Dreams As Spiritual Messages

Have you had one of those dreams from which you wake up thinking, “That was so real. . . I think that meant something important, but what could that be?” Our nightly dreams are one way we receive spiritual messages.

In my interview with Davina, many comments came about dreams. So here is my follow up on this fascinating topic. (Photo by jpstanley)

Five types of dreams

Not all dreams are spiritual messages. Here is a quick overview of the various types of dreams:

1. Some dreams are just the products of our mind. The mind wants to re-process what it experienced. The experience may be real or something you saw in a movie or in a book, and it may be recent or old experience, or combination of them.
2. Some people “work” through their dreams. They have many dreams but the dreams don’t make sense to them. It’s a way their soul is helping other souls in the dream world, and my advice for this kind of dreamers is “Don’t over-analyze your dreams.”
3. Some go to the wrong side of the dream world either by accident or by negative energetic interference. This is really harmful – the person ends up having some kind of sleep problems such as nightmares (the negative side of the dream world is a very ugly place), insomnia (because the mind is so afraid of going there again), or dreamless sleep (because the mind dismisses the horrible dreams immediately at waking up). It is one of the energetic issues I clear in my Akashic Record Reading.
4. Then, there are dreams that are spiritual messages. They would feel special. It may be the soul memory of its past lives, or premonitions, or messages from your spirit guides.
5. Some people (with practice) can program dreams before going to sleep. It’s called lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming also means being aware you are in dreams while in dreams, therefore allowing you to explore the dream world actively.

Can dream dictionaries help your dream interpretation?

So the first step in dream interpretation is to focus on that special dream that you know, beyond reasoning, means something important. You don’t have to “try to remember” this kind of dream as you wake up. You know. (However, it will help you to write down the dream once you are awake. We are all so busy to get distracted, aren’t we?)

Then hold on to that dream and “guess” what it may mean. Hopefully, you’ll have your a-ha moment.

Erin Pavlina makes very important point to rely on your own frame of reference rather than checking with dream dictionaries for your dream interpretation. I totally agree. What does that symbol mean to you? How do you feel about it? What is the overall feel of the dream?

And then again, the dream may not be “symbols”. It may be a more straightforward past life memory or premonition.

Because this is such a personal process, I guess a case study may serve better than generalized explanation. Here is something I experienced several years ago. When I woke up from this dream, I knew it was important so I wrote it down in my journal at 3 am.

Meeting my spirit guide in the dream

In the dream, there was an old man dressed like a Buddhist monk. He was terminally ill, and was being cared for by a younger someone – one of his disciples. There was another young man who heard of his condition and traveling to see him. But the old man was not sad nor scared about his own upcoming death.

“When you seek answers outside of yourself, there is no end in seeking. Silly. Everything is complete within yourself already.” The old man was talking to the person at his bed side. I knew he meant things like books and teachers when he said “outside of yourself”. He looked happy. His body was weakening, but he was in joy to go home.

Like many dreams, there may have been more details but this is about all I remembered. The feelings were very clear: the traveling man’s concern about the old man’s condition and the old man’s positive, almost joyous, feeling about his own death.

At the time, I thought the old man’s message about life and death was so interesting, and so I wrote it down.

When I got to know my spirit guides more closely later, I found that my first guide was an old man who was my spiritual teacher in one of my past life. After awhile this dream popped up in my mind again. I now think that old man in the dream was my teacher and on my spirit guide team.

Learning spiritual lessons in the dreams

Dr. Brian Weiss reports in his classic Many Lives, Many Masters that he received lessons from his Master Spirits in his dreams. It wasn’t just about receiving spiritual messages – he says he could do Q&A sessions with the spirits. Basically, he was channeling in his dreams.

Have you had unusual dreams? What do you think about dream analysis and dream dictionaries?

Further reading:  My friend Anna Conlan just wrote a post about spiritual messages in dreams and “working” in the dreams.

Review: Living The Law Of Attraction

De-mystifying the Law of Attraction

I can hardly believe there are still people in this 21st century who don’t use the Law of Attraction. Is it that scary to have your dreams come true? Does it frighten you to realize you have the power to create? Are you so narrow-minded to accept what you don’t completely understand?

Living the Law of Attraction: Real Stories of People Manifesting Health, Wealth, and Happiness is an anthology of real life stories written by “ordinary” people who dared to embrace this approach to life and got super results. 62 of them. Seeing (results) is believing.

There is this guy who lost his investment business due to the dot com crash and manifested his dream business as spiritual teacher instead. Another guy received equal custody of his child when the male parent’s right was not well established, especially in unmarried relationship. Another raked in deals totaling $20 million in six months, big accomplishment even for a real estate guy.

As an immigrant myself, I felt for the guy who wanted to immigrate to the US. He was first conned by immigration “agency” and lost his life saving. From there, he used visualization and affirmations and in two years, legally moved his family from South Africa to America.

