That is Completely UN Scriptural

So Friday morning I was in bed praying and what not and working with some positive intention type techniques I had read about. One of them was doing good for goodness’ sake, entering something called the “narrow gate“,  the mother of my children and I getting along better, etc. Be careful what you pray for, you just might get it! I know this probably sounds like me wearing a big flashing neon sign saying hey look at me, but that is not the purpose here…. read on and enjoy, hopefully!

I had fallen back into sleep after prayer, when my mother of the mother of my children calls me up. She asks me if I was still in the area (I was staying at a friend’s house to be closer to my kids) and if I know anything about plumbing. At first I think, “uh-oh”, but then realize my prayer had already been answered – chuckling internally. So I said, yes – it’s not my speciality, but I can do it if it is PVC. She said it was. She told me that a pipe had broken and she could use my help. Service with a smile here we come! As I fumbled around in the dark looking for my superhero cape, I began to form a plan. I told her that she needed to get the cleaner and glue; a saw; and extra PVC fittings ready so that we did not have any delay. I wanted to be there for my daughter at her Valentine’s celebration and we needed to have this project completed
by 1:30 PM.

I quickly got dressed and armed the alarm (so I think). I exit the building and put my friend’s dog back in the fenced area. I drive my car for the exit and lo and behold there is a problem. My friend had locked the gate. Ths was a major problem to performing service with a smile. I called my friend and he told me that to get through the gate,
I would need to open it from the other side. I begin to think of the allegory involved now. Wow – the gate to perform service has been locked and must be opened from the other side. He tells me to go get the key to the shed out of the house and that the tools would be located in the shed. I follow his instructions and realize I had not
properly armed the alarm! The shed possessing the key to the gate is then opened. I go and retrieve a wrench and proceed to work on loosening the gate from the other side. I swing the gate open and drive my car safely through. Nice metaphors here. Perhaps sometimes a gate is just a gate, yet I felt this was in alignment with my prayer.
My prayer was about entering through the “narrow gate” that morning. Perhaps the message could be that to get through the gate, I would have to have friend tell me about  another key and open it from the other side maybe and that it would be me with challenges that could be overcome? Who knows!

I then call my friend up and tell him I am through and decide to explain the allegory of the gate. I tell him I’m going “injun” (instead of talking about buffalo and owls, it is about gates and keys though) on him  and relate the story in my best big chief voice. He loves the story. I apologize for going injun, but had to tell someone.

I arrive at the mother of the mother of my children’s house to inspect the situation. This is worse than I thought. We use a screwdriver to unlock a panel leading
underneath her home. It smells like funk. Funk. Funk. Funk. I begin to see more allegory maybe. If the house is a symbol of my mind or her mind maybe, we are now about to get into the funk and crawl around in it. Perhaps this would be what pyschologists call the subconscious. All that gunk that is buried that we don’t want to deal with that is
underneath the surface of our mind! In an even further twist, the pipe that busted is a T joint direct underneath the bed where my wife used to sleep for over a year. I think about the allegory – a busted hot water pipe under the bed where my wife once slept while we were separated. Hot water is spraying underneath her bed. Can’t figure
anythign here for allegory, but I go on. I am told that the fitting and pipe are out in the shed. So I head outside and see a sea of cold water (about 60 feet in length and width) about 1 -2 feet deep between me and the shed. I have no rubber boots. Service with a smile I say – shall we change into a different person simply because of the cold?
Off we go – the cold becomes comfortable after awhile and at last I make to the door of the shed. I unlock the shed holding the parts and fittings. I search for fittings and find exactly what we need. 3/4 inch pipe – that is what the pipe said when I peered under the house! I grab a T and some couplers and off we go back through the sea of
about 38 degrees!

My mother in law supplies me with clothes for crawling around and off we go. I take a picture of the funk for writing up an inspirational blog article later – hopefully. I smell cat feces and all kinds of funk along the way. I wonder if this is what it was like being a Jewish kid who had to jump underneath a urinal in order to hide from the SS during the Nazi operations in WWII. I wonder if it is anywhere close. The cold is all over me, but it starts to become comfortable as my skin numbs. I finally reach the destination armed with pipe cutter, cleaner / glue, and other goodies.

