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Violent Dreams and Magic

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I’ve talked about dreamwalking, but I’ve rarely discuss the price I pay for being able to bilocate while I sleep. On the nights when I do bilocate, I end up waking up exhausted – after all, I haven’t really been sleeping.

On some of the nights that I don’t dreamwalk, however, I have violent dreams. To the point that I struggle hard to fall asleep and struggle from insomnia because falling asleep for me has negative connotations. Unless I sleep in daylight hours, I am guaranteed to have violent dreams or nightmares.

So yeah, there’s a part of me that’s afraid of my dreams. Not the dreamwalking – while that can certainly get violent, that is generally within my control. I’m talking about the type of nightmares that leave you shaken for days afterwards because they seem so damn real why they are happening.

I had one that woke me up this morning, which is why I’m sitting here writing before 7 am and feeling a little cranky (as I went to bed at 1 am). At least I got six hours of sleep, I guess.

Anyway, in my dream/nightmare or whatever you want to call it, I had a friend over at my house. In particular, I had my friend over who is in a wheelchair, so this dream was very inaccurate. I don’t usually have people over (I live over 15 miles from town, so it’s easier for me to go to other people) and my house isn’t wheelchair accessible at all. Yet somehow she was over and while she was there, she arranged a date with a guy.

She gave directions to the house, and the guy came and picked her up and everything seemed normal, but when she left, I had this pit feeling in my stomach, and I locked two locks on the front door (there’s only one on my actual door). When I lay down to sleep (yay, dream within dreams. I fucking hate them), I was woken up by a phone call from her cell, and I picked up and assumed I was talking to her because I was still asleep. Then I realized I was actually talking to a nurse at a hospital, and I found out that my friend had been badly beaten.

I got up and got dressed to go to the hospital, but something didn’t sit right with me, so I grabbed my escrima sticks and cautiously approached the front door. Outside the glass panel on my door, I could see a brown rustic panwagon, which I knew was the truck the guy drove. And through my curtain, I could see his silhouette and the outline of a weapon – I knew he was there to attack me.

If I were someone else, this would probably be the part of the dream where I did something smart, like…I dunno, call the cops. But being who I am, I nudged the door open and got ready to attack him to see who would come out on top. He didn’t swing when he realized I had a weapon, and he actually had two baseball bats in hand. When he saw me, he laughed, and then offered me one of the bats. I don’t think he was really prepared for what happened next because I wasn’t either.

When I have dreams within dreams, they feel terrifyingly real, so my instinct upon seeing him was to call upon Odin. Since I’ve never been in any situations like that before, it was weird because I was able to call the berserker rage into me. Yeah, in my sleep. That’s actually what allowed me to wake up because I could feel my blood boiling. Needless to say, I kicked the guy’s ass before I woke up, but experiencing that kind of intensity in my sleep was a little weird.

Even though the dream was violent near the end, I also learned that I am capable of calling the rage. I’ve never needed to call upon it at all in my waking life, and I wasn’t sure I had the talent for it. Even though Odin came to me and chose me, I guess there was a part of me that still doubted whether He actually wanted me because, despite appearances, I do struggle with self-doubt and self-esteem. I think, to some degree, we all do. Being able to access that rage put an end to those doubts, however. And it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt in my life.

I’ve read some information about berserkers and how that rage affects people today, and there’s always a lack of control indicated by it. Perhaps it’s because I’m used to invoking certain entities (and yes, I do mean invoking, as in horsing/housing) that I didn’t experience a lack of control. Instead, what I experienced was a form of pure rage that coursed through my blood and made my blood feel like it was liquid lava. I never lost control of myself, but I can see that it would be easy to lose control of that type of power if you lost sight, for one second, of the reason for invoking the rage.

The truth is, my talent in the world of magic is so strong that it scares me, and I use it despite that. I know that I can access worlds most people can’t see, and I know that there are people out there who wish they could do what I  can. And even though my strength sometimes scares me because I’ve read over and over again that people can’t have the types of skills I do without having been properly taught, it’s like those rules don’t apply to me. I can’t find a proper teacher because all the people I’ve met who teach any type of magic aren’t strong enough.

