Different "enough", dream streams, other-reality screens
Warning: I mention the word "Ego" in this newsletter.
Dreams are a conversation with multiple streams of consciousness — personal, ancestral, transpersonal, nonlocal, cosmic, alien, divine, etc.
(Honestly, I think the list is longer than that.)
Sometimes dreams are dull. Sometimes they are silly. Sometimes they are highly symbolic.
I took a workshop last Sunday in Berkeley with Jennifer Dumpert, who is an expert on exploring consciousness with Liminal Dreaming, and she said something that clicked for me: In the first hours of dreaming our brain is processing all of the day’s events.
We know the brain cleanses itself while we sleep. Removes toxins. Gets rid of the waste. I try to help my brain out before bed by doing a night terror hate mind dump and by replaying my entire day in reverse. Both of these activities help me get past my own personal walls / bias / fears and allow more of the divine and alien and strange to make an appearance.
You can ask for a dream, like you can ask for a vision, or clarity, or truth.
It’s OK to be confused but the goal is to reach toward understanding, and for that we need help from a source outside of ourselves.
So ask. Pray. Dance for it. Beg. Demand — and then be patient.
DREAM/OPINION
Some stuff about the ego 🤮
First I’ll share the dream, then I’ll share my opinion. I did not ask for this dream. I don’t even like it. I’m biased, but I’ll tell you why afterward.
Dream, Wednesday, January 11, 2023
Every day on his morning commute a man would face his ego and a fight would ensue. But the man and his ego were identical in every way, so their fighting was synchronized. No one would win. A lot of energy was wasted, and the man was always exhausted.
The man began to train in secret. Learning moves that his ego would not expect.
One morning they meet again only this time their strikes are no longer in sync. The man outwits his counterpart and the ego runs away in fear.
That’s when something inside the man shatters. He gives chase. He does not like being different from who he thought he was, and he feels immense pain when his ego runs away.
For a moment he wishes they were the same again, but he doesn’t want to return to the same exhausting loop.
That’s when the man realizes that what he really wants is not to destroy his ego, but to become different enough from it so that he knows who is who.
How I feel about the dream
I’ll preface this by saying I don’t know enough about the ego. I have one, but I don’t like to read the literature or studies surrounding it. I’m not on a personal quest to dissolve or shatter or destroy the ego. I’m also not afraid of it.
I approach the ego with the same fearless fervor as I do the Devil. When you grow up in the church, you get accustomed to all the scare tactics. You do not entertain the Devil. The Devil plays with idle hands. You need to protect yourself from the Devil, and be vigilant — but don’t be too afraid, because if you have too much fear in your heart then you’re doing it all wrong. So I thought about the Devil every day of my life.
Until one day, I was 13 years old and so excited to tell my youth pastor that I forgot the Devil existed. It had been 3 days and I had not thought of the Devil. I thought for sure my pastor would congratulate me — that I had graduated to a new level of purity. But I was wrong. Instead he responded with, “That’s exactly what the Devil wants, for you not to think about him.”
In that moment I felt defeated and angry and disappointed and I began to diverge. I didn’t lose faith or stop believing in a higher power — I just didn’t want a middle man anymore. I didn’t want any man overseeing my relationship with “The Mystery.”
That’s how I feel about the ego. I don’t want to read about it. I don’t want to be told that I should be afraid of it or that it needs to be dissolved. I trust my higher heart and I trust my desires are aligned with my divine will. Sometimes my ego causes me pain and those are the times I feel angry or rejected or unworthy, and that’s OK.
All I need is to become different enough from the ego so that I know who is who.
Five days later, on January 16, I had this dream:
It’s the same message. Unhook from your storyline. Unhook from your ego. You don’t need to leave the meat locker. You don’t need to forget that you are meat.
Just unhook enough so that you know who is who.
Dream streams
I’ve started sharing daily dream imagery on Twitter and Instagram Stories. The 280-character limit helps me to narrow my interpretation. Here’s a link to the up-to-date dream stream.
I can’t post them all here, but I’ll share my favorites from the past two weeks. For some of the dreams, I give more backstory and meaning below each account.
BELLY-FLOPPING BULLIES
In dream imagery, anything that falls from the sky symbolizes inspiration, intuition, intelligence — things from the mental or astral realm descending to earth and becoming real and materialized.
In this dream they wanted to rush me. I felt pressure to just drop to the Earth as fast as possible, but I ignored all external influence and trusted myself and did the perfect somersault down to Earth. Then I watched from the sidelines and giggled as everyone who was annoyed with me belly flopped.
REALITY INTERLUDE
DREAM PROTEST
LOVE IN ALL REALITY STREAMS
WHOSE RULES?
This dream also felt related to the “ego,” but mostly to my spirit. The imagery of the toy and the concept of programming and my own judgement about what is strange or acceptable can be summed up by the question: Whose rules am I playing by?
JOB OPENING
I go back to this moment a lot — it’s a reminder of why I’m here. I was in the Universe’s library. The grounds were vast and beautiful and there were gardens to sit in and reading nooks in every corner. I asked to meet whoever is charge, like I do in most worlds. They take me — again — to an empty office. They tell me I can have it if I want it. I don’t want it. I want to be reading and learning and socializing and loving and living — so I go back downstairs.
SQUIRREL WORLD
The Squirrel World and the vision of the empty administrative offices were from the same psychedelic journey last October. I’ve given up trying to uncover the face of God. I see him every day, all around me. The squirrels teach me to play and relax and just chill.
QUIET VS SECRETIVE
OTHER-REALITY SCREENING
This dream is actually very similar to my reality tunnels dream that I had on Wednesday, July 7, 2021. What has changed in the past year and a half for me is that more and more different realities and memories across time and space are resurfacing. They all feel like me. Familiar and foreign at the same time.
Lots of people are psychic and lots of people remember past lives — I just never thought I would feel like one of those people. I integrate slowly. Pulling in qualities and energies that “fit” into my current life. Again, I only want to become different enough.
I don’t want to feel alienated from my life or from myself. So I’ll try not to sit so close to the other screens.