Arrrgggggg – I brought the wrong size pipe! I brought the wrong size pipe! Arrrrggggh! I crawl back out of the tunnel of hell and come back to the surface. Glad to see the light of the sun pouring through the overhead panel, I tell my mother in law – Argggghhhh I got the wrong size pipe. I’m thinking to myself: “Foooool! you got the wrong pipe
size and you knew you should have compared to be sure!!”. So we go to the hardware store amd get the “proper” fittings and such.

We come back and go through the same process again. Arggggh – this pipe does not match! This pipe does not match!  There must be a special kind for hot water! Fool – I knew I should have showed the hardware store guy the piece of pipe that I brought with me to verify! Fool! Arrgggh!

It is time to go see the kids at Valentine’s at school so I rush off. I make it there with 5 minutes to spare. I begin rolling film for a web site for my family. We sit there playing all kinds of valentine’s games. Hannah makes a card that says “Mom and Dad In Love – Time”. I think – oh boy, the mother of my children is going to get upset over that one! Eventually out of the corner of my eye – I spot her, the mother of my children. I think to myself, why does she not come over here and be here for her daughter. Why does
she not come over here? I send Hannah over there to retreive her mother to play valentine’s games, but instead her mother retrieves my daughter! Arrrgggg!
Why is she not participatng in Valentine’s like everyone else! I say to myself – okay, give her a couple minutes to adjust and then go greet her. Perhaps she feels awkward or nervous. This is all about the kids – remember!

So I go up there and she is nervous. I say to her – joking with her to break the ice, hey are you too cool for us – you can come play Valentine’s bingo! It will be fun! She smiles and then points and says that it is “too much” – to much going on over there for her. She says it is too new and she can’t handle all that. I think to myself… okay
– she can’t be around me and would rather not play valentine’s games for my daughter’s special party, rather than overcome the awkwardness.
That is the part of me that feels rejected sometimes, but I remain aware enough to feel it this time and not get sucked in! Okay, I’ll get out of here to make it easy on her then! I say to her – “Where is our son’s party?”. She tells me the room. I watch her and she smiles several times, but is nervous. I guess I forgot how good looking I am
🙂

Off to my son’s we go. I take Corbin back to April’s and show him that my car is a transformer ( I had recently added a shiny tranformer logo just for the kids to my car). He loves it and asks me if the car can transform. Mamma shows up to the house and runs to tell her about it. I then get out of her hair and go back to my mother in law’s
armed with the write pipe fittings and pipe. I crawl back through the tunnel of hell and fix the pipe in record time before the sun goes down. I completed my work for the day and even remembered to do a couple of my mind exercises along the way!

As I think over the day, my mother in law and I walk through the events and the potential allegory and I retell some of it in my “injun” big chief voice as we sit in front of the fire-place. She makes me a quick vegetarian dinner and off I go – back to my friend’s house. His best LIVE OAK tree had fallen and we needed to move it before it fell on his shed! This was work for the next day though. Ah, the allegory for tomorrow! My friend sees a budlight commercial on TV and asks me – “Shohn, so what does this budlight commericial mean?”. I say to him, “I don’t know – perhaps that one is just for you”.

Once a person told me that she her phone kept calling at 3AM in the morning and it was driving her bonkers. I said to her, “Perhaps it is a wake-up call for you? :)” She says….. “Ooooooohhhhh, I never thought of it like that.”

This morning I had a dream and I thought I would share it to sort of walk-through my interpretative process.
Here are my notes:

Very thick dream. Had to do with my child-hood home. The dream opened in the Wal-mart parking lot. I went into a sort of resticted area / “employees only” type zone and found behind it a sort of big hallway tunnel leading upward to the back side of Wal-mart. It felt a bit like a cave though it wasn’t a cave. It just had that feel to it.  On the other side I found sort of an employee “housey” type area that had a little laptop and a joystick and some other things in a room. It felt like a miniature “neighborhood” within Wal-mart – small houses built inside Wal-mart. I wanted to take the laptop because it was small and would be excellent on physical security testing jobs, but decided not to. It was called “Psy”. I kept trying to rationalize taking it, but decided against doing so. I came up with some excuse that Wal-mart had plenty in profits and they weren’t even using it – it was just leftovers from some Christmas party that the employees had. The room had a feel of yesterday to it. As though no-one from Wal-mart even knew about this place, but it had been used in a time past. I think that is why I kept trying to rationalize taking a laptop that wasn’t mine.

