Samuel L. Jackson & the secret to life
Dreams and reality collide while taking an anti-malaria drug on the Trans Siberian Railway. How dreams have enhanced my life & become a normal (sometimes bizarre) way to interpret the world.
My sophisticated closet studio & 6 yr old interrupting fan girls.
My trusty bible to decode dreams that feel like this Salvador Dali painting (The Disruption of the Persistence of Memory, 1952) Phew.
My scary brain-melting, anti-malaria friend Mefloquine.
Travels to India & Nepal, 2005
Trip itinerary for Trans Siberian Railway journey, 2007
Blurring worlds & bloody wounds on train trip through Russia, Siberia, Mongolia & China, 2007.
Excerpt from my travel journal, Oct. 20th, 2007
My dream guru, Samuel L. Jackson, pulling off the fuzz cap more than the ‘98 Canadian Olympic Team.
Merging beauty & bizarre in Guilin, China, 2007.
Audio Transcript
This is Divine Interruption.
I'm Sarah Hildreth Rankin.
Hi. So nice to be here again.
I have been trying to make it here with this microphone for two weeks now.
It just has not been happening.
I keep getting interrupted in so many ways, and I like to be in like a flow state, so I like to really sit down and just, I guess, tell a story from start to finish.
And so being interrupted, it just kind of puts me back to square one.
And so it's been really hard for me to just find a space where I haven't been interrupted, or I'm in the moment, whatever it is.
And even tonight, this is the fifth time I'm going to be trying to record this.
I'm upstairs in the bedroom closet, like seven o'clock at night.
My kids just went to bed, which does not mean that they're sleeping.
So anything could happen at any moment.
I've got cords running out to plug into the electrical socket.
I've got a lamp in here because, well, ambient lighting, very important.
And I'm amidst a bunch of smelly karate keys and cycling gear and laundry.
And when you tell anyone in the family, I'm doing this thing, please don't disturb me.
They will somehow magically find their way up here.
So if it's not like the toilet flushing, which is right next to this wall or the sink going, you know, we're just starting again.
So let's see what happens today.
I'm just glad that I'm here.
So today, I want to talk about dreams.
Now, a friend that I met years ago when the first things they said to me was, Please don't tell me about your dreams.
I just don't care.
Now, I get it.
Dreams are really personal.
They're often nonsensical.
And you can't really describe them to someone else where they get it, because you have to experience it, right?
It really only makes sense to the person who's having the dream in terms of it being fascinating.
So I'm not here to tell you about too many specific dreams.
I've had, because I know that just won't land.
Really what I want to do is just talk more about the role that dreams play in our lives and that fine line between dreams and reality.
Like what is real?
What's not?
Which one is actually influencing the other?
Or is everything just happening at once?
Because I feel like I've just been immersed in my dreams for as long as I can remember.
They've just always taken up a lot of bandwidth in my life.
I often wake up after a night of sleeping, and it feels like I'm waking up and getting ready for my second shift of life.
So it's like I'm transitioning from my graveyard shift to my day shift, from my night job to my day job.
And it's just I experience so much when I'm sleeping, that it can be really disorienting waking up and being like, what?
Oh, now I'm somewhere completely different, and I, okay, I have like the next 12 hours to go do a whole bunch of other stuff.
So for me, there are often just a lot of blurred lines and parallels between waking and dreaming.
And if you're a Pisces or you've got a lot of Pisces in your astrology, maybe you understand.
So when I was 20, I went on a trip to India and Nepal.
And as a part of this trip, we needed to get anti-malaria pills.
Now, I was working in a bakery, scrubbing muffin pans and glazing tarts for a living.
So, you know, I wasn't bringing in a lot of cash.
It's that time of life when you're just kind of opening up and figuring out, how does money work?
And what is my life?
I was living in a rented room in a basement, and I had this shared kitchen, which really was not a kitchen at all.
It was a tiny little galley essentially without counters.
So you would prepare food on top of the washer and the dryer.
And I would take my laundry out sometimes, and there'd be like bits of grilled cheese sandwiches and cut up onions and carrots.
And I was eating out of Tupperware containers and living off of day old bread and cinnamon buns.
So I was not making a lot of cash at that time.
And to buy these Malaria pills, there were multiple options, but at that time, I was like, yes, sign me up for the cheap option.
And let's just say, there are some side effects that come with these pills that I kind of knew about, but wasn't expecting or didn't think was a big deal.
We had a travel agent who'd booked our trip and had made a mistake.
So we ended up in the London airport and we were there for over 36 hours.
So I ended up having to sleep in the airport.
And it's just really disorienting, right?
Like any sort of flights, we could go on about that forever, but just really disorienting, not sleeping well, kind of confused.
And then landing in Mumbai, in one of the biggest cities in the world.
And just being fully just shocked and surprised and overwhelmed with all of the senses.
Just a completely different experience and not ever having touched that or felt that experience before.
And that is obviously one of the reasons why we love traveling, right?
We love being exposed to new things because we don't know how we're going to feel.
And we don't know who we're going to be and what's going to happen.
And that is such a great place for growth and for learning about ourselves.
And it just pushes us to our edge.
So already just arriving there, I was in this space of, wow, I've never experienced a lot of this before.
And oh my gosh, like I don't even know how I feel.
Like, is this real?
Because my reality, two or three days ago, was very much completely different.
And now I'm in this space where I'm on another planet is what it feels like.
