associated with resurrection or rebirth. 

And since colors are emphasized in these dreams, I will take it a step further: blue is related to Memory in the Tarot.  Memory beyond the boundaries of the current personality.  In my dream, however, the blue beetle has something in its eyes, like a spider web.  It is trying to wipe it away, presumably so it could see   So I wonder — maybe the blue beetle represents Memory of lives beyond this one – Memory that for me is currently obscured by the veil across my eyes.   I sort of helped shoo the veil from the beetle’s eyes, just like I sort of want to Remember.  But when the beetle came at me blinking, I screamed. 

Ultimately, Memory is blocked by my own fear of seeing.

First Night

Dreamt I was in a kitchen with a giant cobalt blue beetle.  It was the size of a small dog.  It had something stuck in its eyes or across its face that it was trying to pull away with its front legs.  Suddenly it flew straight up in the air and swan dove backward, crashing onto the floor, where it quickly resumed its efforts to clear its eyes. 

It seemed frustrated, so I blew in its direction.  That seemed to help.  It stopped rubbing its face and looked at me, glossy black eyes blinking.  They were not insect eyes.  They looked like the eyes of a dog or maybe even a person.  There was a creepy intelligence in them. 

The beetle started scuttling at me.  I got scared and screamed, breaking up the dream.

Second Night

Dreamt I was in a classroom where the assignment was to paint a picture illustrating something or other, I forget what but something very mundane.  Instead of illustrating what I was supposed to illustrate, I was painting a picture of (get this) Atlantis rising in a surprising location.  I forget the location now, but wherever it was, it was the equivalent of Bayonne or Staten Island — someplace completely un-exotic and thoroughly paved over.

So I was trying to paint Atlantis rising, but I ended up painting an icy blue mountain with a long ridge sweeping down to the foreground of the picture.  Or more appropriately, you could say a long ridge sweeping up to a craggy snow-topped peak in the distance.

It was a painting composed entirely of pale blue and white.  But when the paint dried, the icy blue turned molten red.   My snow-topped mountain became a mountain of fire.

Third Night

Dreamt my husband and I were away for an extended family gathering.  It was morning and we were getting dressed in an unfamiliar room amid too many bags.  I looked in the mirror to do my hair and was surprised to see that I had dark brown hair with fat ringlet curls.  I couldn’t remember how my hair got this way.  Nevertheless, I went back to getting dressed.

I looked in the mirror again to put on mascara and saw a young Asian woman looking back at me.  At first I thought she was someone else, but she matched my every move as I applied mascara.  She was my reflection. 

Then we all went out on the beach where crowds of people were celebrating.  Everyone was hooting and cheering like it was the World Series and the ocean was the playing field. 

But gradually I realized that a shadow was crossing us, and then the day turned as night.  At first no one around me seemed to notice, so I started pointing it out.  Hey, why is it dark as night at noon?!

Others were indeed noticing it, but most were still hooting in celebration.  I looked at the sky.  It was roiling with black clouds, black like smoke, with a fiery red wound in the middle.  Then hail came raining down on us.  We were trying to gather our (too many) bags and race to the car when the dream evaporated.

Over the weekend, I dreamt that my husband and I were walking to a grocery store near our house.  Suddenly there was roaring in the sky above us.  I looked to see two old-fashioned red fighter biplanes overhead.  They were chugging along in the sky looking slow and clumsy.  Then I blinked and several more fighter planes appeared, joining the first two.  These were of more recent make but still old-fashioned.  I blinked again and there were more fighter planes, more recent yet.  Then there were still more fighter planes, more recent in design.

Every couple seconds the number of fighter planes in the sky increased exponentially, and each time the new planes looked more recent in design.  Soon the sky was crowded with hundreds of fighter planes.

“What is going on?” I cried.  In an instant hundreds more fighter planes appeared, filling in all the remaining space in the sky.  These were sleek and ultra modern in design.  The roaring was overwhelming – it was like a storm bearing down on us – but the planes were basically stationary at this point.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said to my husband.  And just then two GIGANTIC spaceships appeared overhead – one black, one white. 

