Before I woke up this morning, I had this sort of conceptual/symbolic type of dream which I’ll have sometimes. Where its not really so much an event, as it is a sort of process or problem-solving or something. In this dream, what I ended up with at the end of it was the following symbol, which I’ve done my best to reconstruct in Photoshop:

According to this dream, this symbol was the result of some sort of fusion of energies, which were represented by my subconscious as “The Virgin Mary” & “Satan”. I’m assuming here that the heart has to do with the Virgin, and the arrow/sword piercing it has to do with Satan. It could be looked at as a kind of sexual union between the two maybe, like a yoni-lingam. I think also this eclipsed portion of the heart has to do with both figures. Like the figure or Satan partly obscures or casts a shadow onto the shape of the heart. Sort of like how the earth casts its shadow onto the moon in a lunar eclipse.

Once I finished making this graphic, I realized that it reminded me of some symbols which I’d seen on historical pirate flags - ones which bore other symbols besides the skull & bones.

Also, before I fell asleep last night, I had a hypnagogic vision which delivered to me the phrase “Vibrates two sleeps”. It seemed very significant at the time, of course.

Shifting gears, I just read a sort of mediocre article about dreaming over at a website called Shaman’s Cave. I find their articles to contain useful passages, and better than a lot of other stuff, but never quite what I’m looking for. In any event, I wanted to quote a couple passages which I did like from it:

Sitting Bull once said that his dreams had become so clear that soon he would be able to dream himself back into the world… then he died.

On the dream-body, and entering the waking world with it:

The key with asleep dreaming is to move to the point you can dream yourself back into the world. You basically create a dreaming body; create it to the point you can move back into the real world with it. You have to do the recap to accomplish this - gather all your energy back - it requires all of it. The double, or dreaming body, is not bound by the normal rules of perception. Once it is reunited with your normal body you take on those abilities too. At some point you combine the two back together and at that point you have regained the totality of yourself.

Once you have the two recombined you have total awareness of yourself, this allows you to see energy the way you want, to move anywhere you want in time in space etc, the rules don’t apply anymore. But you are still human. Once you have that, you can move past this world into other worlds, in reality, not just with your energy.

Once you have done this, the totality thing, you face a decision and that is to move or die a normal death. That choice remains with each person I think who achieves that.

I realize this sounds probably pretty out there and esoteric to most people. And it does to me too, but I’m reading it more symbolically than literally. The reason that it’s interesting to me is that it’s one of the few things I’ve seen that talks about achieving “enlightenment,” or whatever you want to call it, through the use of dream-work. There must be other mystics and authors which talk about this path, but I’ve not so far seen any. Well, actually, no. I think Jung is really all about that. Using dreams, visions, active imagination as a road to what is essentially the same thing, but which he calls “individuation”. He doesn’t couch it in the same language though; he doesn’t talk so much about being able to fly around in outer space once you’ve achieved “self-hood.” But ultimately, I think his work has a great deal to do with codifying what is essentially shamanic practices into the “science” of psychology.