So stepping into this experience of, huh, okay, is this real?
Is this not?
Well, this is real right now, but I've never felt this before.
The colors there were brighter, the food was tastier, the sounds were louder, the smells were stronger.
It was essentially like I was in a dream.
And then I was also taking these pills, which, let's see, I've got pull up here.
What were, oh, here we go.
What were some of the side effects or what does it say on the side of the box?
These, this is called a mefloquine.
So if you've ever taken mefloquine, maybe you'll understand.
It says, warning may induce psychiatric symptoms such as anxiety disorders, abnormal dreams or nightmares, paranoia, depression, hallucinations, and psychosis.
So I was taking these pills.
I was also taking a prescription antihistamine at that time for my skin so that I wouldn't scratch myself at night because I would get so itchy.
And essentially, all they really did, they wouldn't make me not itchy, they would just knock me out so hard that I couldn't move my arms or legs.
Perfect solution, right?
Oh, just paralyze yourself while you're sleeping so you can't move.
So I was taking those, and then I was taking the anti-malaria drugs.
And it was this experience of during the day, being in a completely new environment where everything was different.
And my senses were just on fire with so many different experiences, and it was all new and taking all of that in.
And then I would go to sleep and be so exhausted, but also so stimulated.
And then having my dreams also feel like they were just brighter and louder, and there was so much going on.
And then also not being able to fully come out of that state in the morning, because I'd been knocked out by these anti-histamines.
And sometimes I would wake up and I just couldn't move my body, or I was so slow and my head was slow.
So there were so many times where I'm like, did that even happen?
Like was that part of the dream where the elephant was crossing the bridge, or was that real?
Like it was just so much going on at once, and it felt like a dream.
So what's real, what's not.
But essentially that trip was marked by just so...
I hear the door open.
Mommy, I'm scared to go to the bathroom because the lights are all off.
Okay, can you turn on the light?
It's too scary.
Okay, give me a minute.
Okay, back to my story.
I had also had this feeling the whole time, like have I dreamt of this place before?
Have I been here before?
It all felt so new and yet so familiar at the same time.
I was trying foods that I'd never eaten before, and yet knowing like on some other level, like this is exactly what I've always been eating.
And yet I haven't, or being exposed to music, and then not knowing the dance moves, but somehow dancing to the music as if I'd been doing it for lifetimes.
Like there was this intersection of reality and dreaming that just came together on that trip that made me really question a lot.
A few years later, I went on another trip, this time on the Trans Siberian Railway.
So starting in Russia, going all the way across Siberia, into Mongolia, and then into China, and then traveling around for a few weeks there.
And for this trip, I needed anti-malaria pills again.
So I don't know if I'd forgotten about my experience the first time where things had felt so heightened, but I just opted for the cheap Methlequin again out of necessity.
This time, I had a similar experience in terms of everything being heightened and this blurring between daytime and nighttime, but it was a bit of a different flavor.
We started this trip in St.
Petersburg, started taking these pills, and the night before, we are going to catch the train for the bigger leg of the journey, like being on the Trans Siberian Railway.
We were in Moscow and we just wanted a night out.
We wanted to go out to some cool underground nightclub that only could be experienced there, like something we've never done before in this magnificent city.
So of course, when you're going to go out for a night in a cool nightclub in Russia, like you're going to go and pick out the perfect outfit, right?
So I went out and bought myself some form of brown denim or corduroy vest, because every 20-year-old girl needs a really cool vest.
And I will say that vests, now that I'm thinking about it, they come up a lot for me.
I'm wearing a vest right now, actually.
And they're a part of like a lot of other stories I have to share.
I'm always wearing a vest, a very specific vest that is somehow integral to the story.
So there you go.
Love me some vests.
Big part of my life theme.
So anyway, I bought this amazing brown vest.
And that evening, we were staying at a hostel and we just bought ourselves the cheapest vodka possible, ate a bunch of crackers, and then went out into the streets of Moscow.
Having heard about this club that was kind of hidden, it was like underneath a building or something, and we had to find it.
So it was a bit of a mystery.
It took us forever to get there.
And in that time, we were also drinking more vodka.
Then in the club, I really remember nothing.
I just know we were drinking like 24 ounce, almost like beer steins filled with just straight vodka.
The next thing I know, I somehow, I'm like face down outside in the street on a curb.
I had fallen like straight over just onto my face, like full body passed out.
And the next memory is trying to kind of wake up in the morning and just feeling like death.
Essentially, my whole body is on fire.
It's aching.
It's painful and swollen.
And I reach back and I can feel something in my back pocket and my new camera that I bought for the trip just smashed.
There's like puke on me in different forms.
And then I reach up to my face and it's just so big.
I'm like, why is my face so big?
And it's swollen and it's bloody and it's wet.
And this was essentially the start to this train journey was being so hung over and in so much pain and having this huge facial disfigurement.
And we had planned on preparing for this journey and getting the right foods, but we only had such a small amount of time to kind of rush to a corner store and like grab some instant noodles and like maybe some juice or something before we got on the train because we were so sick and unprepared and like in a fog essentially.
So not the best way to start your like epic trip.
Then we're on the train and I'm like, yes, like at least at least this is, you know, you pictured this in your head for so long.
It's so historic.
It's just fascinating filled with history and you're seeing all these sites and this landscape.
It was really special.