The dream dissolved.

Funny thing is that I have zero interest in war planes, but this dream began with a friend visiting me at my home to drop something off.  In “waking life,” this friend is into historic war planes as well as UFOs.  When I described the dream to him today, he immediately placed the red biplanes as Red Barons.  I joked that he visited me in the astral and dropped off his dream.

I returned to the heart-shaped island in the western North Atlantic.  I climbed a mountain and listened.  In the golden light of the Equinox sun, with a chorus of crickets and chickadees around me, I called out to my higher self.  I affirmed my intention – to evolve and, in so doing, do whatever I can to help carry the evolutionary tide forward.  My will is thy will, I said.

I then descended steeply into the underworld between two mountains where I passed through a tunnel formed by twin slabs of giant stone.  There an orb of light greeted me, though I didn’t know it until afterward when I saw the picture I had taken. 

Having passed through the tunnel, I climbed steeply back up the mountain – a different mountain in 3D but it doesn’t really matter.  At its summit, once again on the bare pink and green granite, bathed in the golden light with brilliant blue for miles around, I affirmed my intention and listened. 

Nothing specific.  Nothing immediate.  Just a subtle release of fear and a resulting clarity inside.  One step after another.  Mindful.  Unhurried.  The path stretches long ahead. 

The trails were mostly empty.  I had the thought that another 911 could have happened hours ago and all hell could be breaking loose in the world.  But on the mountain that world was far away.  Our world was the perfect serenity of granite, pitch pines, wild blueberry bushes and cricket song awash in the golden angles of the September sun, with ocean and sky spread endlessly on all sides.

Et in A(r)cadia ego

Back at sea level, I traveled through the woods to the sacred boulder.  Fallen trees lay everywhere. I passed through the grassy channel where I saw the bear crossing our path four years ago.  A few steps later there was fresh bear scat.  Very fresh. 

Bear is my guide.  He sits on my right shoulder.  Nevertheless, I could not overcome the fear of meeting him in the flesh.  I took out my keys and jangled them.

We pressed forward and his scat was everywhere.  So distracted by fear this time, I missed the boulder on the first pass and we had to double back.  When we found the boulder, I was dismayed to find more bear scat its base.  My husband climbed on top of the boulder to meditate, but I could not relax enough to trust myself to attempt the climb.  Still jangling the keys, I meditated on a ledge at the bottom.  I found a chrysalis there which I refrained from touching out of respect.

Despite my fear, I managed to enter that rich dark matrix where Wolfie, the spirit of the boulder, resides.  Just for a few moments, though.  For four years now, I have been eager to return to sit with him again.  Thinking that I’ve grown since the last time, I loaded the moment up with hope and expectation.  Unfortunately my fear of the bear muffled all of that.  I was still jangling my keys after all.  But I did sense him – Wolfie, that is.  I also asked him to help me heal my relationship with work so that I can earn my Right Livelihood and work in alignment with my higher self and the evolution of the planet.   This request might seem silly, especially now, but what can I say?  We each bear a cross — my woundedness in relation to work has been mine.

That night I had a mundane dream that was interesting for being a new spin on an old recurring theme.  Usually I find myself in class on the last day and there is a final exam being handed out or a seminar paper due and I’ve done nothing – I haven’t even been attending class because I didn’t know I was enrolled.  My usual response is a frantic scramble to pull out a good grade at the last minute.  This time I decided not to bother taking the final.  I knew the class wasn’t meaningful to me and I shouldn’t waste any time on it.  I also knew that people would say that I “failed out” but that didn’t matter because I had to stay true to what I felt was important. 

The next night I dreamt that I was at a conference in a building that was a cross between a school and a workplace (the two are often conflated in my dreams).  Outside on the road there were fanatical nationalists waving the American flag and throwing firecrackers at passing cars.  Someone threw a lit firecracker at me as I walked by.  I threw it back and they called me a terrorist.  I tried to argue – next thing I knew I was inside the conference and embroiled in some drama I don’t remember.