I was then riding in the back seat of a truck with 2 rough individuals and I think got away from them. I aas then lead back to this place behind Wal-mart and saw Deacon G’s (someone I looked up to in my youth in the Catholic Church in my hometown) having his birthday being celebrated in front of a lot of people. I then went on a little bit further there was some lady reporter who was excited about going to the house of my childhood. I went there and my mom had prepared some sort of display. My child-hood house served as a place of business and a home. My dad and mom ran a used car business together.  She had placed car covers over all the cars on the car lot and it looked “nice”.

Went inside my old house and it was nice inside. I would describe it as “plush”. There were people with me. We were there for some sort of celebration, but I wasn’t sure what when I awoke. I went into the back of the house and there was one guy who came with me though I can’t remember who.  I saw that the present owner of my old house wasn’t there, but he lived like a pig – it was very messy. I’ve often wondered about the owner of my childhood home and have had multiple dreams about this house and the owner. There was stuff everywhere – old toothpaste bottles, dusty mirrors, etc. I looked into the bathroom and saw two floaters in the toilet and had sort of brown stuff blended into the water headed down. It was gross. I told the other guy, let’s get out of here man – we don’t need to be getting into this guy’s stuff.  So we got out and I woke up a short time later.

When I awoke, I figured I might as well try to interpret the dream so first I went back and forth through it in my head and then dictated it to my iPhone.

I thought about the message of the dream and noted that there was a mess in my old house and that there was another presence in the back of my childhood house that was living there and not flushing the toilets.  I started thinking about this as perhaps some nasty stuff in my childhood that I had not dealt with – perhaps a piece of me forgotten back there. A man who was not there, though his presence felt in my old house – living behind the curtain. Perhaps this points to a fragment or something trapped back there.

This brought up an associative memory as I was interpreting. When I was a kid, my dad used to drive a tractor trailer and would leave for extended periods. I used to be so excited when he would come back, but was sad to see him leave, or he would not be there because he was out working. I tend to have a fear of abandonment, so I think this may be where it initially came from and may explain the situation with my extranged wife. That is, why my soul / me would choose someone who would abandon me. I imagine that idea is that I needed to confront this fear.

I’ve been doing more experimenting with lucid dreaming. Using galantamine, choline, etc. as suggested in the book advanced lucid dreaming: the power of supplements. I’ve had many successful lucid dreams over the last year and have been trying to tune this myself. This may not work for you  ;)  – the methodology and trial and error is what is important I think.

Wake up about 5:30 AM. Take the medley, stir around for a bit to make sure I’m good and awake and not groggy. Get back to bed. Temperature is nice and warm like sitting cozy by a fire.

I started seeing pre-dream imagery and was still conscious. Eventually I faded and found myself approaching the end of a long drive way which is my grandfather’s. Some relatives are there and I realize  I’m dreaming. I speculate about parallel dimensions for a second. Fade……. I am in another scene this time going on the dream – it is vivid, but not quite lucid. My kids are sliding down an icecube slide. I have an uncle of mine there. His hair is unusually grey/white. He looks happy, but old. Very old. It has only been a year since I saw him last. The divorce has really torn him down.

