In the past weeks, some of my dreams have brought on magical synchronicity cascades, and as we head into this week’s Equinox, it feels meaningful to share one particular saga.
It is said that the Equinoxes, which usher in Spring and Autumn, are a time where energies come into a perfect balance. A brief moment in the Wheel of the Year in which daylight hours perfectly equal the dark hours in a 24-hour period.
This, right before Light (the energies of growth, expansion, manifestation and rebirth) or Darkness (letting go, “composting”, turning inward, dreaming and the death that brings life at the next cycle) start to gain in strength and presence in our lives for that coming half of the year. This is an important cycle, and helpful for us to align with it so as to use our energies in harmony with what the greater web of life is doing around us — in this way we prevent burn out, nourish our bodies with the energies and approaches of the season and make things happen with the support of Earth’s energies, rather than against the grain.
But at the turning of the season right now, I’m being called to spotlight something that perhaps doesn’t come to mind when we think of “balance”, which is more about how potential-filled the blurry, melding time in between seasons is. I’m called to invoke the liminal, to bring forth that which is fluid, not here and not quite there yet.
While the story I’m about to share is not about the liminal, it is steeped in —dripping with— liminality. You’ll see what I mean in just a moment.
The underlying themes are quite present in my personal work to be sure, but I’m also witnessing them being very present for many right now. I hope you’ll find a kernel here that resonates with you too! Join me on this rambling adventure, with various appearances from the gods of media — through movies, music and the internet — and hang on to your seats while I mix metaphors galore.
A Dream About A Cat
In my dream, I was time-traveling to retrieve my beloved cat – from a time in the past when she was still a kitten.
After some adventures to finally find her, it started raining in the dream. Startled, I felt the rain burn my skin. Someone informed me that acid rain was a “thing” to watch out for at that place/time. We quickly found shelter, but the rain seemed like an annoyance I hadn’t calculated for, and one that for the locals of that time was a serious concern.
Shortly after waking up, I saw this post from astrologer Rob Brezny
(please read it with a sense of humor and a non-literal mind! 😉 )
SING IN THE ACID RAIN. I spotted that line before the rest, like a neon sign beckoning.
Then I took in the whole message, with its invitation to a particular kind of trickster wisdom and creative madness, and I felt something was up. I wasn’t sure what yet: sometimes precognitive dreams show you a snippet of something you will see shortly after the dream, and I have quite a few of those, so I couldn’t tell at this point if my dream was precognition of seeing Rob Brezny’s post early that morning, or if it was a synchronicity-nudge, something for me to be paying closer attention to.
Soon enough, various singing dreams and allusions began to show up, underscoring: yes, pay attention to all of this.
Two of my dreams shortly after this time-travel, cat-rescue, acid-rain dream revolved around an acquaintance from my teenage years who was known primarily for her love of singing and performing on stage.
In one of these subsequent dreams, I had a reunion with a friend I haven’t seen in many years in waking life. She belonged to that same social group as my singing acquaintance, and she lent me a necklace to wear. The necklace’s centerpiece was a beautiful, speckled blue stone– like turquoise but it wasn’t turquoise. It was much more saturated, with more variation in color.
Meanwhile, in waking life, I was shopping online for a particular stone I wanted to get for Merlin for his birthday. In the process, I stumbled across the very stone I had dreamed of, which I didn’t know from before: Shattuckite.
Shattuckite turned out to be particularly meaningful for me. It’s considered to be a stone that supports clairvoyants in having increased clarity in the images we perceive, as well as aiding in channeling truthful, accurate psychic messages. Perfect support for my psychic work!
Among its energetic properties, like many blue-colored stones, it evokes a connection with one of the main energetic vortices of our energy field, found at the base of the throat.
The best way I know of to think about these vortices or “centers” in our energy bodies is by imagining them as transducers. They transform or translate one type of vibration into another: from the energies, vibrations and information found in our energy ecosystem all around and within us, into material form, and back again. The vortex in our throat area is especially attuned to everything to do with communication— listening with the heart and speaking truthfully, clearly and compassionately. It also represents some of the ways we express and manifest our creative visions. “Singing” our part in the song of life, if you will!
The singing connection kept getting reaffirmed.
Next, we visited Merlin’s family for his birthday. At the table, his grandmother mentioned she’d watched the movie Coyote Ugly the night before. My ears immediately perked up. For the friend I’d just dreamed about, this movie had been a total obsession, and I’d watched it for the first time with her. If you don’t know the movie, the protagonist is a young singer-songwriter with a serious case of stage fright, whose biggest challenge is to sing in public to get her music out into the world. The thing I didn’t know was that the movie was based on a 1997 GQ memoir/article by author Elizabeth Gilbert. The very same author who wrote Big Magic, a book on creativity as a partnership with the unseen realm of ideas longing to be brought into manifestation through us. In the book, she writes:
“I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.”