But at the same time, I'm just so dead and we're in this tiny little cabin and we're moving.
So I don't know about you, I don't do so well with things like boats and buses and trains.
Anything that's moving and rocking, especially when you're already like extremely nauseous, not so great.
And then I like ask my friend, I'm like, is it like really hot on here?
Is it just me?
Like I'm sweating, like why is it so hot?
And then we realize there's a thermostat somewhere.
It's like 28 to 30 degrees Celsius, which I think is like 84 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit.
So it's like pretty hot to be in a tiny enclosed space.
So it's scorching hot and we're moving.
Then the pills are starting to kind of kick in and I'm like, what is this space that I'm in?
Where am I?
What is happening?
We're just eating noodles.
We couldn't speak the language.
The train would stop sometimes, but we didn't know where we were.
We didn't know if we got off the train, when the train would leave again.
So we didn't want to get left behind.
And this stretched out for a while.
At some point, I think we were on there for like five straight days on this train in this tiny cabin.
And it was like a dream.
It was just bizarre.
And at one point, we met some older men that got on from a small town, and they were serving us vodka, and kind of, you know, we're like making friends.
But a bunch of them had just all gold teeth, and they're drinking so much.
And I remember trying to communicate with them, and they were drawing us pictures.
And the pictures one night were like of guns and a bomb.
And then they were like drawing a clock and like making it seem like at some certain point in time, there was going to be some sort of thing connected to a gun or a bomb.
And then they draw a train, and me and my friends are like, what are they talking about?
Like, is there a bomb on the train?
Are they going to kill someone with a gun?
Like, what is happening?
And I was like, is this a dream or is this real?
And, you know, after days and days of this being trapped on there, at some point, I ripped off my baby toenail.
I started to kind of lose a little bit of sanity because it didn't feel real and there was no way of getting off of this train.
And this dream state had started to kind of amplify.
Like, when I would sleep, things started to feel a bit apocalyptic.
I would wake up and be like, okay, like, the world just ended in my dream, like, completely ended.
Is this the end of the world or am I, is this real life?
Or I just murdered my whole family, like, are they still alive?
Or am I on this train after murdering them?
Like, I started to lose sight of what was real and what wasn't.
And that led to, yeah, ripping off a toenail, which was really gross and bloody and like a mistake.
But that was the state that I was in at that point.
So we ended up making it to China.
We'd stopped off in other places along the way.
And by that point, pills were in full effect.
And when I say that, I mean, these dreams were on hyperdrive.
I was having these apocalyptic dreams every night and I would wake up in a cold sweat and I would have injured the end of the world each and every time.
And what was also fascinating was that all of a sudden, Samuel L.
Jackson, of all people, just started to appear in my dreams.
This is when we entered China, he just popped up one day.
And he stayed with me throughout the next three weeks.
He was in my dreams, not every night, but most nights.
And he would always have something prophetic to say.
And he was like Samuel L.
Jackson, like era, I'd say like the late 90s, early 2000s, when he had that fuzzy backwards kangle hat, which I will say he's like the only person who can pull that hat off.
I think the Canadian Olympic team wore those.
They were like fuzzy and red with maple leaves on them.
I think it was like 1998.
Anyway, it was not a good look, just saying, but he can pull it off always.
He always looked very cool.
So that was the era that he was at when he was in my dreams.
And he would show up after something horrible had happened in a dream, this thing very violent.
And then all of a sudden, he would just kind of walk up towards me.
I wouldn't know who he was because he would be like, hello, I'm a landscape architect.
And then he'd take his glasses off, and I'd be like, it's Samuel L.
Jackson.
And then he would say some mythic proverb.
He'd be like, Sarah, the truth will always prevail.
Like, oh, okay.
And then the dream would end.
And this happened ongoing.
He would always be a different character, like a garbage man or a teacher or a doctor.
And then he would say something very important.
All that glitters is not gold.
One that I found in my journal was, no matter how hard you try, the universe will just keep raising the bar.
So like, not always super hopeful, but he was giving me this intense life advice.
And the last time he came to me, I believe he was a dentist.
The world had exploded, and then I found myself in a dentist chair.
And as he came closer, I realized it was him.
And he pulled down his little dentist's mask or whatever.
And he said, Sarah, I want to share with you the meaning of life.
And I was like, yes, Samuel, like share it with me, please, please, please.
And it felt so real.
It was like every moment of all these dreams and this entire trip had converged.
And this amazing being who was so wise and so special and who cared about me so much was coming to like make everything make sense.
So he leaned over and he whispered in my ear, and he was like, Sarah, the secret to life is.
And then there's like, I don't know, we get woken up all of a sudden by like some cat going through the garbage outside of our hostel, like screeching.
And I never heard what he had to say.
Like he never told me the most important piece of advice.
So I always look back and I lament the fact that he was going to tell me how the world worked, how the universe worked, and I never got to hear it.
So the theme of this trip was like these really intense dreams, and then I would wake up and again, have these intense experiences.
And everything was just so different and bizarre and fascinating, but confusing on that journey, you know, going from the train and all those travels and being so hung over and then having this black eye and then landing in another space.
I remember we went to, I think it was a national park somewhere in southern China, and it was so beautiful and so different from anything I'd ever experienced.
It was just, the landscape was like a dream, like a dream, there you go.
