from: An Electrician’s Guide to Our Universe, and a Life, Love, and Death Upon Its Unlimited Bandwidth
(writer’s note: there is both reader’s and writer’s fatigue happening on my blog site, Facebook and Substack, and I am not immune. The book is finished, and this is an important section from it. After I publish the book I may sell a couple of copies, but under the conditions of our present world awareness, who knows for sure?)
Chapter 33: The Nocturnal Nexus: Where Dreams Unify Brain, Soul, and Self
In An Electrician’s Guide To Our Universe, and a Life, Love, and Death Upon Its Unlimited Bandwidth, there are certain themes that refuse to remain politely contained within the borders of conventional explanation. Dreams are one of them. They do not stay in their lane. They trespass across psychology, neurology, spirituality, memory, grief, prophecy, healing, and identity itself. They cross wires between worlds. They illuminate hidden circuitry within the self. And for those of us willing to take them seriously, they become not entertainment for the sleeping brain, but instruction for the waking soul.
For most of modern history, dreams have been forced into an unnecessary argument. On one side stands science, insisting that dreams are products of REM sleep, electrical signaling, memory consolidation, predictive modeling, and emotional processing. On the other side stands mysticism, insisting that dreams are messages from God, the soul, the dead, the future, the collective unconscious, or dimensions of being that waking consciousness can barely imagine. I reject the assumption that one of these views must cancel the other. Dreams are too large for such impoverished thinking.
The brain may well be involved in dreaming in the same way a radio is involved in music. The circuitry matters. The mechanism matters. But the existence of a receiver does not explain away the meaning of the signal. During REM sleep, the amygdala lights up, the visual cortex becomes active, and our sense of linear rational control relaxes. Yes. But that does not reduce the dream to nonsense. It may instead explain how the mind becomes more permeable to dimensions of meaning that waking life habitually suppresses. The sleeping self is not inactive. It is available.
Dreams arrive in symbolic language because the deepest truths often cannot enter consciousness by way of literal speech. They come clothed in image, sensation, emotional intensity, and impossibility. They speak in archetypes and strange juxtapositions because the soul is not obliged to obey the grammar of the ego. A tidal wave may signify terror, cleansing, transformation, or overwhelming love. A dead friend may be memory, visitation, unfinished grief, or all three at once. A road may be choice. A room may be the mind. An electrical panel may be consciousness under repair.
This is why dream work requires humility. The old dream dictionaries, with their rigid formulas, rarely satisfy me. To dream of teeth falling out does not mean one thing for all people, at all times, in all cultures. Meaning is contextual. Emotional tone matters. Personal history matters. The dreamer’s associations matter. A snake is terror to one person, medicine to another, and rebirth to a third. Interpretation begins not with certainty, but with reverence.
A useful approach to dream understanding rests on three foundations.
First, emotional resonance. How did the dream feel? The dream’s emotional field often reveals more than its visible content. Terror, awe, grief, release, wonder, conviction, shame, serenity, and holy dread all carry interpretive value. Sometimes the feeling is the message.
Second, waking life parallels. What in ordinary life echoes the dream’s themes? Where am I being pursued? Where am I hiding? What am I refusing to grieve? What longing is trying to find a voice? Dreams are not detached theater. They are commentary, diagnosis, rehearsal, and intervention.
Third, personal association. What does this symbol mean to me? Not to the internet. Not to folklore in the abstract. To me. To my history. To my body. To my wounds. To my path.
When we adopt this kind of careful and integrated listening, dreams begin to reveal themselves not as nocturnal static, but as one of the most sophisticated inner guidance systems available to us. They assist us in processing trauma. They simulate danger without external cost. They illuminate our shadow. They expose self-deception. They connect us to lost parts of ourselves. At times, they seem to reach beyond the boundaries of self entirely.
I have long considered dreams to be messages from the many facets of my Self. Not just my psychological self, though certainly that is included. Not just memory, though memory lives there. Dreams have also functioned in my life as vehicles of healing, revelations of hidden emotional truth, and at times as encounters with realities that challenge the materialist imagination. I have dreamed of the dead and felt their presence as something more than remembrance. I have dreamed events or symbols that later appeared in waking life with unnerving precision. I have dreamed as if inhabiting the circumstances of others, and awakened with the sense that consciousness is not as private as we pretend.
This is why I no longer ask the simplistic question: “Are dreams real?” Of course they are real. They are experiences. They affect the body in real time. The heart races. Tears flow. Fear grips the nervous system. Peace descends. Conviction takes root. Healing begins. The more relevant question is this: What order of reality do dreams belong to? They may belong to several at once.
