Dreams in a Spiritual Dark Age

The every-night process of diving through the subtle planes while sleeping

Everyone born into our current chunk of the Kali Yuga is born tired. I used to sleep so much as a baby, my parents report waking me up every few hours just to make sure I wasn't dead. The problem, I believe, was that I spent fewer than five years out of incarnation. I believe that my soul's previous incarnation ended in 1968. From what I can recall, she died of old age. Occultists say that in past eras, human souls would spend anywhere from 50 to 200 years out of incarnation between bodies. Nowadays we are lucky if we get a few months. This is the natural result of human population being at an all time peak. The wave has crested. We may hit ten billion but it won't last. The thing we occultists look forward to (and economists mourn) is longer breaks in-between human lives as humankind shrinks in number.

I was tired as a child despite not having any significant health problems. I was tired at my physical prime around age 21. I wasn't quite as tired when I went vegan at age 37; for about a year I had a physical and mental boost as my health improved. Menopause hit at 49 and now I'm tired again. I am tired right now, writing this essay.

If you are tired like me, know at least that you are not alone. The humans alive right now lack the abundant energy people took for granted in the pre-Industrial era. This is largely the product of etheric starvation, a condition that occurs when lakes are filled, rivers dammed and reversed, roads built over meadows, and paradise paved to put up a parking lot. Philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was born in 1872, often commented on how much greener everything was before the 20th century. Since his death in 1970, the un-greening of the world has hit a frantic pace, and with it, etheric starvation has become the de facto condition of the world.

Why Is It Like This?

Sleep is supposed to be nourishing. Because of etheric starvation, sleep does not satisfy and nourish as it did in Bertrand Russell's era and the ones before it. Just as we eat more food nowadays (and get fat in the process) while absorbing fewer nutrients and becoming sick instead of healthy, we require more sleep, but the sleep we manage to get fails to restore the etheric body. Sleep also lacks the ability to soothe emotional distress for the most part. Sleep and dreams often leave us more troubled than going the insomniac route. This problem is the direct result of the collective astral's current degraded state. To put it flatly, the collective astral is a house of horrors; a cosmic dumpster fire. The combination of mass etheric starvation and endemic spiritual ignorance has given us a perpetual collective astral s**tstorm. The astral plane is nothing more or less than the realm of the imagination. When the average imagination is a haunted, poisoned well, the collective result is a minefield of creepy things emerging from those wells like The Ring (2002) minus the haunted VHS tapes. Let's take the example of the imaginal world of a four year old girl named Cassie. Little Cassie's babyhood was spent entirely in Covid lockdown. For this reason, she knows the lyrics of Sexxy Red's Pound Town better than she knows her ABCs. Her mind is consumed by both Lyla in the Loop and lewder images of influencer types twerking in the club. She doesn't have the mental equipment to know what to make of the titillating images jamming her brain. She does however know how to drop the F bomb like a seasoned pro.

Now let's visit Alex, a fourteen year old suburban boy. Justifiably angry at being society's throwaway, Alex longs for rites of passage other than getting a driver's license. He escapes his hovering mother and a stifling school routine with online games. He has no practical skills and nobody to teach him how to be a man. His imagination is populated by the caricatures of women in anime form who speak in baby-talk to his subconscious, reassuring him that it is fine to be lazy, dependent, and weak.

Fast-forward to Alex, the female version. She is 28 and she wants to be an influencer of a slightly different kind than Sexxy Red. She has recently joined an MLM, convinced that it is her ticket out of poverty despite the credit debt she had to take on in order to gain the "opportunity" of selling herbal diet pills. Alex is possessed by a Wendigo that craves unearned wealth. Her dreams overflow with McMansions, spa weeks, and jet travel she will never experience.

Now on over to the hump of middle age... I know it well! We have Jason, a 52 year old man preaching assertive forms of religion mainly to people who don't want to hear it. His subconscious is as full of the desire to be gay as his feed is full of damnation against gays. His brief, drug-fueled experiences as a young twink haunt him, though he will never admit it. His uni-God purportedly hates gays, so deep down, he believes his God hates him as he cannot help being homosexual.

But wait, like a bad infomercial, there's more. Let's get on to Nora, a sixty-five year old divorcee who is addicted to shopping and romance novels. Nora's rich ex-husband shovels alimony money in her general direction, so finances are not an issue. Nora's dreams and imagination are dysmorphic. She's fond of making AI photos of herself that depict her as a romance novel heroine, her old, flabby body replaced by a young, busty avatar that somewhat resembles somebody she could have been.

Finally, we have Clyde, an 80+ guy trapped in a nursing home who waits to die while watching cable news alone in his room. Anything is better than the constant onslaught of needles, experimental vaccines, and dialysis required to keep him in endless stasis. His family has forgotten about him and his friends are all dead. He cannot help his grumpiness with the young strangers who don't have time to discover his bed sores. He wishes they would just leave him alone so he could make his undramatic exit.