In the hall on my way to the next conference event, I saw a dark-haired guy with an infinity symbol on his t-shirt.  I told him I liked it.  Then I saw “2012” spray painted in silver on a whiteboard nearby.  I commented on it to those around me, but no one knew what it was. 

Later I saw the dark-haired guy in a silver leotard outfit with the infinity symbol on the chest.  He was with a crew of people dressed just like him.  They were all gathering underneath a strange room.  The room was actually on the floor above us but it had no floor so we could look up into it.  All four walls were spray painted silver in countless rows of alternating infinity symbols and 2012s.

Suddenly the silver leotard group was gone. 

“Aren’t you going, too?” someone asked me.  I responded that I would like to but I didn’t have a silver leotard outfit like theirs.  A voice told me that didn’t matter.  It was my choice and here was the moment I’ve been waiting for.

And so I went to the silver room, which was some kind of gateway.  The dream dissolved as I was transported.

Both of these dreams were about freeing myself from the bonds of external expectations (good grades) and prerequisites (silver leotard) and choosing my next step based solely on my own internal compass. 

The next night I arose from a deep sleep in the wee hours and looked out the east-facing balcony of our motel room.  The night sky was bright and overwhelming.  It confused me at first, then I realized that it was the Big Dipper emblazoned over the ocean looking giant and surreal.  I went to the room’s lone window, which looked southward, and saw Orion framed perfectly over the mountains and lit up the same way.  Don’t know what it means if anything other than the fact that I am so accustomed to light pollution that I am stunned when I see the constellations unobstructed by haze.  Somehow, though, it felt meaningful.

*   *   *

Bear made his presence known — so did Falcon.  Falcon was everywhere in the flesh.  Once I saw him catching prey in midair.  Sad for the prey, but it did communicate that now is time for seizing the moment.

Earth Activation

Every time I visit Acadia, the trails present me with a coherent theme in imagery.  Last time it was splits.  Split trees, split rocks — all kinds of splits were underscored with a synchronistic glow.  The lesson I took away was that there was a split within me and I needed to align my will with my heart.

This time the imagery was about upheaval.  Uprooted trees were a frequent sight – much more so than in the past – some were bearing the bright blue paint of a trail marker.  The path itself was eroded in spots, certainly not everywhere but again more so than in the past.  The East Face Champlain Trail was completely closed due to damage and subsequent rock falls stemming from an earthquake that occurred in October of 2006.

Please don’t misunderstand.  Acadia National Park is a treasure.  It has not fallen into disrepair.  It is amazing in its natural beauty, and its many trails are lovingly kept by brigades of people who are passionate about the place.  I would gladly live there if I could.  What I mean to say is simply that the trails presented metaphors for upheaval to my eye this September.

As I’ve written before, I feel I was activated by this place and have or had some kind of connection to it.  In past years, I’ve seen familiar faces on the trails – others who kept returning and had a glow about them when they were here.  This time I saw no faces familiar from previous years.  It seemed like the activation party was over, the guests were gone and now the host was alone and possibly in need of assistance.  For all my meditations on the mountaintops and at the base of the sacred boulder, maybe I really should have done only one thing and that is ask the question: Dear friend, what ails you?

Toward sunset on the last day, we drove up Cadillac Mountain to say goodbye to the island, just as we did four years ago.  We haven’t hiked up Cadillac in a long time – mainly because it can be a let down to spend hours climbing up a mountain and then be greeted at the top by tour buses and a gift shop.  (Cadillac is the only drive-up mountain on Mount Desert Island.)  Nevertheless, this was where I experienced what I believe was a heart chakra opening last time.  It seemed that Cadillac Mountain was a powerfully active volcano, but instead of lava, it was spewing energy of a high vibration.  For those keyed to it, being in range of its energetic broadcast was a blast to the chakras.  That was my theory, anyway.