Biologically, dreams help regulate, process, encode, and simulate. Psychologically, they dramatize the unfinished business of the self. Spiritually, they may serve as portals, teachings, visitations, warnings, or invitations to transformation. Socially and even metaphysically, they may reveal that the boundaries between persons are more porous than our waking identities allow. The sleeping self may sometimes enter dimensions of relatedness that the waking ego cannot tolerate.
For this reason, dismissing dreams as mere fantasy can become a tragic form of self-abandonment. We lose access to a native intelligence built into human existence. We ignore the one part of the day when the soul, no longer supervised by habit and performance, is free to speak more honestly.
Dreams have often brought to the surface what my waking mind could not or would not face. They have exposed grief before I consciously named it. They have provided instruction during periods of spiritual confusion. They have carried healing through symbols that no therapist could have invented for me. They have also frightened me, unsettled me, and forced me into uncomfortable forms of self-recognition. Such is their mercy. Dreams do not flatter. They reveal.
The modern person is often trained to trust only what can be measured. Yet much of life’s deepest significance arrives first as experience, not proof. Love. Beauty. awe. conscience. grief. meaning. We live by realities that cannot be entirely reduced to instrumentation, and dreams belong in that category. They may be studied scientifically without being spiritually evacuated. In fact, the neuroscience of dreaming may enrich spiritual understanding by showing us the mechanisms through which deeper intelligence moves.
The old split between matter and spirit is wearing thin. Dreams reveal their continuity. The neuron and the symbol are not enemies. Emotion and insight are not enemies. Brain waves and revelation are not enemies. The human being is not a machine occasionally interrupted by fantasy; nor is the human being a floating soul temporarily burdened with biology. We are an indivisible mystery. Dreaming is one of the places where that mystery becomes visible.
So I encourage the reader not merely to admire dreams as abstractions, but to enter into relationship with them. Keep a journal beside the bed. Set an intention before sleep. Upon waking, write whatever remains: an image, a feeling, a phrase, a fragment. Patterns emerge over time. The dream world rewards attention. It begins to trust those who listen.
Approach your dream life neither as a gullible believer nor as a defensive skeptic, but as a sincere investigator of consciousness. Let wonder and discernment work together. Ask what the dream is saying, where it touches your life, what wound it exposes, what truth it confirms, what future it hints toward, what deeper self it invites into the room.
Dreams are not a distraction from reality. They are among reality’s most subtle disclosures. And if we are to live with anything like unlimited bandwidth, we must learn to listen across all frequencies available to us, including the ones that come alive only when the body sleeps and the deeper mind begins to speak.
Chapter 34: Spiritually Significant Dream Categories: Ten Dream Pathways Beyond the Ordinary Mind
If we are to take dreams seriously, we must also take seriously their variety. Not all dreams are of the same order. Some are obvious reflections of daily stress. Some are symbolic processing. Some feel educational. Some feel sacred. Some arrive with a force, luminosity, or precision that separates them from the ordinary residue of the day. Over the years, and through both experience and reflection, I have come to recognize at least ten spiritually significant dream categories. These are not rigid compartments. Dreams often overlap categories. A healing dream may also be a visitation dream. A lucid dream may contain prophecy. A remote-viewing dream may produce radical empathy. Still, these ten forms provide a useful map for the dreamer moving through inner terrain.
- Visitation Dreams
Visitation dreams often come after the death of a loved one, though not always immediately. The deceased may appear healthy, luminous, emotionally clear, and strangely more themselves than they were at the end of life. The communication is often simple but profound: I am all right. Do not fear. Love continues. What distinguishes these dreams from ordinary memory is their quality. They carry an unmistakable sense of encounter. They do not feel manufactured. They arrive complete.
I have had more than one such dream, and they leave behind a peace unlike imagination. They challenge the assumption that death terminates relationship. At the very least, they heal grief by reorganizing the emotional field around the departed. At their deepest, they suggest that consciousness can survive in ways our culture is poorly equipped to discuss.
- Prophetic Dreams
Prophetic dreams are among the most unsettling because they disturb our ordinary understanding of time. These dreams do not necessarily present a fixed future. More often, they reveal probabilities, patterns, convergences, or symbolic previews. The dreaming mind may be processing subtle data beneath conscious awareness, or it may have access to dimensions of temporality that waking logic does not comprehend.
I have had dreams that later seemed to correspond with actual events so closely that coincidence felt too small a word. Yet I remain careful. Prophetic dreams are not fortune-telling toys. The future remains dynamic. Human choice matters. But dreams may cast forward along likely lines of development, offering warning, preparation, or recognition.