And I’m aware that that could sound arrogant – it’s not meant to. It’s more frustration than anything else. I’ve learned more about my magic from the entities that I have contracts with and from the gods than I ever have from other people. In most magic circles, the fact that I can naturally invoke deities without ever having been properly trained to do it would be cause for alarm. It isn’t alarming to me. Annoying and exhausting sometimes, but not alarming.

The truth is, even though people complain about the use of the term, I have all the abilities of the shamans of old. I was born with spirit contracts already in place. I dreamwalk without effort, and I can invoke entities and spirits without having had the training. Perhaps it is blood-based, as I was born into a family where I was trained as an empath. Which isn’t exactly the same as a shaman, since empaths usually don’t deal with other planes of existence.

Yet there are people out there who say that it’s impossible to be born with magic, just a talent for it. I was world walking before I knew what world walking was by the time I was five years old. Mirrors still freak me out to some degree because I know that they can be used to access other planes – I walked through one when I was a child, and that’s how I came to be aware of the spirit contracts I carried over from a past life into this one.

And I would love to find a proper teacher, but so far, all I’ve managed to find are people who don’t think being born with magic is actually possible and people who aren’t nearly as strong as they think they are. I’m frustrated and scared because I need someone to teach me – instead of settling down as I get older, it’s like my powers keep getting stronger. And I don’t know how long I will be able to handle them on my own.

In general, people in the pagan community say that magic is supposed to take time to work. That sometimes you need to do repeated rituals in order to see progress. I wouldn’t know because I don’t need rituals. As an example, when you cleanse a gemstone of negative energy after using it to store the negative energy around it, most people will do some sort of cleansing ritual that lasts overnight in order to cleanse the stone.

I had a friend whose protective amulet was near to breaking because she hadn’t cleansed it in almost two months. I asked her to let me cleanse it for her, as it doesn’t take me more than a few seconds to do a cleansing. When I gave it back to her, she was surprised because the gemstone had dulled from the bright orange that it was (the sign it was near breaking). I didn’t actually notice that the color had changed and was afraid that the cleansing hadn’t held when she pointed out the change.  That’s what I mean by strength. The only things I was ever taught growing up were the simplest things an empath needs to know – how to center, how to ground, how to shield, and how to cleanse. Those four methods make up the cornerstone of my this-world magic, and I’ve honed all of those techniques, especially shielding. I have to do protective magic every night to keep certain entities out because I attract things without intention.

But I can’t really properly talk about my experiences with others, not even those in the pagan community. There are too many people out there who insist that there are no harmful entities lurking in the shadows to understand what it means to live a life knowing that they are always there. I envy those who can’t sense it, but I’m always aware of that weight. Especially because I have spirit contracts with very different entities, two of which would be considered demons by today’s terms, another that is a demi-goddess, and others that are spirits. From what I understand from the conversations I’ve held with them, I’ve had these contracts for millions of years over countless reincarnations.

I don’t know what those contracts mean for me overall, but I do know that I end up getting pulled into the other worlds to deal with some of the major things that happen there. I’ve had to help disentangle friends who have found themselves caught in a demon’s snare over vast distances. I have yet to find an actual distance limitation on my power, and that is also somewhat terrifying.

And the power isn’t scary because it’s so vast – it’s scary because of how much responsibility it means I have. I’m sure everyone has heard the quote “With great power comes great responsibility” and that is especially true in magic. The things I know, the deeper stuff, I’m not allowed to teach to other people. Even though I would if I could, the universe feels wrong when I consider sharing that…like somehow there are secrets that are too powerful for everyone to know. What I can share, I do so willingly. It’s just weird, seeing how close some people get to the things that I’ve been taught by the Gods and other entities and also seeing how far away they always are from the complete truth of a particular mystery.

I don’t really know what the point of writing this was, except perhaps to acknowledge that I now have another power I need to be careful of using with the berserker rage. I won’t ever turn away from magic because I am a born shaman, and I have things I have to do in this world and others that defy logical comprehension (which honestly frustrates me because I don’t like not being able to explain things with logic). That drive never goes away, and I think my magic is the reason that Odin and the others were drawn to me.

Part of me thinks that everything I write sounds insane, but I know that part of that is the fact I grew up in a culture that idealizes science and logic and tends to reject the things that can’t be explained away using those processes. I sometimes feel like I walk a tightrope between being stable and being insane, and I think that is just another part of the price I pay.