But it was also filled with these creatures, like the landscape was amazing, and then you'd come across like a giant Teletubby statue out of nowhere, but it wasn't quite exactly like a Teletubby or three huge rabbits holding hearts that are like hiding behind the trees.
And it just really threw me off.
I'm like, but this seems so real, and yet so fake and so dreamlike.
So that was those two worlds merging.
And even when I look back now on those travels, it just highlights kind of in a very extreme way, that weird space between dreaming and then being in reality, because our reality can be just as bizarre as being in a dream.
And then our dream can reflect back the bizarreness of being alive, and then they just merge together.
So I would say that I've consciously been working with my dreams since probably first year university in terms of like a very conscious way.
I was a part of a research study in my first year psychology class.
I think I had to do it for credits, and I don't know what they were studying.
I honestly don't remember.
I just knew that we had to track our dreams.
So it was a very physical exercise that every morning, I would have this book and I would have to wake up, and I would consciously make myself remember.
The more you do it, the more it becomes second nature.
Like, oh yeah, this happened.
It's like you can hold on to the memory longer, and I would write them out.
Sometimes I would draw pictures of the dreams, and then I had this old school dream book that I stole from my brother, and I would look up every single part of that dream.
And I don't know if that was part of the study, but I would just be obsessed with, okay, in that dream, I was carrying a suitcase.
Okay, that means something.
Then the suitcase is brown.
Okay, that means something.
And then I walked into this building.
It had 15 floors, but then there was a fire, and it happened on the fourth floor.
And then a lion popped out of the fire, and then it spat out a bird, and then the bird turned into a waterfall.
Everything had meaning, and I fully believed that, but it was a very literal interpretation, and it would take me a long time, and I would go step by step by step, decoding everything.
And it was fun, but it was a lot of work.
And through that, I started to just become more aware, right?
I'd start to open up and be like, oh, okay, I am tracking my dreams every night, and I was able to start to see some patterns form.
And like, let's be clear, there are entire bodies of work on dreams.
You could write an entire thesis probably on like one type of dream, or someone's one prophetic dream, or there are courses and workshops and authors who, this is all they talk about.
So I am not the resource to come to for dreams.
I just know this is what I've noticed from my own personal experience, and it's probably a different flavor than what a lot of other people experience.
I don't know.
So what I did notice was there's the dreams, was with the random stuff, right?
With all of the symbology, and like I mentioned, one thing happens after another thing, and everything kind of leads you on a weird journey.
And sometimes you can make sense of it, other times you're like, no, no, no, this is, who even knows?
Who even knows?
Then there are the dreams where it felt like I was always trying to work something out.
I'm stuck in some sort of loop of energy, and it's on repeat.
So you're dreaming and something's happening, and you need to scream.
But then every time you go to scream, you can't scream, right?
Your voice is stuck, and it feels like the whole dream, you're trapped in this kind of nightmare of needing to scream, but you just can't, and you're trapped.
Or you can't run or move your arms.
Or for anyone who's worked in the service industry, in retail or in customer service of any kind, working in a coffee shop or a restaurant, there's those dreams which feel like they are based off of your real life, right?
It's taking that experience.
And then it's trapping you there, and they're the worst kind of dream.
I've had so many where I've been trapped at a cash register, at Starbucks, and I'm trying to take someone's drink order, and I can't get it right.
And let's be fair, being trained at Starbucks, it was quite an experience and it was challenging to remember everything.
I would be taking someone's drink order, I'd have the cup in my hand and my Sharpie pen, and I'd be trying to write it down and the pen would run out, or I'd drop the pen, or I just could not get the order right, because it would be something insane, like a decaf, venti, ristretto, extra hot, no foam, four-pump hazelnut caramel macchiato, served in like five cups, because these are actual things that happen.
These are actual drinks that people order, okay?
But it would just be this nightmare of being trapped in trying to write that and it never coming to fruition and me always getting it wrong.
So those were so stressful.
I had a dream last week, where I was in Denmark and I was serving the world family toast.
And every time I would come out, I would get the toast order wrong.
It would be too burned or the jam would be the wrong type of jam or not enough butter.
And it felt like I was in this dream for the entire night, just over and over and over again, which I think is very telling probably about something we're working through, where we are trapped in a cycle or a loop or a pattern.
And we're not maybe expressing something in our life or moving through something or moving energy out.
That's kind of what it's always felt like to me.
So there's those types of dreams.
And then there's like the visceral visitation.
I don't get these all the time, but when I do, they just feel so real.
It's usually with someone who's passed over.
So someone who's actually dead, and it feels like you connect with them in your dream.
And it is so real because to me, it truly is real.
You're connecting with their energy in some way.
Let's say it's your grandma who died when you were 12, and in this dream, you connect with her and everything about the way she looks.
From tip to toe, she is exactly as she was in the right clothes.
Her skin smells the same way, the way she talks, she'll touch you.
And there's just this energy or emotion attached to it, which is so real.
It's like pure love, and you wake up, and you're like, grandma came to visit me, and we were together in that dream, no doubt.
Or it can even be with someone who's currently in your life, who's alive.
And again, it's like you guys are hanging out in your dream because your souls want to connect and have a conversation.
I don't know why, but it's so vivid and so real, and you wake up with again that feeling and sense.
And maybe they even communicated something to you that you remember.
But yeah, when I get those, I'm like, that's legit.
That is so real.
And there's ones where it's like an activation in the dream, and they're very physical.