- Warning Dreams
Warning dreams occupy a vital place in the dream ecology. At times, they seem to arise from the body itself. At other times, they feel spiritual in origin. Either way, they serve a protective function. They may alert us to emotional danger, moral error, relational instability, or even physical illness. Sometimes they do so symbolically; sometimes with startling directness.
Accounts of health warnings in dreams are too numerous to dismiss casually. The body knows things before the conscious mind admits them. If waking life is full of denial, the dream may bypass that denial with a warning image or phrase. We need not interpret every disturbing dream as prophecy, but neither should we ignore the possibility that the psyche and body are collaborating in self-preservation.
- Healing Dreams
Healing dreams move us from fragmentation toward wholeness. They restore balance. They reconcile opposites. They sometimes involve sacred figures, deceased loved ones, teachers, ancestors, animals, landscapes of light, or ritual processes that feel older than the dreamer’s individual history. These dreams do not merely comfort; they reorganize. One awakens changed.
In my own life, healing dreams have often emerged after intense suffering, grief, or moral exhaustion. They have instructed me, corrected me, and brought me back into alignment with a deeper current of life. A true healing dream may take years to unfold in meaning, yet one knows immediately that something benevolent and powerful has occurred.
- Heavenly Dreams
Heavenly dreams deserve their own category because they are not simply visitation dreams, though they may include visitations. These dreams often involve realms of beauty, music, radiance, pathways, cities, gardens, songs, tunnels, or forms of presence that exceed language. They can feel like contact with a dimension of ultimate peace.
I have had dreams in which what I can only call the music of heaven was present, and the emotional effect of that sound remains beyond ordinary description. Such dreams are not necessarily theological proofs. They are experiential disclosures. They remind us that beauty may be a mode of revelation, and that the soul seems to recognize certain atmospheres as home.
- Mutual Dreams
A mutual dream occurs when two people dream the same or nearly the same content, often in separate locations. These dreams challenge our assumptions about individual consciousness. They suggest that minds may be more entangled than we understand. Sometimes these dreams occur between close friends, lovers, relatives, or spiritually linked people. More rarely, strangers appear to share dream material.
Mutual dreams imply that dreaming may not be a fully private event. If consciousness participates in a field larger than the individual ego, then dreams may be one of the ways that field becomes temporarily visible. The implications are staggering. We do not merely dream alone. At times, humanity may be dreaming through us.
- Projection or Remote Viewing Dreams
These dreams involve seeing, sensing, or inhabiting circumstances beyond the dreamer’s immediate location or ordinary knowledge. They are often dismissed because they do not fit accepted models of perception. Yet their recurrence across cultures and traditions suggests that some form of extended awareness may occur in dream states.
In older occult language, such experiences were sometimes described as telesthesia or traveling clairvoyance. I have had dreams that seemed to place me directly into remote situations later confirmed in waking life. These dreams demand humility. I do not claim mastery over them. I simply cannot deny the pattern. If consciousness is not strictly local, then the dream state may loosen the usual boundaries enough for remote perception to become possible.
- Radical Empathy Dreams
These are among the most philosophically provocative dreams I know. In a radical empathy dream, one seems to live through the actual perspective of another person. The dreamer may feel another’s fear, limitations, grief, bodily condition, or environment from the inside. It is more than imagining. It is participation.
These dreams blur the line between self and other. They ask whether identity is as sealed as we assume. They also hold moral significance. If dreams can train or deepen empathy by allowing us to experience another life from within, then the dream world may be one of the great unrecognized schools of compassion. In an age increasingly fragmented by ideology and digital overstimulation, radical empathy dreams may be among the last remaining sanctuaries of genuine human interconnectedness.
- Personal Growth and the Act of Teaching
Some dreams call the dreamer into greater maturity, responsibility, expression, or leadership. Teaching dreams belong here. In these dreams, one may be instructing others, guiding a group, presenting insight, solving a problem, repairing a structure, or being pushed to find a voice. These dreams often reveal unrealized capacity.
Teaching dreams are not always flattering. Sometimes they expose fear of visibility, resistance to responsibility, or doubt about one’s authority. Yet even then, they are initiatory. They indicate that the soul is preparing the individual for a wider expression of what has been learned. The dream says: do not merely survive your life; articulate it.
- Lucid Dreams: A Mystery We Are Beginning to Understand
Lucid dreams occur when the dreamer becomes aware that they are dreaming while the dream continues. This state is extraordinary because it combines the immersive symbolic environment of dreaming with a degree of waking-style awareness and sometimes volition. Current research has suggested that lucid dreaming involves distinct patterns of brain activity, including beta-wave associations more common in conscious waking thought. In some studies, lucid dreaming appears neurologically different from ordinary REM sleep, suggesting that consciousness can indeed arise from within sleep itself.