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Difficult Dreams

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I’ve talked before about the fact that I do a lot of dreamwalking. That process isn’t always within my control – sometimes one of the Gods seizes control of my dreams and sends me to weird places. When that happens, I often have trouble interpreting what message it is that the deity in question is trying to get across to me.

The Norse Gods are like raging storms of power, no matter which deity we’re talking about, so having my dreams seized by one of Them always leaves me exhausted and pretty much worthless the next day. I’ve mentioned before that the Norse Gods found me rather than the other way around when I started on this path.

I may not have been 100% clear on how that happened. I’ve mentioned the dream I had that featured the Valknut (thus, Odin taking control of the dream), but I’ve never discussed how violent that dream actually was. In the dream, I was me but a past reincarnation of myself (Odin’s dreams with me almost always deal with my past lives). In the dream, I was a male, a father of three boys, and I was in a Viking-style longboat. My sons were with me. A violent wave crashed over the boat, and one of my kids fell into the water. Even though I couldn’t swim and was terrified of drowning, I immediately jumped into the water and managed somehow to save my son – at the expense of my own life. When I looked up from the water (I didn’t experience the sensation of actual drowning in the dream), there were three longboats above the water somehow (impossibly, but still somehow) positioned in the shape of the Valknut.

The last dream I had where Odin took control was also another dream dealing with a past live – in this one, I was also a man. I was an ancient Sumerian warrior, a leader of one of the armies. In this one, Odin was actually physically present, although I have to say that his outfit was one of the most ridiculous I’ve ever seen. He was on Sleipnir the whole time, but he was wearing a red and white checkered bandanna over his blind eye. In the dream, my army had just captured an enemy city, and we were standing on the top of a fortress wall. I gave orders to kill everyone in the enemy army, and then civilians were brought up and asked a series of questions that determined whether or not they were allowed to live. It was brutal, and I had no mercy in me.

Now, as violent as these dreams are, I can process them and understand them because Odin’s messages are almost always about my past lives. When they aren’t, then the dream consists of both Odin and Loki, and Loki communicates with me without any trouble. There’s no interpretation to be done – He’s very straightforward. So, in those dreams, Loki essentially acts as a translator of sorts. Or I will hear a conversation between Odin and Loki that is in actuality a message intended for me.

When Freyja wants to communicate with me, She does so from deep within my psyche. She directly connects to that, and She uses the empathic language I understand (being a natural born empath) to communicate Her message through feelings. I can then interpret those feelings into words and understand what She needs me to know.

Lately, though, I’ve been having dreams that involve Hela. While I have a great deal of respect for Her, as I do all of Loki’s children, I don’t follow Her path, and I don’t make regular offerings to Her. Despite that, my dreams recently have been plagued with Her presence in subtle ways that I can’t quite seem to grasp. I don’t know if that She’s just too different from me, or what, but it is supremely frustrating to know that She is trying to communicate with me and not being able to comprehend the message She is trying to send.

There are little hints of death in a great deal of my dreams lately, but there are two dreams that stick out to me because they are the ones where I felt Her most clearly. In the first, I witnessed the head of a female woman with black hair and ivory pale skin roll down a pile of bones – the head wasn’t attached to a body. That’s all that dream was.

In the second dream, I was standing in the middle of a city covered in an ashen winter – it was cold, but the snow on the ground was volcanic ash. Hela stood in front of me. The reason I knew it was Her was because I could only make out half of Her body – the other half distorted every time I tried to bring it into focus. And I couldn’t help trying to bring it into focus – the dead half of Hela seems to both attract and repel at the same time, and I found that rather intriguing. Anyway, before She could talk to me and tell me what it is that she needed from me, grotesque grey creatures with very slinky limbs (able to contort in disturbing ways) with greedy eyes and mouths full of terrifyingly sharp fangs started to swarm up from the sides of the street, and the connection was lost.

I’ve never felt so frustrated about being unable to communicate properly with a deity before – even the deities whose paths I don’t walk, like Thor, sometimes communicate to me in my dreams. Although Thor only does so begrudgingly, to be fair.