So I don't know if I can really describe these, but I've had dreams where it's almost like my energy is being manipulated.
And usually I'm above my body, and I can see what's happening in parts of me, or lighting up, or there's very specific colors that are shooting around me, or sequences of almost like a doctor doing things to me, or somewhat like moving my energy around, and I'll wake up and I really will feel physically different, or like my energy has shifted or moved around.
And sometimes those dreams are strictly in one color.
I'll have a dream that's entirely yellow, where my energy goes through like a yellow car wash or something.
And then there's the ones, I guess, like sleep paralysis.
I think that's what I'm going to call it because I do think I've looked it up before, because I've been trying to have these not happen to me because they're quite scary.
It's at some point, I am flying and I get trapped at the top of a ceiling, and I'm fighting something like some sort of creepy or dark energy.
And then I want to go down and it's like I can see my body down there, and I'm trying to get back into it, but I can't.
And in that dream, I will do that thing of trying to scream.
And Nick has told me, it comes out as, and in my dream, I am screaming at the top of my lungs like, help me, wake me up, Nick, wake me up.
But all he hears is like a few little like rumbles from my throat.
And it's the worst because I can also realize that.
And I'm like, please get me back into my body.
I know I'm in a dream and I can't get out of it.
So I don't know, I kind of realized and recognized a lot of those patterns with the types of dreams I had.
And do I still track them?
No, let's be honest.
Like I just, sometimes I just don't care or I don't want to.
Like I get woken up by screams from my kids usually, and it's a very intense way to wake up and they're fighting over which person gets to have like the sparkly long-sleeve unicorn shirt and it's full out screaming.
So my nervous system gets jolted from like zero to 60.
And I don't even remember the amazing symbolic dream I had, right?
I'm in another space already.
So I don't know, I haven't found the space for myself in the mornings.
And to be honest, when I do write things down, things that I have thought were so rich and full of symbology, they're like prophetic and profound.
I'm like, this dream is earth shattering.
Like as I'm waking up, I'll put a note in my phone and I will, here I've found one.
Okay, so this one, I wrote this down because it felt so important at the time.
This is from May 28th, 2024.
It's 7.10 in the morning.
And it says, Massage covered in weird cheese bun, looking scars after.
Have bling finger curly hair with freckles.
Venezuelan Williamsburg exploding car.
So I think that tells you all you need to know about how profound my dreams were.
Like, no, what does that mean?
It means nothing to me.
I can probably delete that out of my phone, right?
I should delete that.
So I don't track my dreams that way anymore.
It just doesn't feel important.
I don't have the space or time, but I have noticed that this is probably in the last five years, that there's actually like a cycle to my dreams as well, and it links up with a planetary connection.
And I wasn't aware of this.
This did take me a long time to realize, but there's this maybe three to four times during a year, like within a 12-month span, that my dreams would just go on hyperdrive for about two weeks.
And during this time, it was almost, it's like I can't sleep.
I don't sleep well, because there's so much coming in, like I'm experiencing so much as I'm falling asleep and while I'm asleep, that I wake up all the time, because it's like I have to write it all down.
It does feel important, whereas the other dreams that, obviously, I think are important are just trash, but it links up with when the planet Mercury goes what they would call retrograde.
Now, you don't need to know anything about astrology.
It really doesn't even matter.
It just means that I've noticed that two weeks before this planet slows down, or I think in scientific terms, it doesn't even do much.
It's just the way that it looks from Earth is that the planet isn't moving forward.
Again, irrelevant.
But two weeks before that happens, leading up to that slowing down, I get crazy dreams.
And it will happen the two weeks before and then the two weeks after.
And this happens about three to four times a year.
So much comes in during that time.
I connect with all sorts of people from my life.
Like everyone just comes as a parade each night into my dreams with messages for me and they were like, want to talk to me and things will repeat.
So I'll get a message or maybe it could be a sentence.
It could be a word, a name, a thought, a date.
And it will repeat so many times throughout the dream that it will alert my conscious self and I will know as I'm dreaming, like, okay, I got to write this down or I need to wake up now, I need to keep holding on to that thought.
And you know, when you're so tired or you're like, and you wake up, you're like, okay, I just need to go pee when I wake up.
But you're like, no, don't do that.
Write down the thing, write down the thing.
And I will get creative ideas.
Things are almost fully formed.
I'll get poems and sections of writing that I want to put together or ideas that I want to talk about like here, like me talking about dreams.
This has been coming up for me during these periods of time for the past five years.
This is like parts of wanting to talk about dreams will come in my dreams and I will write them down.
So it's almost like these puzzle pieces that I'm being shown and given during that time.
There was one period where I received every night, it was a different plant.
I would hear the name of a different plant, a different herb or a different rock or crystal or stone.
And I hadn't heard of some of these ever.
So even the word itself, I'd be like, I don't know what that is, but I'd wake up, I would know that one thing was repeating.
So I'd write it down.
And then I would either look it up, so I'd Google it and be like, oh my gosh, that corresponds to like some weird physical symptom I'm having, I should go get that herb.
Or I would go to the herb store and ask about it.
And they would tell me something that would then make something else in my life make sense.
Or I would go to a garden or a forest nearby that I knew had this specific plant.
And while I was there, I would meet someone, and that would set off another trajectory.
Like I'd meet someone and they'd tell me something.
I'd be like, oh my gosh, this helps me realize this other thing.