Fade…… I get sucked down into some kind of tunnel. I felt pressures all over my whole body, it went dark, vision faded, and I thought to myself – great – I’m returning back to an awakened state. At some points I felt like I was compressed into a “point” if that makes sense.  I was a bit frustrated by this turn of events, but was glad I got to experience the tunnel effect. I had experienced it going “outbound” into dream state, but never inbound to waking awareness before. I was sort of hoping I might be being taken to the “kingdom of God” for a nice little 5dimensional review of my life maybe. Maybe I can’t handle it just yet. I say some prayers and ask for this. Not this time apparently. I awaken in bed, but it is not my bed in this realm. It is different. I look around and look at my toes. Vision fades in and out. I know that I’m probably strattling the edge of being “awake” an dreaming and so I I try some exercises to maintain consciousness. I try the lucid dreaming “spin” technique and then I tried looking at my hands. I see my hands. Yay! They are faded sort of. Vision comes back in – yay the signal to noise ratio is corrected! I walk around the dream setting. I see some of my art on a wall. The area is like a wooden automative shop that I’ve turned into a house or apartment somehow. I look around at the refrigerator and I think well, I better leave this duct tape in the fridge as a reminder to myself that I’m dreaming just in case. I’m not sure what I was thinking with that plan or where the duct tape came from. Consciousness starts to fade so I grab some ice out of the fridge and touch it to my skin. Brrrrrrr.. that’ll wake you up! I go to look in a mirror. It is my current waking life body, but my beard is gone. I turn around and look into another mirror and my beard is back. I think okay, let’s get out of here. Time to try out flying. I look for the exit and find it. I find myself outside and my vision starts to fade again. I notice some color from the trees and focus on that and the sunlight. It brings the vision back after about 10-15 seconds.

I look around at the neighborhood. Trees, some victorian homes, it is in a modern city from this time frame judging by the cars, but I don’t recognize the city. I say to myself – “let’s freak out the locals and fly”. I head to the street – vision fades again. Dang! I focus on the green from the trees and the light from the sun again. I flap my arms just once with a mighty push off and I find myself weightless and soaring through the air. Vision returns. I think to myself – perhaps I should engage my walk-through-walls powers in case I fall down and get hit by a car.

My son kicks my leg – I feel my consciousness becoming “split”. I feel my body laying there in bed and flying at the same time. Vision fades fast. I wake up. Wow.

It feels like trying to control a gigantic balloon at this point. Once I become aware that I’m dreaming, it tends to fade in and out.

Below is a picture that my daughter drew a couple weeks ago. Ordinarily, I’d say “no biggie”. However, what has me puzzled is that the drawing is the same (meaning a spiral with 4 circles on each corner and symbols) image that I saw in a dream near the same time. I had not seen her drawing before, at least not that I consciously recall. I didn’t discover her drawing until yesterday as I was cleaning out her old room and it freaked me out because I saw the same thing in a dream.

I’m checking various discussion groups to see if this could be a universal symbol, something specific to us, all of the above, etc. The main thing that comes to mind when I look at it is the 4 seasons and perhaps evolution or devolution.

Went to Defcon and saw the sleep lab.
http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/SimpleEEG/

Kvasar Dream Mask
http://brindefalk.solarbotics.net/kvasar/kvasar.html

I’ve had several dreams about my estranged wife over the last couple days. These are not new, but what is new is I am trying to learn how to better intepret my dreams and apply meaningful data in waking life.

It is challenging. I’ve gotten to where I record details about my life and what and how my day went before I went to bed. This include what I ate, who I spoke with, what about, my feelings, the weather, the moon cycle, etc. I record this data to determine what made it into my dreams as a result of something that happened during the day. By doing this, I now remember my dreams most mornings.

For example, the other day I had a dream that I was in Sydney Australia with a number of people following me off the main area in Sydney. I recall passing by a road work crew that was operating gas powered weed eaters similar to how it is done in Texas. We had to proceed very slowly through the road work area. Eventually, it was just my estranged wife and myself. We were headed towards a long up hill road. I revved up our motorcycle and went down the valley as fast as I could because I knew we’d barely have enough power to get to the top. She was holding onto my back. As we approached the top, the motorcycle had to be abandoned and this time she was holding onto my back as I climbed the road “wall”.  I felt my muscles getting tired and so I asked her to climb over me – using me as a bit of a stepping stone to get to the top. She still didn’t have enough ummmph, so I pushed her little bottom over and she made it to the top. I was able to follow her over onto the hill. We then went to see my grand parent’s on my mother’s side.

There were other details and this was one small part of an epic dream, but I thought it would serve as a good example of the confusion that a dream can bring. I had a “flash” of a trip to Australia I had taken a couple years ago the day before this dream. It brought up an old memory. I’m not sure why this trip to Oz came to the forefront of my mind, but it manifested in my dream later on. The point being that sometimes things you think about or talk about will show up in the dream. I suppose it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is irrelevant to your life at all if you were to consider all of life one big allegory, but you get the idea. That is one class of dream phenomenon. Daily events manifesting.