This time I got out of the car with some concern that the mountain would be quiet – that it was stressed and wouldn’t have the same power.  But ultimately, at the top of Cadillac, the energy was there.  It was somewhat subdued from last time, but it was still pulsing bigger than all of us.  Bigger than the upheaval at hand.  Bigger than the mountain, the sky and the surrounding ocean.  Maybe bigger than the Earth itself.

I dreamt I looked out my office window here at home and saw an aircraft hurtling in for a crash landing. It looked like a rocket flying on its side like a plane, low and parallel to the horizon. It screamed across the sky and then exploded some distance to the southwest.

There was a huge commotion there – a crowd of emergency vehicles, lights flashing, sirens wailing, amid great plumes of smoke and fire. But it seemed that the commotion was there before the crash, and the exploded rocket was merely adding to the chaos on the ground. I wasn’t sure.

I studied the air above the crash site. At first it appeared empty, but then my eyes refocused and just like when the other side of an optical paradox emerges, I could make out two huge dark space ships and a slew of other strange aircraft hovering above the area. They looked like shadow craft, but they were darkly lit and now that they had emerged from their camouflage, I could make out their complexities.

It crossed my mind that a new war may be breaking out. I raced to turn on the TV and radio to hear what was going on. Station after station was playing the same inane commercials and programming as if nothing was amiss in America. But I could see with my own eyes out my own window that the reality was clearly and extremely otherwise.

As I’ve written before, I am one of those people who has a synchronistic relationship with 11:11. 11:11 was my original wake up call, and it continues to be sort of a master number for me. But 11:11 opened the door to a whole river of synchronicities that I swim most every day. All kinds of things can be synchronous. I keep my eye out and try to follow the strings when they occur. They are breadcrumbs marking the way.

Numbers other than elevens show up synchronistically in phases. They are a subtle line of communication between me and my higher self, or so I think anyway.

For a while I had sets of consecutive twos showing up all over the place. Then it was fives. Lately it has been consecutive fours. Fours all over the place. One of the more striking examples of this is that I keep jolting awake from a deep sleep and looking at the digital clock on the other side of the room at 4:44 a.m. exactly. It occurs so often that I now wake up my husband as a witness when it happens. All I need to say is: “4:44 AGAIN!”

The other night I woke up early on with anxiety about work. In desperation, I asked the universe to help me learn from and heal my job situation. I fell back asleep and hours later woke with a start. I sat up to check the clock on the other side of the bed. Sure enough, it was 4:44. I thought that my higher self was trying to tell me something about my work. I had the thought that fours mean transfiguration. Then I fell back asleep.

I dreamt I was in a bookstore café. The guy at the next table had Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012 book in front of him. I commented on it, telling him I had read it and it was good, though actually I haven’t read it yet.

There was a young woman sitting at the table behind me. She had two books in front of her. I started a conversation with her and told her not to buy the books. I said I would check for them at home and give them to her if I had them.

The first book was Look Homeward Angel. I have never read this book. I have never intended to read this book. I haven’t even thought of it twice before now, though I’ve known of its existence.

The identity of the second book was unclear in the dream, but I left the young woman at the table thinking that I had to look at home for Thomas Wolfe and Robert Penn Warren, so perhaps the second book was All the King’s Men.

Okay, once again, I have not read All the King’s Men, nor have I read anything else by Robert Penn Warren. I have not felt the urge to. I knew of their existence – both book and author, but that’s it.

I woke up as I was leaving for home to go look for the books.

In the waking world, I went to work (ugh), where I googled the second two books and authors because their presence in the dream was odd to me. I learned that Thomas Wolfe set Look Homeward Angel in a thinly fictionalized version of his hometown — Asheville, North Carolina. I didn’t know Asheville existed until recently when it came up synchronistically in another context, so the dream connection got my attention. Then I learned that both Thomas Wolfe and Robert Penn Warren died on September 15th. I have no idea what significance this has, if any. It just makes me think I should visit Asheville, North Carolina. Perhaps on September 15th.