Or now I need to go watch this movie that they told me about that then leads me on another tracks.
And I've learned that I do need to listen because again, I'm not sleeping anyway, there's no rest happening.
So I kind of prepare myself.
I'm like, okay, I'm going to be really tired.
So like, hopefully I can somehow nap or go to bed extra early because I'm going to be kept awake, especially in that time between falling asleep, like when you're still awake before you've fallen asleep, like those different frequencies, like our brains go into those different waves.
Again, that parallel between waking and sleeping and dreaming and reality, that is the space where I just, oh my gosh, I'm like, so much exists there that we don't understand, which makes me know that life isn't what we think it is, or there's so much more there.
And I've had full conversations with things in that time, like where I'm falling asleep, and then I start hearing someone talking to me, and I'm like, okay.
Sometimes I'm like, no, I'm just tired.
Can you just like leave me alone?
Other times, I've stayed up and written down full conversations because I'm curious, like, hey, who am I talking to?
What is this about?
Can you tell me about some things?
Or why are you here?
And I don't know, sometimes, again, they've meant something for my life.
Other times, it's just fascinating.
I can't tell you exactly what's going on or what I'm experiencing or who I'm talking to, but it's happened and I still have all these crazy notes on my phone.
Over time, I've definitely created some better boundaries for myself because I don't necessarily need to be open to all of that, if that makes sense energetically.
I don't know, I'm again somehow bringing these energies towards me and they're communicating, but maybe I don't need all of that.
So now, I just know there's these specific times during the year where I need to pay attention, and if I do, I will be not rewarded, but I will be receiving some form of guidance for my life, and then if I enact that guidance, like I said, I would go to the herb store and ask for the thing or go to the place, or I would write down the idea that I would then use three years later that I wouldn't know about.
When I enact that, it does shift my reality.
So what's happening in my dreams is actually shifting my reality because I'm taking action on what I'm being shared.
Leading up to this time and during these weird weeks where my dreams get crazy, I also see a blue light out of my left eye, and it's not in my mind's eye.
So it's not in my head.
It's not my imagination, whereas normally that's where I see most things that aren't necessarily visible to the human experience, where it's inside of my head.
But I actually see a physical blue light in my left eye during these weeks with my dreams.
And that also alerts me.
That's when I started to put it together.
I was like, wow, okay, this is connected to a whole bunch of other things.
And it flickers and it's in my periphery.
So sometimes I think I'm seeing a flash of light or someone's camera going off or something from a TV screen, but it's not.
It can be anywhere and it's frequent.
And now that's what happens.
So there's a lot going on there.
Dreams have also, I guess, really shaped how I see and interpret the world, not just inside of me, but even around me.
So dreams have taught me to pay attention to the subtleties of life and the undercurrents and to what I'm sensing and what I'm feeling.
And in a way, they really trained me in this other intuitive language.
And that language is one of symbology and one of metaphor.
So dreams, I see them as almost like a Salvador Dali painting, right?
They're complex, they're messy, they're layered, they're confusing, and everything is just steeped in this weird meaning and this undercurrent of symbols.
And you're like, what does this mean?
But I know it means something, but it's a big mess and this big web.
So when I say symbols, and especially in dreams, like an example of that would be the ocean.
So I hope I can explain this.
I've experienced the ocean or an ocean in so many different ways and forms in my dreams.
And I know that this is, again, universal, right?
The ocean is a universal symbol, like everything else can be.
And I'm sure most people have had a dream of some point, at some point, that connected with the ocean or with water in some way.
And over the years, after spending so much of my dreaming experience with an ocean, like the ocean coming through, as in this one dream, I'm drowning or another, I'm being caught up in the current and carried far away from land, or I'm being pulled down to the depths and like wrapped around with weeds, or I'm, I don't know, unearthing some form of treasure chest at the bottom of the ocean and finding magical things.
So there are all these different experiences in my dreams of being with an ocean or in an ocean and experiencing it.
And over time, I came to understand what it was showing me.
So for me, an ocean really represents the emotional body.
It's helping me to understand what's going on in my heart, what's going on with my feelings and my emotions.
Are there any deep-seated or unprocessed experiences I've had that are down there like in this deep ocean?
And when I did intuitive readings for other people, an ocean would often show up in a very similar way.
And when I would connect with someone's energy and I would feel this ocean, it's like I would, first of all, see it in my mind's eye.
So not with my physical eyes, but when I'm reading energy, I'm seeing it in my head, right?
It's like my imagination.
I'm seeing this picture of this ocean.
And then I'm also often in that ocean.
So I'm physically, also, it feels like I'm in that experience.
If it be, you know, I'm drowning or I can't breathe or I'm floating or I have this sense of being dragged under, or I'm in a shipwreck, whatever it is, I'm experiencing it and I'm seeing it.
And then I can feel the emotion of what's there.
So then I can tap in even further and I'm like, oh no, there's like deep grief here.
And when I look into that ocean, like I don't want to go down there because of all these buried memories of when I was a kid or when my heart was broken and all of these relationships.
So it's fascinating because all of that can just come from this symbol of the ocean.
And I could understand experiences or what people would be feeling just as I could for myself when I would feel into my dreams.
And I would just know right away, I'm like, oh, this is connected to something somebody's processing, just like with me.
And again, this is nothing new.
This happens with all sorts of things.
It's with color, the way I've talked about, color has meaning.