Another type may be global stream of consciousness.

Sometimes, I’ve had dreams that were “prophetic” or at least tapped into the global stream of consciousness somehow. For example, one night I dreamt that I was in the custody of some Chinese generals who were wanting to extract military secrets out of Americans about nuclear power and such. The next day on the news – there was a major story about China and some plot to steal such secrets. So that might be fairly obvious as just being tapped into the part of us that is bigger than ourselves. The part of us that is made from the same atoms that our neighbor is made from (scientists say our bodies change all cells every 7 years or so), that earth is made out of, that the universe is made out of. Yet we are still individua too.

Another type may be problems or messages from parts of you outside your normal waking mind.  So let’s take a look at this dream I had about my beloved. On the surface, this one seems like a snap. Keep going. It is going to be a long hard road. You are carrying her, that is your job. You may have to give her a little nudge to get to the top.

Yet, the real question becomes: “Is this just wishful thinking?”. I’ve made love to my wife a few times over the last year in a dream, but that certainly hasn’t happened lately.

Are sometimes these things just desires that are manifesting in a dream world? How to discern a desire vs. a message and more importantly who or what would the message be from?

I’ve been told that when the solution to a dream is found – it will be as though an “ahah” moment comes to you. What if i take this one step further and ask: “What does my estranged wife represent within me?”. Let’s move beyond my standard mantra of beloved wife come home, to the bigger picture. The part of us that has the same atoms as those used to form the planet Pluto.

Could she represents the loss of my feminine side?Perhaps my intuitive, non linear thinking side is underdeveloped and atrophied?

If I treat my house as allegory for what is missing in my soul, I’ll note that I am in a big 5 bedroom house, living with a Pastor who is a monk, no family, and no wife – no feminine touch. The top of the hill we were scaling had to be reached by going through the land down under, passing through much work and construction, eventually going up a high road, and after shedding much weight to reach the pinacle, we went and visited my grandparents house at the top.

As I write this out, suddenly I have that “Ahah” moment. The grandparents at the top of the  mountain / plateau are those on my mom’s side (female). One has been suffering from Alzheimer’s and the other has passed. These both represent a part of me that has been lost over the years. My inner feminine side perhaps? Although I can’t be a female, I can at least work on those aspects of myself.

On the day of Sept 10 -11, I kept seeing syncros with regard to memory, remembering, etc.

With dreams, it would seem that if there were a message, it would not tell you that which you already know. I know I want my wife back. What I did not know, was that parts of me were lost.

As my wife and I were in the home of my maternal grandparents, they allowed us to borrow something. It was cash or something I think.  The dream continued on….. and moving on from dream interpretation to invoking Lucid Dreams.

I read a book called Advanced Lucid dreaming. It explained so much that would have taken me years to understand on my own (all of this is part of my efforts to enter the Kingdom described under Luke 17:21).

I had went to bed last night around 11ish and had taken some supplements. Holy Basil, Gaba, and Valerian root to knock me out. I woke up around 3ish and took a very small amount of an herbal supplement called yohibmine. I was going to try the WILD technique for inducing Lucid dreams. As I lay there, eventually my eyes were closed and I wasn’t sure if I was sleeping or was still awake – meaning I wondered if my body fell asleep.

I kept my eyes closed so as not to waste the 20 minutes or so of careful consciousness maintenance of keeping my mind awake as my body fell asleep. The slightest amount of light would reset the whole process. Eventually I decided that it wasn’t working so I kept my eyes closed and tried to get out of bed. The covers were wrapped around me and I had to struggle a bit to get them free from me. Finally freed of the covers I walked to the middle of my room and looked around. I thought to myself “Am I dreaming?”. I tried to verify by jumping. Gravity was still in effect. Suddenly though, I feel the haziness of dream world setting in and that feeling of losing control. My consciousness fades and I find myself awakening a few seconds later with the covers still on. Nice and tidy.

Fun.  The good news is that I was successful at first attempt and I didn’t even use the supplements recommended by the book. I had to do some substitutions.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve begun to have what I can only call “visuals” as I am in that half-way awake/sleep state.

I thought I would write up what I have seen so far.