Have you checked out Asheville, North Carolina online? There is a website where someone makes the claim that if you’re into 2012, Asheville is the place for you.

Okay, maybe I am babbling. Then again, maybe not.

I will end this post with the following thought, which has nothing to do with anything else I’ve written . . .

I want to be able to say that I stand by what I perceive in the world.

That’s all for now.

I dreamt I was in a gathering at a banquet table in a manor house. It was night and there was a blizzard raging outside, but the manor house was warm and bright. We were seated around a table engaged in some kind of philosophical discussion. The table held platters of food for us to take from as we wished.

I left the table and went out on the porch to survey the snowy night around us. The manor sat alone on a small hill top. There was a flood light on the porch that lit the entire hill. The storm seemed to have stopped. In the sphere cast by the light I could see a lawn thickly blanketed in white sloping all the way down to where the road began, then blackness. It was perfectly still.

I thought I saw a couple poles emerging from the snow near the perimeter of the light. Somehow this seemed strange and worthy of immediate investigation. I bounded down the slope. Running through the snow in a sphere of pale light enclosed by night was exhilarating. It was easier than I expected to be able to run in snow so deep. I ran through one apparent “pole” then another, finding nothing solid at all. Perhaps they were mirages.

I ran all the way down to the edge of the light and then into the night. As soon as I stepped into the night, I was hit with a blast of blizzard. I zigzagged across the line between light and night a few more times to confirm the impression. It was indeed quiet and peaceful on one side and a fierce storm on the other, with no shades of gray between.

I ran back to the manor house and told the others. No one believed me. Then there was an article in the paper about how I had made these ridiculous claims and that I was lying to stir up trouble.

Image by millicent bystander, used courtesy of a Creative Commons License.

Last night I dreamt that I was at work – miserable and frustrated – and someone kept stealing my desk. While it was gone, I lay down on a counter and fell asleep. When I woke I felt guilty for dozing, but then I realized that it was pitch black in the office. I turned on the lights and realized it was black as night outside. I looked at the clock and saw it was noon. I went around commenting to everyone on how could it be black as night in the middle of the day.

Then I was asleep in my bed, realizing – with dread – that I would have to wake up for work soon. I got up, got dressed and left the house. I was greeted with a stunningly beautiful sunny day outside. It was unseasonably warm – around 70 degrees. I realized that it was too warm for March and then realized the sun was high overhead, as if it were noon. I checked the clock and it was 2:00 a.m.

Had night and day flip flopped?

No one was out – it was in the middle of the night. It was so amazingly beautiful. It was a secret day just for me and the birds. I was walking a sandy path along a dried up lake, drawing it all in. I was overjoyed with the beauty of the place. I started dancing barefoot in the sand. Then I was dancing in the lake as well, which was mostly a sandy beach.

Back to the choice we face as we spiral down the hourglass of the age. In 2012: Two Paths, I talked about LOVE vs. FEAR and then relayed a dream of a global catastrophe in which I did not choose as I would have hoped. As strongly as I feel about choosing LOVE over FEAR, some unaligned levels of my being have their own ideas.

LOVE vs. FEAR is the essential struggle within me.

I know FEAR. I am something of a specialist in it. My childhood was marked by trauma, and this designated me the likely heir to the legacy of my female forebears on my father’s side: panic, anxiety and agoraphobia.

But modern American life didn’t offer me the option of staying home and cooking elaborate family recipes all day, so I battled back, or else it seemed I would fall off the face of the earth.

I refused meds but tried some mainstream behavior therapies. I made what was called progress, but I have to say that much of my adult life was a white-knuckle ride, with me endlessly struggling to “overcome my fears” and coming away from both victories and defeats with the same raw, battered, exhausted feeling that told me I was just too fundamentally defective to deal with the world.