Then there are people who gained better health, like my friend Jenny Mannion, whose story is in this book. I also like stories like manifesting flowers or surprise presents . . . small things that nonetheless make us so happy.

You can learn to utilize the Law of Attraction

Reading these stories is a great way to learn how really you can utilize the Law of Attraction. Some uses vision board. Some pray. Some are so confident in their own power to manifest that they just start looking for what they want.

But in case you want more clearly defined instruction on how to utilize the Law of Attraction, the book suggests the following steps (the notes under each step is my own interpretation):

Step 1: Feel Good
You need to be feeling good if you want to attract good things. When you are in negativity, you are attracting the lack of what you want. So start your day with gratitude. Meditate. Exercise. These are solid ways to raise your mood – your vibration.

People who mistrust the Law of Attraction seem to have trouble right here. They prefer to stay in their cynical, smart-ass little hole and say something like, “Oh, the Law of Attraction, that’s for stupid people. Look, life is tough. Anyone smarter than Pollyanna knows this. And they insist of feeling good and having positive thoughts.”

Well, you don’t have to feel good if you don’t want to create happiness. That is totally your choice, and I respect that. If, however, you want to create some positive outcomes in your life, you do need to figure out how to feel good. And the good news is that this is a learnable skill.

Step 2: Set Forth the Intention
Don’t expect the Universe or your spirit guides to read your mind. Be clear and specific about your intention. And dare to dream big.

Step 3: Take Inspired Action
“You can’t spell attraction without action!”

This is another point of big misunderstanding. On one end of the spectrum, there are people who think their dreams just gets done by the genie with zero involvement of their own. On the other side of the spectrum, there are people who can’t tell the difference between inspired action and any action, and runs around like crazy doing, doing, and doing more.

Both are mistaken. You do need to take action because you are the one with the physical body and therefore can move move things around. The Universe or the spirit guides can bring opportunities but you need to go get it. This, however, doesn’t mean any action brings results. You need to take inspired actions.

How do you know what your inspired actions are? Well, when you are tuned in, you will know – it is inspiring.

Step 4: Release the “How”
How is not your job. The Universe takes care of it. Your job is, again, to take inspired actions.

Step 5: Be a”Yes” to Life
Have faith that it is working. Your life is working even when it may not look so to you. So stay positive.

Step 6: The Intention Manifests

(image by exper)

Why the Law of Attraction works

As you can see, it takes faith to work the Law of Attraction. You need to set your intention regardless of your current situation. You need to take inspired actions – whether you can comprehend its meaning or not. And you need to stay in that positive mode. In short, you need to work from inside out, to live as a conscious being with intention, paying less attention to superficial ebbs and flows of outside world.

And that is the hint of why the Law of Attraction works. As Dr. Brian Weiss pointed out, we are souls incarnated in the physical body. Our souls incarnated with purpose. While each of us have our own unique purpose and lessons, there is also a big purpose that all souls live by, and that is to experience love, joy, and abundance in the substantial way in this physical world.

This is my current understanding: When we were the Source, the pure energy itself, we were love, joy and abundance. There was no lack, nothing that was not love, joy, abundance. This was wonderful, but we also wanted to try out something different. So we created this physical world, in which, by its very nature of being physical, things are distributed unevenly. I don’t just mean the social inequality – even in nature, there are unevenness.

There are mountains, oceans, farmlands, cities. Then there are barren lands. We might plant trees in the areas that have been long neglected, which is an act of love, and thus witness the abundance of this world. This brings joy.

The illusion of individuality in the physical world

While we are incarnated as physical beings, we have the illusion of separate individuals. This may cause us to fight, to exploit others, or to feel jealous, angry, and depressed. So there are opportunities we come back to love, joy and true abundance.

In this physical world, we can learn love, joy and abundance in a way that is not possible as the complete, perfect, pure energy we were. (And in fact, we still are the Source in essence.) To make sure this happens, the Divinity has designed a system. And this system is the Law of Attraction. We think of something we want, we desire and intend, and we attract it. We play out the rags to riches story. Or we can steer to negativity, which will bring negative things and events, letting us know something is wrong.

The question, then, is: Are you using the Law of Attraction to learn love, joy and abundance?

How the Law of Attraction is working for ME

A while ago, I decided to attract publicity. My Akashic Record Reading service is growing and, while more and more orders are certainly nice, I thought publicity would be even nicer at this young stage of my business development.

Last Friday, I found that the article I contributed to Pick The Brain went on to The Huffington Post. Pretty cool. I think this may be the beginning of my great publicity. (Just in case you may not be familiar – The Huffington Post is the world’s largest news blog site.)

Join us in the Intention Game

I will be starting the new Intention Game on my Gratitude Friday series (next edition is due Friday next week). Join us and see what happens!

Update: I’m renaming my Gratitude Friday to Online Gratitude Journal. It is biweekly now, so I think this fits better.

