I have been studying my life over a long period of time. I have tried to leave no stone unturned in my inner world. Lately I see who I really am does not show up in dreams. The self that shows up in dreams is deeply unconscious. Indeed, it is often so primitive that I do not recognize it. It also shape shifts, becomes other people and otherwise tricks me.
Just last night I dreamed I was living in San Francisco. I wandered into a Chinese temple and ended up getting a treatment from an elderly woman there.
There have also been dreams of the Higher Self guiding me to geographic places that I knew nothing about. The first one was about traveling in the desert to meet a man that taught in a protected classroom. That turned out to be Vernon Howard. In another dream I was shown the constellation Leo outlined in red stars. I called a local planetarium to find out when Leo would be in the ascendancy. I returned to hear Vernon speak again when that happened. At the talk, there was a break and a woman I did not know came up to me and said, “Would you care to stargaze a little?” And I KNEW this was part of the dream, the waking part of it! We stood outside and looked up at the stars in the desert sky. There were millions of them, all gracing me in that moment.
After Vernon Howard died, his group split up. His secretary went with the part that moved to Arizona, a state I had visited only once. Not long after the move, I had a dream in which I was shown dolomite mountains, a black bear and a small zoo and some hummingbirds. My husband Bob and I visited the group. On the way there, we saw a small zoo where a man had rescued wild animals. There was a restaurant across the street from the school named “The Black Bear” and the cabin where the office was for Vernon’s students was named “Hummingbird.”
The last surprise came when Bob and I took his secretary to lunch and we stopped at the Rainbow Bridge. As I read the brochure about it, I was shocked to read that it was the largest dolomite structure in Arizona! So my soul knows geography when my waking self does not.
Last but not least, I had a dream in which I was in Hawaii. Bob and I were driving down a highway there and we spent the night at a small tourist camp. The guide there told me, “You have a teacher and you will meet a teacher in Hawaii. Your colors are blue and gold, the Christ Consciousness.”
On the strength of that dream, we traveled to Maui and by a remarkable set of coincidences, I found the teacher I was to meet there. When I told him how miraculous it was that I found him, he just grinned. “You fell into the collective unconscious,” he said. He told me that I was the Self but in such a light-hearted way that it didn’t have that much import on me. Then Vernon Howard died and Bob and I returned to Maui. But this time I fell ill and did not meet with the teacher again. When I returned home, I wrote and reported to him how sick I had gotten. “It was because you didn’t want to hear me say that the teacher/student relationship isn’t real. There is only the Self.” I am still working on that one.
So there are many states and stages of consciousness and we travel back and forth between them. These glimpses give me great hope, for they come bearing gifts of grace.
Vicki Woodyard
Always, gifts of Grace. Dreams can lead and guide us so well.
This will sound strange and I hesitate to say it, especially publicly, but as I was reading an essay in your book “Bare Being” yesterday morning, the idea that I loved you came to the front, followed by ‘this woman is teaching me about Love’ which is a less personal rendition of the first. At the same time, I realized is was all One Love that was doing the writing, the reading, and the thinking. Such is the reward reaped when someone writes as if no one will ever read it, I guess….