Basically my life was shaped, circumscribed and defined by FEAR.

Somehow, though, another way of thinking unfolded in my consciousness. It started with 11:11 and the chain of synchronicity that I began following at that time. The Kybalion came my way, and through it I learned of the Principle of Polarity and its conscious manipulation: To change an undesirable mental vibration, concentrate on the opposite pole. For me this was a profound revelation. You don’t overcome or otherwise eliminate the darkness. You let in the light.

So that’s path I’ve been traveling. It has been a transformative period. A period in which I’ve come to realize that the way is not to eliminate my “defects” or to adopt “ideal” behaviors as they are defined in American culture, but instead to fully become who I am.

I also came to understand that the opposite side of FEAR is not courage – it’s LOVE.

But while I’ve been moving toward LOVE and away from FEAR, the dominant culture around me has been moving sharply, aggressively, emphatically in the opposite direction. I happen to live in a stronghold of the dominant culture, so I am swimming in waters that are cold, dark and inhospitable. The contradiction is intensely painful – I long to find my Right Place in the World, but that is another story. The point now is simply that the culture in which I live does not support heart-centered living. Instead it is like Michael Corleone’s Family – it keeps pulling me back into my own negativity.

So the LOVE/FEAR polarity is a dynamic opposition within me. The Global Catastrophe dream is a gift because it dramatizes my contradictions and gives me an opportunity to resolve them.

Two points stand out for me:

Although my intention is to choose LOVE, I have trouble actually receiving it. Case in point: the dream opens with me moving to the place I love most in the world. I have longed to move to Maine for almost twenty years now. And there I am in the dream, in the early stages of buying a house there. I went out into the backyard and took a handful of earth, breathing it in deeply because that’s how overjoyed I was. The opening scene is LOVE LOVE LOVE.

Sadly, my dreaming mind could not allow me to receive this abundance. It recoiled from LOVE and put me in a place many people I know FEAR. I lived in Newark for several years. I know better than to react to it with knee-jerk FEAR, like the average white suburbanite around here. Nevertheless, it was not the most pleasant place to live, not back then. It is currently undergoing a renewal, but then it was grim and dilapidated — and very inconvenient in terms of access to reasonably priced goods and services. It had still not recovered since the time of the Rebellion. Newark history and politics aside, when I lived there, my life was circumscribed by scarcity and FEAR.

So my dream consciousness turned from LOVE to FEAR. It diverted me from my ideal place to a place of grim limitation. I need to think more deeply about the ways in which I am not accepting LOVE and instead living in self-imposed scarcity.

The second point concerns my anxiety about how I might react in a crisis of horrific proportions. Up until now, I have been assuming that – in the event of a global catastrophe – evolving might not mean surviving. I guess on some level I was thinking that a global catastrophe would involve a quick exit from this plane. I was not prepared – mentally or otherwise – to live in a post-catastrophe world of slow death by radiation, starvation and mob violence. When faced with that world in the dream, I reverted back into base-level FEAR, absurdly wishing I had stashed cash so that my family and I could somehow finagle our own little way to some semblance of safety.

Clearly I have work to do. The question is not which energy I am carrying because I have both LOVE and FEAR churning within me. I don’t have the answers, but I do know the path lies in the heart. I will continue to work on the heart chakra and on expanding the LOVE that flows through me.

I had a destination in mind with the series of dreams I’ve been posting. I’ve been taking the back roads to a particular point. The question is how to approach 2012 and whatever that may mean: the transition of the ages, earth changes, earth initiation, mass extinction or ascension . . .

Some are hunkering down. They are discussing where in the world to flee, what to hoard, how to fortify themselves with the arms, skills and materials they’ll need to survive.

I can only respectfully say what I feel in my heart to be true: approaching this period with a bunker mentality is the exact opposite of what we need for our highest good and the highest good concerned.