If anyone has insight into this, that would be awesome, but I mostly wanted to share this because I feel like it’s important that those people who aren’t Gods-touched know that those of us who are Gods-touched can have difficulty communicating with the Gods. That’s mostly because we’re human, and the Gods are divine beings.

While every human has a spark of the divine in them, lights can be bright and lights can be dim. I’d say that being Gods-touched is being like a bright light, allowing the Gods to find the connection with more ease. The problem, however, is that the Gods aren’t the only non-human entity that divine sparks can draw. That’s why a lot of those who are Gods-touched end up drawing away from any/all spiritual paths – for fear of being driven crazy by hostile entities.

 

Update on the Heathen School 

I was really excited about the adaptiveU platform for hosting a school, but it’s incredibly difficult to work with. I’m good with software (not with hardware, though – don’t ask me to build you a computer) and can generally figure out how a program works within 10 – 20 minutes.

Working with the platform was really frustrating – not because it was hard to navigate. No, the platform is really easy to navigate. The problem is that it doesn’t save anything properly, so there are obviously glitches in the programming that need to be sussed out.

I am still creating a school – I’m just using a different platform – rcampus. It has an incredibly old school internet feel, which I absolutely love. I thought I’d hate it, but I actually find myself enjoying seeing the internet the way it used to look way back in the 90s. A bit of retro with the modern age is pretty cool.

Anyway, this platform works differently because I have to fully create a course before I can publish it. Once I finish writing this course (I’m maybe halfway through it – it’s an introductory course), I’ll share the link and the access code.

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Intro to Dreamwalking

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I had one person ask me about dreamwalking, and I’m sure there are others who are interested, so I’ll share what I do.

First off, dreamwalking occurs after mastering lucid dreaming, and I’ve heard lots of people come up with lots of different methods over the years with little to no success. I go with what I was taught because it’s never failed to work, but it’s not an easy process. There’s no immediate “Wow, I had a lucid dream I controlled!” Nothing in life is that simple. It takes time, it takes effort, and it will be exhausting.

Just like any muscle built up through exercise, dreamwalking builds up mental muscle. And like exercise, you don’t start with the finished product. A lot of people think psychic skills / mental abilities should come to them easily – sorry, life isn’t that kind. Sure, there are people with a higher potential skill level than others, just as there are people with higher natural athleticism than others. But if that athleticism isn’t trained into something, it never becomes more than potential.

That being said, lucid dreaming must be mastered before dreamwalking occurs. And to master lucid dreaming, you first have to become aware that you *are* dreaming. If you never manage to wake up in a dream and think, “Oh, this is a dream,” you will never learn to control it, and thus never learn to dreamwalk.

The first step then, is to master the awareness of the dream, and the trick that I used when I first learned the skill is a very simple one. The only thing required is a place to lay down. This is a trick my mother taught me when I was very young, and I have taught others this same trick one-on-one. To my knowledge, it works for everyone.

First, pick a number higher than five but less than ten. Then, before you get ready to sleep, tap the back of your head that many times on your pillow and tell yourself, out loud, that you will know you are dreaming when you begin to dream. The vocal affirmation is necessary only until you get used to waking up in a dream.

When I first taught this trick, I was unaware of the level of exhaustion it would cause. The first person I taught told me that he slept nearly ten hours after he did this trick, and he woke up feeling like he hadn’t slept at all. This is normal, so if you don’t want to sleep more than an hour or two when you start, I suggest setting an alarm.

This trick only allows you to realize that you are dreaming. Control, the pinnacle of lucid dreaming, comes later. First, you must master the ability to handle your dreams as they come to you, no matter how disturbing or bizarre they may be. When you get to the stage that lucid dreaming is possible, you learn how to wake yourself up out of the disturbing dreams. That’s the first step to controlling the dreamscape itself, but it’s a lesson you must learn on your own.

If and when you start using this trick, begin keeping a dream journal. The best way to do this is to keep the journal by your resting place with a pen beside it, as the dream realm and physical realm are connected by the thinnest of margins. If you place your feet on the floor before you have written down the dreams you’ve had, you will forget most, if not all, of the dream. We naturally ground ourselves when the soles of our feet contact the ground, so if you intend to remember everything, write it down before grounding yourself.