And with any sort of natural element, like flowers and plants and animals and trees, like with trees, when you feel into a tree, it's like, how are we rooted?
Right, so you feel into someone's tree and you're like, oh, I can see that there's roots down there that are gnarled or that don't feel safe being in the ground.
What does that mean for how someone grew up?
What are their roots like in their root system?
What was their family life like or their connection to their parents and their grandparents and their ancestors?
It's how rooted are we?
So everything, everything can be a symbol and it can have meaning.
And behind that meaning, it can be so personal and have all this stored information about us.
You know, it's similar to how I talk about music, right?
It's an intuitive or like a psychic language.
And this is just the same, it's just more symbols.
And we've used symbols all throughout time, right?
As a way to understand the world, like humans, that's how we communicate.
And you go back to like the earliest times of like human beings and like cave drawings and all of that.
They're just symbols.
It's a way of understanding and communicating.
And I've always felt like through this lifetime of just dreaming and really feeling into everything that I'm experiencing there, like, let's say it's a rose.
How many times have I dreamt about a rose, right?
I've dreamt about it enough times and felt into that rose enough times that I'm like, oh, is the rose closed or open?
What color is this rose?
Does it have a stem with thorns or has it been cut?
Is it floating on water or is it floating inside of my body?
Like, it's another symbol.
Everything has a meaning and I can feel into that meaning.
And so when I opened up even more spiritually, I was just like, oh my gosh, okay.
So what I've been doing my whole life with dreams and having such a vivid dream experience where I can read into all of these symbols and I'm seeing and feeling in my dreams, now it's a catalog of symbols and a language that has all of these things that already mean things to me.
And it can be very subtle, but I'd already been doing this.
I'd already been existing with and learning these energies and these symbols for years before, but it was in a more unconscious way.
It was just through the dream and it would help me understand myself.
I didn't recognize that I was actually learning something and becoming more familiar.
And then I would use this to understand the world on a more conscious way or on purpose, I guess, and through dreams.
I've also experienced other worlds.
And when you think about movies like Lord of the Rings or Avatar, or anything that's like fantasy or sci-fi, think about all the other worlds that the writers of these scripts or these books or these movies, even like Harry Potter, all of these worlds are so beyond.
They come from this space of imagination.
They didn't exist before, and then they're created.
When you're in a dream, you can experience all these other worlds that you've never seen before.
And in dreams, that's where I've gone.
I've gone to all sorts of places.
I'm like, what is this?
I have never felt anything like this in my waking life, or seen anything like this before.
I have seen new colors.
And what's so crazy is that I can't describe the colors to you because there are no words because they don't exist into my human eye.
So it's just so trippy.
And even physical sensations, like I felt things in my body or things that have happened that I'm like, okay, like I don't again know how to describe this because I haven't felt it when I'm awake.
But there's so much going on.
And I would also say that there's this deep connection to life.
And this is where things start to just, oh, they just start to go off the rails when I start to feel into this because there's this merging of these two realities where it's like I'm having dreams that then in my waking life, I'm doing something like washing the dishes.
And I turn around and look out the window in a specific way.
And all of a sudden, I'm having one of those insane deja vus.
And I'm like, wait, uh, uh, like I have done this before.
I've been here before.
But was it from a dream?
And I was imagining my future?
Or did I just see this moment and live it already?
And I'm now in the past?
Like, what am I experiencing?
What's real?
What's not real?
And these Deja Vu's, I have them all the time and they all feel connected.
So it's like, I'm not having a new one necessarily.
I can trace back Deja Vu's that go back to when I was like seven years old and had a specific dream.
And then I've had that same Deja Vu build on itself, you know, over the past, like, 30 years.
Like, it's this web of information and experience that in that moment, when I'm folding the laundry and I like, look at a certain t-shirt that has a picture on it, I'm having, whoa, that's connected to 24 different dreams, where I went to six different worlds and I had this same feeling.
And it just kind of blows your mind.
It's like a space where I lose track of time and space.
And I don't know what is a dream and what isn't a dream and what's my reality, because it's all connected.
I do think it was helpful to learn that habit of tracking my dreams and looking up the meaning and doing all of that work.
You know, when I go back to thinking about that research study and how it kind of opened me up to really paying attention.
But I will say, when I think back to that time, it feels very clinical.
It feels almost divorced from the experience of daily life.
And it's almost like separating two things.
It's like separating the dreams.
Like, okay, when we wake up, we write down the dream.
And then we look up the dream in the book, where other people have told you what these things mean.
I don't know how to describe it, but it feels separate.
It's like the separation where these are what dreams are.
This is what life is.
And it's like when we separate our body from our emotions or our minds from our hearts, I just feel like everything is actually so much more nuanced and connected.
Then that and everything is working together.
And I think there's just a bigger picture at play.
So even when I talk about working with dreams, I don't just mean like decoding them when I wake up, but it's more, I feel like over time having this attunement to just the mystery of life.
And that's what dreams are.
It's like, what even are these worlds, like experiencing things that we don't see during the day?
Why do we think that what we're dreaming about isn't possible?
Or isn't real?
Like, why is that left to be, I don't know, stuck in a journal somewhere and just examined at certain times?
Why can't it just open us up to the possibility of all sorts of things that we don't know?
And I don't know what could be possible.
The more receptive I've been in my daily life to just other ways of thinking about seeing my own reality, because it's a dance, it's all connected.