Ever since I was a child, certain words and phrases have hung in the air and glowed for me. The glowing words turn up repeatedly in chains of meaningful coincidence. Over time, they become laden with mysterious significance, and if I follow them, they eventually lead into deeper mysteries. One of my longtime glowing words first came to me courtesy of Led Zeppelin: there are two paths you can go by . . .

Reality is usually not so clear. We face an apparent maze of many highways and byways, but underlying it all are two basic directions. You can label them with various names, but I prefer LOVE vs. FEAR. In one way or another, we approach that fork and make that choice countless times each day. Most of us are inconsistent in our choices, so we tend to walk a rambling road of alternating directions. But our daily choices have a net effect. They add up and the sum total determines the fundamental direction of our lives. Similarly, our individual choices add up and the sum total determines the overall direction of humanity. Ultimately, our choices serve to expand one or the other – LOVE or FEAR – in the world, even the universe. We have free will (more glowing words), and intentionally or not, we shape our world with our choices.

Some forks in the road are milestones, and choices we make there are weighted with profound significance. I believe what we are approaching is a historic milestone for our species, our planet.

We can rationalize all we want, but at the root, it’s either one or the other. LOVE or FEAR. The bunker approach – arming, hoarding, hunkering down – is the path of FEAR. Walking this path expands the principle of FEAR at a critical point in history. Perhaps it might help a couple of those who travel it to survive a cataclysmic event, but at what cost? Is survival on such terms worthwhile? Basically, the means determine the ends. A path rooted in FEAR leads to a more fearful world.

I have no idea what will happen as we spiral down the hourglass of the age, but my inner voice, my dreams, my every intuition tell me that FEAR is the last thing we need. My feeling is that we need to release our small-minded expectations and embrace the potentiality of change with open hearts and minds – with LOVE. We need to cooperate with each other and evolve with our planet. Come what may.

Meeting change is a lot like meeting waves in the ocean. If you meet a wave with fear, you’ll try to hold your place. You’ll be rigid and the water will hit you like bricks. But if you welcome the wave with love, you’ll be flexible and light on your feet. The wave will lift you up and take you somewhere else.

That’s what I choose: LOVE. Somewhere else.

BUT . . . as I mulled over these thoughts and gathered the courage to post them here, I had a dream that seemed to throw a major monkey wrench into everything. At the risk of boring readers but in the name of honesty, I am including the whole dream. The catastrophe and monkey wrench occur in the last five paragraphs:

Dream: Global Catastrophe

On 12/30/07 I dreamt that my husband and I were looking at a house in Maine. I went out into the yard, took a handful of dirt and brought it to my face. I breathed it in deeply and thought about how much I love the earth of this place.

Later we were in Newark with my mother-in-law, Christmas shopping I guess. I volunteered to drive us home (in a little MG we were driving for some reason), but then I realized that my mother-in-law had wandered across the street. We waited for her, and while we waited, some man approached us in a strange and aggressive manner. He ended up retreating, but then my mother-in-law almost went out into the street in front of an oncoming car. We went to help her. By the time we all were back in the little car – a tight squeeze – my shoes were off and I couldn’t get them back on. I was rattled from all the scares and frustrations. I told my husband I was sorry but I couldn’t drive after all. My husband said he understood and took the wheel.

Next thing I knew, the three of us were in store that rented gift boxes. I was trying to find the right size for an oversized children’s outfit. The box I found was too big – they said it would cost $2.75 to rent. I responded that there was a lot of wasted space in it and I wanted to find a better fitting box. The whole point of the store was conserving paper products involved in gift giving.