Gratitude For Time For Myself, Online Gratitude Journal #17

Your money or your time

Recently I had a serious confrontation with my inner child. She was upset.

My inner child: You lied.

Me: What!?

My inner child: You lied. You said when your business grows, you’ll have more money, and we’d go out playing.

Me: Um, yes. I really mean so. Why is that a lie?

My inner child: Well, your business is growing, and you are busier than ever before. We don’t have time to play. We don’t even have time to sit down and chat. You’ve been ignoring me.

For the sake of clarity – my business is growing, thanks largely to my friends’ help, and I’m sincerely grateful. And I love and am proud of what I do. My inner child’s complaint has nothing to do with the satisfaction level of my work.

Me: Well . . . it’s taking off, but it’s far from success. We just made it past the break-even line and when we pay the quarterly self-employment tax for the first time in January, we won’t have so much left. Actually not really enough to pay all the bills yet. It’s very important to build a solid foundation of business at this time. And . . .

My inner child: SO WHAT? We have some money now, right? So we don’t really need to worry about becoming homeless. Then we can play, can’t we?

Me: Umm . . .

My inner child: I don’t really care how much money we have. What I want is to do what I want to do when I want to do it.

What do you really want in your life?

I could see her point. I thought money would buy me the time to enjoy life, and maybe when I have plenty of passive incomes, it can work that way, but right now, the more I work, the less time I have. I don’t have time these days to do things just for fun. I hardly have time to care for myself.

I have financial responsibility to provide secure residence and enough foods to myself (I mean, to my inner child) but it’s also true that I’ve gotten myself in a growth dilemma.

So I realize it’s not money that I really desire. I want freedom, I want love, and I want to further my spiritual growth. Money as numbers doesn’t thrill me – it’s so abstract. Money as a means to get what I want is good, but then, it’s easier to desire the very things rather than the money.

How about you? Do you really want more money, or is it something else but you are substituting it with money?

My Law of Attraction Dream Money Project

This Dream Money Project has been a fun way to stretch my wealth consciousness. But I feel I’ve done enough of that. Also, beyond one million dollars, I think it’s more about paying back to the society rather than using it for myself.

I guess I have a bit different attitude about money. Many people seem to dream of big houses and shiny new cars when they use the Law of Attraction. I don’t quite get it. I own a beautiful 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 2 car garage house back in Tennessee (anyone want to rent it?), but when I was living there myself, I was only using half of the house. I felt kind of stupid. And car? I just don’t get what the big deal is about Lamborghini or even BMW. I want a safe reliable car that is reasonably good looking. I currently drive 2006 Civic and quite happy about it. Maybe one day I will get a Prius, but that’s about all I want.

How about things like dresses and jewelry, you may ask. Well, I love looking nice, but my preferred dress code is casual or boho. It can be expensive but not pretentious. I hate pretentious. And I hate boring. To me, certain brand goods just look so boring. I do like jewelry because I love stones and pearls. For me, they are more like arts and crafts to be appreciated than personal show of wealth.

For the Law of Attraction to work, the target of my desire need to be something (or people or events) that get me excited and happy. Money and material stuffs (without personal meanings) don’t do that to me. Things that signify freedom and love do. Like seasonal flowers. Time to enjoy music and arts. Time to read and learn, time to write and share my passion. Time to hit the road to see the ocean when I feel like it. Organic foods, and time to cook. Or the fun to dine out occasionally. I want to try ayurveda spa. And aromatherapy (or just playing with some flower essential oils). And . . .

Okay, I think my inner child is getting happy again.

So my Dream Money Project is put aside for now. From next edition of Gratitude Friday, I plan to start “Intention Game” to practice the Law of Attraction further.

Link Love

Well, even though I’m getting off the Dream Money Project, I know this is a great way to stretch the mind. My friend Mokihana just started it. Have fun with this, Mokihana!

Recently I’ve had the honor to be interviewed by two great bloggers. Davina’s interview focuses on intuition, dreams, and spiritual guidance. It also includes fascinating topics such as déjà vu and out-of-body experience.

Alex at Someday Syndrome interviewed me on a more personal side.

Additionally, I had the opportunity to guest post at Pick The Brain. It’s about how spirituality helps entrepreneurs – very important topic. Please check them out, stumble, digg, whatever love you can share ^_^

Update: Looks like the aforementioned post at Pick The Brain went to be posted at The Huffington Post. Cool.

Today I’m grateful for the coffee and the chocolate biscotti, Amazon.com that make it so easy to get hard-to-find books, Burt’s Bees Almond Milk Hand Cream, and even the rain (it’s been raining daily for two weeks here, but it’s finally clearing up!).

Okay, this is it for this week. I’m going to have a bit of R&R this weekend. Got to keep the inner child happy . . . (Photo by Mr. Greenjeans)

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