The first one was a mountain with the sun behind it. My wife later gave me an envelope from where she works. Strangely enough, it was a pyramid with a sun behind it in almost the same position. I don’t think it was the same thing, though it was remarkably similar.

The next one, I saw the night sky – complete with stars and such. It was pretty neato and lasted for about 10-20 seconds.

Recently  I saw a gallon of water upside down, and the later water being poured into a glass.

Most recently, this morning, I saw a candle light – followed by a much bigger flame area. My brother calls me up a couple hours later and tells me that he found out the potential “real” reason why a friend of ours killed himself. My brother tells me that this friend was a propane or gas service man. He said that our buddy was servicing a family’s home, but that the gas line was run right along side a heater line. A leak developed and the family got killed. Our friend blamed himself and couldn’t handle the guilt apparently. Of course, this friend was known to tell tall tales from time to time and was often subject to spells of depression, so who really knows.

A friend of mine informed me that we are given these things for a reason, but like a puzzle sometimes it takes awhile to put it all together. As you look back on your life, these things – signs and road posts would start to make sense only in retrospect at times.

Ain’t life funny?

I’ve been trying to ramp up my lucid dreaming / out of body experiences / meditation.  I tried a new herb called “Holy Basil” coupled with spinach for dinner, Vitamin B supplements, electric massager, Brainwave Mind Studios Volume II,  fruits and vegetables throughout the day (very limited eating out), Valerian root supplement, etc. Although I had dreams last night, and remembered them, I was too lazy to get up and write them down. They weren’t excessively vivid though.I woke up around 5:47 this morning feeling relatively rested and decided to pray for what’s left of my marriage and my family. I prayed protection around her phone, her mind, her car, the kids, and the house where she resides at present.

I then got up and got rid of my water intake from the night before. I decided to lay down on the floor with a guided meditation track. I used the one from Kelly Howell called Universal Mind Meditation. Started with my breathing exercises and after about 20 minutes I started fading in and out again. During this phase I saw a mental image of gallon of distilled water – upside down. A bit later I saw another mental image (as though it were in my field of vision) of a glass of water being filled. I’m  not sure what to make of those images.

I woke up briefly and rolled over onto my side almost in fetal position. It felt so comfortable. I could just lay like that for a long time. I then dozed off and started fading in and out. I realized my head was on top of a book and I started reading the book. I thought to myself, this is weird – I am dreaming, but there is sufficient resolution in the dream for me to read out of a book. Cool. I keep flipping pages, but they weren’t real pages. It was as though my mind was “seeing through” the pages and I was able to read without turning the pages by adjusting the level of transparency in each previous page or by adjusting the depth of my apparently see through vision.

I then got up sort of groggy. I didn’t see my body on the floor so I figured I was really awake. I turned to get up and peeked out the door to make sure no one was in the living room (I have a room-mate now).  I was going to walk through really quick like and get a glass of water yet I was still naked as the day I was born, so I was sort of sneaking about all tip toe style.

I walked into the kitchen and thought, you know – “it sure is light in here. What’s with the lights being on?”. As I was contemplating this, I thought to myself “Perhaps I am still dreaming?”. “Let’s test this” I thought. I thought to myself “I need to get outside and see if I can find a license plate number or something to recall when I wake up, if I am dreaming. Well, I don’t know how much time I have. Let’s try to fly.  If I can fly, then I am probably still dreaming.”

I jumped up and much to my delight and slight embarrassment my naked body is now soaring over the kitchen sink.  As I made it over the counter, I went into what I now call “the white zone” where I knew I was still dreaming, yet was awake. This happened once before. It feels sort of like the static on a television with no actual signal being received.

Perhaps this is the narrow path that Yeshua spoke of. Straddling the point between conscious and subconscious, though I’m not really sure.

Some have informed me about the middle when performing breath exercises. It makes me wonder if it is similar when going between awake/dream state.

It was very difficult to maintain this state and I woke up.

I had been practicing rather attempting various “higher” thought forms over the last couple days and attempting to be more aware, but the scenario for this dream seemed to be driven once again by feeling lethargic as I dozed in and out. The lethargic / comfortable feeling seems to be driven by the right amount of heat, couple with perhaps time of day, spinach, and binaural tracks. One more thing to note, when I woke up at 5:47 AM – I was very very hungry.