Meanwhile, my mother-in-law was looking for Christmas cards. I was looking too, it seems. Somehow we ended up at someone’s house looking for cards. They had some stacks there and we were waiting for a turn to look through them. Our goal was frustrated by the fact that they were currently in the hands of an inconsiderate young woman who kept looking up from them to chat with her friends for twenty minutes at a time. My mother-in-law was getting nervous. I was getting mad. Finally I said “Forget it – I don’t have the time to wait all day for a turn to look at these cards. I don’t need them. It’s after Christmas anyway.” I was wondering how we would convince my mother-in-law that she didn’t need them either when she emerged from another room with one card in her hand. It happened to have both her name and her recipient’s name on the front of it. At first I thought it was a custom card, but it turned out to be a regular pre-made commercial card. “Perfect!” we said, remarking on the coincidence. “You can’t beat that!” Then I realized that the design on the front of the card was a cross made of blocks, each block with its own symbol.

Somewhere in here a thin little man with a pinched face announced that there would be a global catastrophe soon and that we had better hoard food and stash cash to prepare for it. He gave us the date, but we didn’t pay attention. He seemed like a mean wacko. It wasn’t clear if he meant what he was saying as a threat or as a prophecy.

Next thing I knew, we were in our kitchen with my mother-in-law. The little man was there, too. He started talking and it wasn’t clear if we were hearing him in person or on the radio. He was saying that the day had arrived and that in X seconds there would be a big blast that would definitely get our attention, even if it was ten thousand miles away. He was sneering. At this point, I was taking his message to be threat, not prophecy. I waited for the prescribed seconds to count down to see if he was for real or just a wacko. At the end of the count down, there was quiet for an extra second or two. Just when I was starting to think it was a false alarm, the lights cut off and the ground shook. There was an ominous rumbling in the distance. The lights returned at brown-out level. The alarm on the stove went off and my mother-in-law apologized for having set it. I went to turn it off and found it set at 10. I turned it to zero and it stopped (it was an old-fashioned timer with a knob).

Now I found myself wishing that I had heeded the warning and stashed cash for this day. I had no idea what had happened and what would happen next. I didn’t even know if having cash mattered at all, but I was thinking it would have been better to have it. Wouldn’t it? Maybe it could make some kind of key difference for us in the chaos that would surely follow. Maybe it would make me feel a little safer. All I knew was that what I was feeling now was horrible beyond words.

The little man resumed his address. He sounded smug that the explosion had gone off as planned or foretold, and he was telling us that we were doomed. Soon the rains will come, he said, and they will carry death. Life on our planet would never be the same.

How could we survive in the little man’s new world? It sounded like hell on earth. What had happened? I wondered if the little man was involved in the detonation of massive nuclear devices. An image came to my mind of a chunk of the globe encompassing Canada being blown clear away, but I had no idea if it was correct. Enraged, I started pounding the little man in my kitchen. I was hauling off and punching him repeatedly in his face and head, but his gloating voice continued on the radio. I realized that the little man in our kitchen was just a man-shaped figure of rags.

Thankfully, I woke up.

- – -

I am going to let this sit as is for now. This was different from the previous earth change dreams I’ve been posting. I definitely have thoughts on its meaning, but I am still processing. For now, I post it all without further comment. Except to wish us all the strength to make our own choices, consciously and with full intent, in the new year and beyond.

Another dream with an earth change theme . . .

In the fall of 2003, I dreamt I was going about my business in an unfamiliar city. I was trying to get something to eat but one thing or another was standing in my way. I think there was a conflict with a deli owner who would not serve me. But then all those frustrations became irrelevant. One disaster after another was breaking out. Tornadoes. Earth quakes. Dump trucks hurling through the air and crashing on the street. Buildings collapsing. I was in the thick of it. Naturally at first I was terrified. But when I saw a dump truck hurtling toward me, I instinctively sprang forty feet away as if I were wearing elfin power boots.

It was a revelation.

All my life I had been so fearful of potential catastrophes. Now all hell was breaking loose around me and I suddenly understood what to do. I suddenly felt SAFE, probably for the first time ever.

“I get it!” I exclaimed. “Just get out of the way!”

And that’s what I did. I sprang my way safely through the chaos – lightly, effortlessly, even joyously. Like I said, it was a revelation.

Then I felt a presence pick me up and hold me with overwhelming love. I became lucid and the dream dissolved.