Time Travel: A Do-Over
With all of these new themes: singing, creative partnership with sentient ideas, new connections were emerging in my mind. I wondered if there might have been more to my dream about retrieving my cat via time-travel, which seemed to have set all of these wacky connections in motion like falling dominoes.
Each of us have our own dream vocabulary: a repertoire of images and concepts our subconscious mind tends to use to convey symbolic, multi-layered meaning. In mine, cats often represent creative energy, creative projects, as well as the creative life force expressed as Eros and sensuality. As I journaled, reflecting on what the overall message might be, I had an even more far-out thought.
What if the dream I had were of an actual, future self coming to me, in her past, to “rescue” me from a decision I was about to make – or to steer a creative project from wherever I was about to take it, into a different, more beneficial direction?
Perhaps, even, a much more authentic one, one that’s more aligned with my “true song”?
No sooner did I have the thought, than my attention snapped to the song I had playing in the background. This wasn’t a song I was familiar with, but these were the words pouring out of my speakers, right at that moment:
“If I was Marty McFly
I would go back to when we were nine, or ten
And I’d be your best friend”
The song, I learned, is “Who Knew” by You Won’t. (In case you’re unfamiliar with the reference, Marty McFly is the protagonist of the movie Back to the Future, which is, you guessed it, a time travel movie).
Aha, I thought. I must be onto something.
Did this mean that a literal future self was trying to send me a message? I don’t know. But let’s entertain the thought for a moment.
Author Robert Moss, for instance, reports on his books and blog about his dreaming journeys, which often involve meeting other “selves” within the multiverse. These alter-egos are people he might have become had he chosen a different path, responded differently at a key turning point; sometimes even selves who are wiser and act as spirit guides. This lens helps us to know our-selves as a great family whose members are able to support each other’s path through time, instead of seeing the self as an isolated point on the map of consciousness.
Whether a literal or metaphorical visit from a future self, I recognized the invitation from the dream and the synchronicities in its wake. “Something” is being invited into fuller, more authentic, more heartfelt expression — with the help of a radical do-over— and perhaps with a healthy dose of liberation from the constraints of certain forms of internalized oppression, which most of us have known only as the rules of “common sense”, “normalcy” and “sanity”.
Wherever I look, it seems we’re finding ourselves at a decision point, as we hit the realization that our collective normal is crumbling beyond repair:
Do we choose to trust the (scary) unknown of giving voice and shape, weight and purpose to the spark within — attending to the vulnerable pull to bring something of beauty, service, creativity, realness, hunger and wildness, into the light of day?
Singing the Seeds
Singing is an incredible metaphor for this process (although it’s incredible how many people I’m hearing from who are taking up actual singing! ).
Our voice is such an intimate part of who we are. Even though we can train and control our voice, there’s an intrinsic, powerful autonomic neurological “circuit” connecting our face, throat, heart and lungs — aptly named the Social Engagement System— that makes it so that we can never fully divorce our voice from how we’re feeling. It is a visceral, revealing body-mirror of our authenticity.
Much of the conversation on authenticity and the voice legitimately revolves around other themes, such as boundaries— learning to assert ourselves and our needs, in a world that’s taught that only those in power get a voice.
We talk about “truth-telling” as a shorthand for those moments when we want permission to say “here’s what I really think whether you like it or not”. We embrace confrontation as an antidote to people-pleasing, and (re)learning to say No to that which would harm us, or distract us from what we truly value. Some of us even fly the flag of authenticity to validate that so-called brutal honesty that destroys the ground of relational connection: authenticity as a weapon.
But singing! That’s a whole other story. Singing is an act of affirmation of our inherent aliveness-in-connection. Our voice itself is an inimitable signature of vibrations, unique to each of us. Yet vocalization is one of the powerful ways each of our bodies synchronize with others: our voices communicate, entrain, soothe, alert, coordinate, navigate and bring all manner of emotions and realities into existence, through resonance and vibration, into the body, heart and mind of the other. Using it to create music and resonance is a different act of authenticity, one that says Yes to the life-force channeled from within the heart, poured outward into the world.
If we zoom out even more, “singing” as a metaphor extends to us giving expression to those other tender seeds within the core of our being, our capital-D Dreams.
Like Elizabeth Gilbert’s sentient, co-creative ideas, they are asking to be brought out into the light of day, to touch the world and become part of its abundant beauty.