Even the most spiritually aware people -- present company excluded, I'm talking monks and nuns who actually live the Word, yogis, and kung fu masters -- have to put up with the collective astral morass. The more along the Path you are, the more sensitized you are to higher beings and the more exempt you are from astral assaults, but it does not save anyone from the mess the astral has become. Much of magical work in the Western tradition is to build a temple within the imagination that is a sanctuary from the collective astral. The collective astral is at its all-time worse at the moment but it has always been crappy, hence the need for astral temples.

The Dives

Sleep and dreams are a diving expedition. Sleep is a cycle of waves on the subtle planes that mimics patterns measured on the physical planes. To "drop off" into sleep is more like to "turn on". As the physical falls away, the dreamer wanders unfettered by the Meatworld body and Meatworld limits. For this reason, all sleep is astral travel. Like pit stops and break downs on a road trip, diving through the planes in sleep can be marred by halts and jerks. The first dive through the lower astral is like taking a car through a bad neighborhood. One pothole or excessively long traffic light can spell disaster. Hypnogogia and night terrors are pit stops in the lower astral, the imaginal realm of torment, passion, and conflict. If you vibrate to the lower astral because of your steady diet of Sexxy Red, Samus Aran, and Dawson's 20 Load Weekend, you'll be a virtual prisoner of it both in waking and dreaming life. Add that most of us don't sleep all that well or deeply, or that many of us are on serotonin drugs, and the chances of hanging out with the nasty creatures of the lower astral are virtually guaranteed. It's funny that bedwetting is feared and tabooed, because bedwetting is often the natural result of effective, deep sleep. The young and the old wet the bed because of 1. Not-so-great bladder control but also because of 2. Thoroughly detaching from the physical plane while sleeping. When you can still dive the higher astral plane during sleep because you are closer to non-Meatworld being than most (by virtue of being close to death or birth) it's hard to re-surface, wake up, and pee.

Dream Symbolism

Dream guides -- those books that attempt to catalogue what every dream symbol means -- are not worth the powder to blow them to hell because the real question is not "What does this symbol mean?" but "What does this symbol mean to me?" When my father was dying, I did not see his coming death in dreams, yet I was the only one who knew he was going to go near the time he did. My dreams are not prophetic. Nevertheless, my dreams have plenty of symbols that inform me about past, present, and future. For instance, when I dream of a certain large house, it symbolizes worry about money and security. When I dream about the city of Chicago, it symbolizes the Path itself, despite the fact I try to avoid traveling into Chicago whenever possible. When I dream of cults, it's a surefire symbol of American corporate culture. But if I dream of a bird, it's just a bird.

Controlling Dreams

There are people who can control their own dreams. One woman used her TED Talk platform to insist "anyone" can turn their dreams into a fantasy playground. Though I don't doubt she has fun times with her rainbows, talking fish, unicorns, or whatever, transforming one's dreams into free Disney World strikes me as a genuinely stupid idea that stands a decent chance of earning her a painful karmic retrogression. Dreams are a playground of sorts, but they are not as gossamer and silly as the term would imply. Instead, dreams are more of a sandbox that happens to temper the dreamer like fine steel. But Kimberly, you say, doesn't ritual magic and sacred homemaking involve the construction of imaginary shapes on the astral, and doesn't that take some playing around? Yes, but in the case of ritual magic, the whole point is to invoke and court Divine protection, which is not something one does when attempting to become She-Ra in the Land of Cotton Candy. So what I am saying is go ahead and curate your astral experience, including your dreams, but understand that dreams and the astral are the attempts of the Divine to teach us outside of the confines of Meatworld. For some, the use of the astral as a constant playground is not possible and thank goodness, because to use it as the TED retard suggested is to use one's night sleep like a junkie uses smack. Personally, I have avoided heroin because I don't want to learn that one the hard way, and the same is true with abusing dreams.

So You Have a Dream?

Keeping a dream diary is a good idea. Everyone dreams regardless of whether or not you remember it. My dreams are often difficult to remember, and I don't remember 90 percent of them within a few hours of waking up. So write them down, by all means. No matter what, discursive meditation is the key to getting anything out of dream analysis: that means sitting down with a single symbol, name, or impression from a dream and unpacking that item for anywhere from 5-15 uninterrupted minutes.

Don't forget practical, natural magic to fight the nasties on the etheric and astral planes: in the bedroom, place one or more symmetrical patterns. They act as demon traps on the astral plane. This is a kind of magic that has been used since time immemorial to confuse evil entities: African wedding baskets, Islamic mosaics, Amish hex signs and quilts, Native American dream catchers... all are designed with symmetrical, repeating patterns that act like Kryptonite to a demon's Superman. Furthermore, don't forget a bowl of vinegar, saltwater, or salt (or all three) at the bedside, as these scramble evil entities on the etheric plane, making them sorry they ever traipsed near your corner of the etheric. I'll make my best attempt to explain all of this crazy jazz in my upcoming book, Sacred Homemaking. In the meantime, sweet dreams.