Also, as one final note, remember that we have multiple dreams when we sleep. I have gotten to the point that I have five to six dreams that I remember each night, but it didn’t start off that way. If I am remembering correctly, when I began dreaming purposefully, it took me awhile to realize that the “dream” I woke up in was actually a chain of dreams running together. It’s that realization, along with the ability to wake myself up, that allowed me to learn how to control my dreams and begin to dreamwalk.

So to recap the steps to dreamwalking

1) Master the awareness of dreaming (using the trick mentioned)

2) Learn to wake yourself up out of bad dreams

3) Learn to distinguish between dreams and identify the chain of dreams

4) Lucid dreaming allows dreamwalking

Remember, dreamwalking isn’t an easy thing to do – it takes time, it takes effort, and it takes dedication. If you truly intend to learn to dreamwalk, it’s not something that can be done in the space of a week or two. Nothing worth doing in life is that simple.

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My Thoughts on UPGs

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UPG stands for Unverifiable Personal Gnosis, and it is essentially a personal interaction with any deity that doesn’t have any basis in the lore. I am going to say right now that I adore UPG because it is how I interact with the Gods. And I have no problem with others who have UPGs because I believe everyone’s path is different, so ridiculing someone else’s beliefs is a little counterproductive.

While I think that UPG can enrich a person’s spiritual practice, I don’t think that UPGs should be used as the foundation of a communal faith. When a faith is shared, then there needs to be shared practices and traditions that are embraced in communal settings because the sharing of those practices is what allows a faith to flourish. In this particular aspect of life, I agree with traditional reconstructionists. Public blots and sumbels should be done in a way that is as close as possible to the way they were originally done. In this one area, I embrace reconstruction.

In almost every other area, I shed it. In my personal practices, I feel no need to stick to the traditional format of the blot because I believe in cultivating personal relationships with the Gods and Goddesses I follow. How I choose to cultivate those relationships is difficult to relate except to say that it is largely done through UPG. And most of that UPG is done through dreams.

I dream a lot. I don’t remember every dream I have, but I have about half a dozen dreams every night that I can remember in glimpses. I also dreamwalk – I hesitate to call it a shamanic practice due to the difficulties talking about shamanism in general can invoke. I’ve read many sites and books that claim shamans no longer exist, that there are just people who try to emulate shamanic practices from other cultures, and that claiming to be a shaman doesn’t make you one. Which isn’t surprising, considering no one seems to agree on what a shaman is supposed to actually be, other than some kind of medicinal herbal healer who walks in the spirit world.

The truth is, though, that what I’ve been doing my entire life echoes everything I’ve ever read in books and websites about shamanism, and I trance as easily as I breathe. I was trained as an empath by my mother, and the more research I do, the more similarities exist between empaths and shamans, so I am okay with either term though I tend to use empath since it is more widely understood and accepted.

So when I say I dreamwalk, I mean I walk through the worlds when I sleep. I don’t necessarily do it by intention – I can fall asleep and “wake up” somewhere else. I know there are people who would love to have the gifts I do, but the gifts do come with a price. I struggle to fall asleep – I have insomnia – and I do not wake feeling rested when I dreamwalk because I am fully conscious while sleeping.

But is through my dreamwalking that I experience UPGs. It was UPG that pulled me into the world of the Nordic Gods to begin with. In that particular dream, I was a man, drowning in an ocean, trying to make sure my children were safe, and the boats above my head were Viking longboats that somehow perfectly formed a triangle. In interpreting that dream (which I do myself because dream interpretations are 100% specific to an individual), I found myself drawn to Odin and heathenry.

I don’t often share the UPGs I’ve had because they are usually incredibly personal, but some of them are random glimpses of the Gods. I had one dream where I was walking up a snow-covered bank watching Odin climb up the hill in front of me. Even though he never turned around, I knew he was aware I was there, and it was a rather somber moment.

Those UPGs don’t mean anything to anyone besides myself, and I would never try to use a UPG in order to convince someone that the way I see certain Gods is the only way to see them. In any case, if anyone has a UPG they are comfortable with sharing, I’d love to hear it. I’m also willing to entertain questions about the dreamwalking, as I have been teaching a couple people how to do it.