The Dance of Predictability and Boldness
The thing with these inner seeds is that most of us have had the experience of needing to tune out their call. External life demands are a typical (and often very real) reason. But deeper down, there’s pain: from absorbing the belief that whatever we wanted to create was pointless, would never make us any money, or even being told outright that we’re no good at it or that the thing we want to bring forth is intrinsically worthless, unnecessary, or that favorite of naysayers: “unrealistic”.
I’m not even singling out creativity in the artistic sense here. Have you ever wanted a really deep, emotionally connected, sexy, really-real, adventurous and yet rock-solid romantic partnership? Have you been disappointed in that arena? Isn’t that also a kind of inner seed we carry, something to learn to craft into existence, but where the world’s cynicism might end up steeping into our bones, where we give up trying?
What about a small business, or a grass-roots endeavor to improve living and working conditions in our community? And yes, even, what about art-making? What about literal singing, dancing? Are you currently a person who sings?
I hope the answer is yes, but if it isn’t, that’s not a cause for despair.
To bring those hidden heart-instructions forth, many of us are needing to fight the inertia of some ancient anti-life agreements: a soul’s equivalent of acid rain. And this is where I feel time travel — the undoing or do-over hinted at in my dream— comes in.
Some (parts) of us have learned too well to play by the rules of deferring and sacrificing to keep all systems running as usual.
You probably know exactly what I mean: those little and big turning points where you suddenly feel the longing get louder. You feel yourself at the crossroads; you could choose to try something new. It may be even a small thing: you decide to make some time to write (more), to meditate (more), to take that one class you’ve been wanting to take for ages.
You may even be a pro at this already: you’ve mastered your creative process and you know the ropes. You have a system to get the process moving. Even then you eventually reach the edge of what you’ve mastered, and beyond that edge lies something absolutely new, unprecedented, vulnerable, dark. Dark as in: you’re in the dark, you don’t know what to expect, and one centimeter beyond the light of your known universe, there could be just about anything. Any outcome is possible and you have no system to make something predictable happen. We all hit that spot, newbies and pros alike, and it can be an absolutely excruciating place to hang out in for extended periods of time.
Our brains thrive on predictability, and while chaos can be exciting, and provides opportunities for growth and innovation, it has to exist in proportion to an amount of organization that allows us to process the chaotic input and make sense of it.
Think of the difference between an exciting action movie and being thrown into the midst of an actual battlefield: the former provides an amount of chaos our bodies might read as “fun” or “thrilling”. Unless you have military training, the latter far exceeds that threshold, and would more likely put your system in a state of disorganization, panic or fragmentation.
Similarly, in practical, daily-life terms, we need the safe base of a life that provides us with met needs and expectations often enough to sustain creativity in the long term. That might mean paid bills, solid, supportive relationships, or a regular sleep routine. So, maybe, at that edge of the unknown, we turn right back around: we might not have the resources to metabolize the tension, the dissonance, the chaos, the risk. So we return to the illuminated area of the known, and for good reason.
But perhaps you’ve done — I know I definitely have —that very same about-face one too many times. There are so many good reasons to make safe bets, but our times right now are calling for uncharted paths, for defiance of the internalized normal.
Our communal thriving will depend on our insistence on those new, spirited heart-centered ways as the old ways fall apart. The Universe, and all our allies on the other side of the Veil are gazing approvingly upon bold, creative bets on our future, less so on sacrificing our heart-seeds on the altar of predictable outcomes. Because as the world changes, the outcomes cease to be predictable by the old rules that got us where we are.
Could a time-traveling, wiser self have our backs, and help us face the edge again when we’re just on the verge of a breakthrough?
I imagine what this future self might say…
“Dear one, I know how this turns out. I know why you’re turning back. I understand why you want to make a safe bet right now, why you want a tried and true strategy, an outcome you can control. I promise you, I get it. But I’ve come all this way for a reason: it’s time to follow your heart this time around.
Here at the edge of all you’ve known, you’re on the frontlines, doing your part to help undo some stinky-ancient agreements that we’re all working on revoking, deals that aren’t quite working for the human soul any longer, that hold up a mirror of life as a place of sacrifice, of a constant, impossible battle of either/or, of “there’s not enough space here for all of us”. But right now, we need all of us to thrive, and all of our seeds planted in the soil of the world, out in the open air, exposed to sun, weather, crisis, love, change.
And what is a seed? Biology tells us seeds carry reproductive DNA: folded proteins encoded with information, instructions for a plant to reproduce and continue the life of its species.
Our soul-seeds work the same way: they carry life-sustaining instructions that support the continuation of the human song on this green-blue planet.
Come with me. Let’s take that one-centimeter step into the dark.
And the next.
And the next.
We’ll sing while we walk.”