Like, we are these multi-dimensional beings and our experience here and our daily lives can be just as magical as we allow it to be.
But if we're not open to things not being what we've been shown or what we've been told by, I don't know, the environments we grew up in or the mainstream media that we consume or whatever is deemed appropriate or what is real and what is not real and what matches up with what I learned in school or in these courses that I took or in the textbooks that I read or whatever our schooling was or what our families told us was the right way or was real or not real.
If I'm not open to things not being what I was told, then likely my reality will only exist within those bounds, because I'm not open to dreams meaning more.
Now, I don't know if everyone has crazy dreams.
I don't even know what deems a dream crazy.
I just, I know that it's meant to be the way it's meant to be.
And obviously for me, dreams play a big part in my reality, and they might not for someone else, and not everyone is probably meant to work with their dreams in a crazy way.
I just think it's, again, being open to what there is there.
And to me, that's a bigger conversation.
And I just find a lot of what's talked about in, I don't know, very mainstream arenas, is always about proving if something is legitimate or not, or debunking if someone's thoughts or beliefs are real, or if they're valid.
And it just, it feels like a lot of what our society has spent its energy on is just having other sources discern for us what is or isn't real.
And not just real, but is it acceptable?
And is it okay to be into that?
And do we even allow that?
I just don't think the question is actually about whether our life here is magical or not.
That just feels so black or white to me.
Like, this is what dreams are.
This is scientifically what they mean and how they work in our brain.
And that's interesting and important information to have, but that's not the whole picture.
I truly don't believe that because guess what?
Again, whatever limit we put on our belief is going to be what our reality is.
So even the fact that I had actually been living in a dream state, learning all of these different ways of understanding life and my world and myself.
Like, I'd been existing in this way of seeing and feeling and understanding in like a subtle kind of unseen way for so long.
But I didn't really know that.
I didn't understand that it had any value because that concept of what dreams are and what their value was had already been decided for me.
So dreams were this way, they exist at this time, and they don't actually have anything to do with our daily reality.
So if we believe our dreams aren't real or that they don't have any importance, then yeah, most likely they won't be.
And if we tell ourselves that other places in the world are scary and that we don't want to travel because it's unknown and foreign, and I don't know how I'm going to feel or what I'm going to do, then guess what?
We won't travel to those places, and we won't have those new experiences, and those new experiences won't be able to change us.
Just as our dreams, if we listen and we're open to them, they are able to change us.
But only if we allow them, only if we're open to that, and if we believe that that's possible, or if we let it into our lives.
And I find that, yeah, like my daily reality, a lot of times, again, being woken up, you know, with literal screaming, like back and forth, it can be loud and abrasive, and it can jolt me out of that feeling of possibility.
And it almost shuts down that moment where I still held on to the dream.
Do you know what I mean?
And it just disappears.
And as that dream disappears, sometimes it also closes down that bigger perspective of being open and allowing my day to be something that now it's not going to be, because everything can just feel so dense and heavy.
And I'm like, oh, I'm tired and, oh, screaming.
And, okay, now I have to go get dressed, and we have to make breakfast.
And it's like I can't see beyond my frustration once I'm in that reality.
And I can't connect with that feeling of that possibility that if I could just hold on to the dream a little longer and ease my way into my day shift from my night shift, almost the back end, like pull it out longer, I can hold the possibility of both.
And I can work with what I learned in my dream during the day.
And then during my day, it moves in a different way.
It's more in flow and then it eases back into the nighttime.
And then that it's like they sync up and they just work in a different way.
But that is not easy to do.
I have to be very conscious or I have to create space for that because yeah, my daily reality is not going to do that for me.
And no one around me is going to do that for me.
And anything I connect with, most kind of content I'm going to come in contact with isn't going to validate that my dreams are real, or that there's the possibility of so much more, or that I should listen and be a little bit quieter and a little bit more open to hearing what the trees are saying and what people's energy is speaking, and what the earth beneath my feet is telling me.
All of that is real, and I felt that.
But it's easy to shut down because we're not really allowed to hold that space or told to hold that space, or this could be a whole other episode.
I could talk about this forever, just how our daily lives are structured right now within this space and time, this reality and what that really prevents us from accessing, which is essentially ourselves and just magic, right?
Just other possibility.
So these two worlds, these two worlds of waking and dreaming, to me, really work in tandem.
And what I experience in my daily life influences what shows up in my dreams.
And then what I take action on based on my dreams then actually shifts my reality.
So, it's all connected.
I'm just saying, and for me, it is all very real.
That's really what I want to say about dreams.
And if Samuel L.
Jackson ever shares the secret to all of eternity with me, I will very much share that with you.
I promise.
So I think that's all I have to say about dreams today.
And, you know, maybe I'll put the link to my Pisces playlist in the show notes, just in case, because that's kind of...
When I listen to that, it puts me into that dream space, or it just gives you an idea of, I don't know, like, experiencing, like, kind of other worlds or just being open to that kind of magic and possibility.
Like, it's dreamy.
And I will probably also post some horribly cringe photos of my travels and possibly that beautiful brown denim or corduroy vest that I mentioned.
So I'll put that in the show notes on my website.
Thank you for listening.
I've had probably about 10 interruptions.
I've wiped a few butts.
I have put people back to bed.
Yeah.
So thank you for being here, and I hope I can connect again soon.
Okay.
Bye.
