Breakthrough

So the lovely Suzi recently said in an email that she felt like I would have 'a massive breakthrough at some point' and it occurred to me I have...  In fact there has been a couple...  but sometimes the hard thing is working out what they mean and how to bring those words into the waking world and what sense they make here, if that is clear to anyone!

A while back I started suffering from nightmares.  I found this scary because I have never had dreams that dealt with fears where I have been very scared before, not even as a child.  My sister would drift through my room to my parents bedroom, pale as a ghost.  i used to be quite envious of the excuse to go sleep with Mum and Dad, and so, sometimes when I was awake in the night and wanted to sleep with them, I would imagine bad things to summon up a few tears...

So suddenly to find myself dreaming nasty things was a challenge.  I began to wonder and worry about what these dreams were saying about the state of my mental health!  A girl who bumped into an old college friend and accepted the offer of dinner to catch up only to discover he had always been fixated on her and had become a serial killer, killing girls like her...  The little boy kidnapped...  The teenage girl left alone in an airport, with no ticket but after security....  The couple killed in their home....  There was no actual bad endins though, because I was able to twist the story away from the truly awful and help the main characters escape.

Then one night I dreamt I was in my bedroom lying on my bed but it was a glorious day and the room was flooded with sunlight.  I turned to look at the person next to me and it turned out to be my spirit guide.  He told me not to worry, that I was dreaming the fears of my ancestors.  And after that, I stopped worrying that this was my unhealthy mind and accepted that these were not my fears, not my scenarios.

For a couple of weeks my dreams were filled with fearful scenarios but as I stopped blocking them and worrying about them, this was no longer a problem.  Some of the dreams could even be pinpointed to whereabouts they would have come from.  In one dream, a lady was driving a delivery van but it carried important cargo.  She was stopped by a police officer who turned out to be with the enemy but she was able to defend herself and get the cargo away.  In the Second World War, my Grandfather was a driver.  I imagine he transported all sorts of things around and i can also imagine my Gran thinking up all sorts of scenarios....

I recently started reading Robert Moss's The Dreamers Book of the Dead: A Soul Traveler's Guide to Death, Dying and the Other Side.  One thing he says is that sometimes we need to use our imaginations for the dead.  I think this is what I have been doing.  I think some of my Ancestors have been trapped in a recurring nightmare that goes round and round and they just don't know how to escape.  I think I have been dreaming them ways out.

The best example I have of this was the falling dream.  In this dream, not surprisingly, I was falling with another person.  We would fall towards the ground and then, just before we hit we would pass through a gate and fall all over again.  I tried all sorts of possible ways of getting us out of there....  I remember one of them was a helicopter free falling by us and trying to pull us in but the danger of the propellers and matching speeds made it impossible.   In the end, a couple of men with parachutes jumped out and fell with us  and caught us to them and strapped us to them and brought us safely down.

Can you imagine falling, over and over, unable to think of a way out?

I think dreaming fears is linked to my having passed the Spider Gate.  I wonder how passing other gates would affect my dreaming?

The other breakthrough involved a dream where I was eating in a mediterranean restaurant.  I was talking to the waiter and I told him I didn't know what I was.  He was surprised and disappeared into the back and came back with his Grandmother.  She placed her finger on my third eye and shut her eyes.  When she was done, she opened them and told me I was a Walker, A Weaver and a Shifter.

I have only the vaguest idea of what these things mean really and I have even less idea about what benefits they can have in the physical world.  They seem to me, to be very much talents of the inbetween, of the Dreamer.  That too makes sense too, because the wind at the heart of my circle is the Dreamer and my totem for this is the Crow.

A Dreamwalker is one who can walk into the dreams of others.  I know I do this.  I walk through their dreams, their stories and I wear their bodies and think their thoughts.  But I don't understand the subtleties of this and you can be sure there are some.  I feel quite strongly that these are well defined talents with hidden depths whose paths we have lost somewhat or are only remembered by a few.  I also find it easy to navigate the dream world on journeys.  Once I have been somewhere I can get to and from that place very easily on future occasions.  I just open a door and step through.  There are hints that many Native American Indians just vanished when White Men came, that they stepped through the veil, opened a door and went elsewhere.

A Shifter, obviously shifts shape and again this is something I do.  I often wear feathers to travel in journeys and I have twice danced the elements at the Equinox in the shape of a Dragon.  Many books talk of how Native American Indians used to be able to shift shape with ease, in this reality. 

A Weaver is the less obvious I think but before the dream I had a journey at Samhain.  We were to connect with an ancient Ancestor, back in the dawns of time, we were to make our way to an ancestral cave.  I did this and got a little more than I bargained for.  I met with an adept in a dark hole in the back of a cave.  He was quite a character and told me off if I started to drift or lose focus.  He told me how Spider Woman wove the worlds into being.  He showed me her web, how everything is made from the same huge giant web, twisted and curved and prodded and pulled into all the shapes of everything we are, connected.  He showed me how to unpick as well as how to breath spirits through the web into a shape. 

My suspicion that this must be what a Weaver is was confirmed by Robert Moss's book, he talks of how in many of the lands of the dead, the matter is formed using imagination from an underlying grey material which is plastic in form.  His description of the material was familiar although different - it is so hard to describe impossible things!  He called the people who make things over in this realm of Memorydream, Weavers.

So I have been gifted with three talents and they all relate directly to the dreaming.  I have a vague idea of what they are, but no idea of the deeper meanings.  I have no idea whether or not I can affect anything in the waking world in the slightest.  Of course, if we lived in the dreaming then things would be very different indeed.  I know I can help myself with these gifts, that they make journeying and dreaming easier for me and that I learn a lot from both, but I have no idea how I can help others in reality and I have a lack of active control although I think the Dreamer in me knows exactly what it is doing and does it, when the conscious me does not get in the way!

I think spider links into my life now in several ways.  I think Crow is beautiful and I know that Dreaming is the best gift of all.