What fascinates me most is that lucid dreaming seems to occupy a threshold state: conscious, but not fully bound by waking logic; imaginative, but not merely chaotic. Some researchers have even compared aspects of the lucid dream state to the neurological correlates of psychedelic experience, though lucid dreams may preserve more self-awareness and agency. This matters profoundly. Lucid dreaming may reveal that consciousness is not binary, not merely awake or asleep, but layered, dynamic, and capable of remarkable hybrid states.
These ten categories are not meant to settle the question of dreams, but to expand it. They remind us that dream life is not monolithic. It is as varied as consciousness itself. We move through warning, grief, instruction, beauty, healing, memory, empathy, projection, and revelation, often in a single night.
And perhaps that is the deepest point. Dreaming is not a lesser mode of existence. It is one of the great theaters in which human consciousness explores its own vastness. The dreamer is not merely resting. The dreamer is traveling, learning, grieving, listening, remembering, healing, and at times touching mysteries that daylight consciousness cannot hold for long.
If you have ever awakened shaken by the reality of a dream, or transformed by its beauty, then you already know this. The dream world is not trivial. It is one of the hidden workshops of the soul.
Chapter 35: The Dreams That Entered My Life: Visitation, Prophecy, Remote Seeing, and the Mystery of Shared Consciousness
It is one thing to describe dreams philosophically. It is another thing to live with them as a recurring force in one’s own life. My own dream history has not allowed me the luxury of dismissing dreams as psychological leftovers. Too many have arrived with instruction, consolation, warning, symbolic precision, or correspondence to external events. They have been companions in grief, mirrors in recovery, and, at times, profound disruptions to my assumptions about selfhood and reality.
One of the earliest and most formative dreams of my life came in 1964, when I was eight years old. Before that time, my dream life had often been dominated by nightmare. Sleep was not always a welcome surrender. I would review the day at night, almost instinctively, as if by improving my waking conduct I might reduce the violence of the inner world. Then came the dream of the priest or shaman.
In the dream, this figure stood above his village, in an ancient landscape untouched by technology. He received instruction from “on high” and returned to tell the villagers to throw every idol, every sacred object, every golden figurine into the lake. They were to face evil without symbols, without divine proxies, without superstition. Then he himself stripped bare, entered his home, summoned the darkness, and fought with all his life force against a hidden enemy in the fog. As his strength drained away, the face of the feared evil finally appeared, and it was or might be his own.
Even now, I regard that dream as a complete spiritual and psychological teaching. It revealed projection before I knew the term. It showed me that what we demonize in the world often reflects unexamined contents within ourselves. It also challenged idolatry, not merely religious idolatry, but all false dependencies we create to avoid confronting our own shadow. That dream was no childish absurdity. It was a map.
This significant dream will be discussed in much greater detail in a later chapter.
Years later came one of the clearest visitation dreams I have ever experienced. Bob Fero had been part of my childhood world through my parents’ friends, square dancing circles, camping trips, and the ordinary intimacies of community life. He was not a perfect man. His anger had a destructive edge, and in 1972 his reckless driving killed him and permanently injured his wife Dorothy. Still, grief does not wait for moral simplification. Bob mattered. My father, devastated, could not bring himself to attend the funeral. I did.
Two nights later, Bob came to me in a dream. The communication was unmistakable: do not fear death. Where he was, he said, was beautiful and peaceful. Death was not the enemy. I cannot prove the ontological status of that encounter to anyone else, but I do not experience it as mere wish fulfillment. It had the unmistakable quality of visitation. I felt not fantasy, but contact. My father was not consoled by hearing of it, though I wish he could have been. Some insights cannot be borrowed. They must be encountered.
After recovery from addiction began in 1987, my dream life intensified in new ways. The nightmare phase of my youth had long since given way to something stranger and more luminous. One profound sequence involved a name: Bobby Clements. Over three consecutive nights, I dreamed a life that did not appear to be my own. First, I was a teenage boy named Bobby Clements with a group of close friends. Second, we enlisted together for World War II and insisted on serving together. Third, I was piloting an aircraft with these same companions when anti-aircraft shelling brought us down. We were all going to die. I knew it.
The sequence shook me. Later research eventually led, through my sister’s determined effort, to Robert “Bobby” Kelly Clements of Nova Scotia, a Lancaster bomber pilot in the RAF who reportedly hand-picked his crew, his close friends. The broad contours of the dream sequence matched the historical story with a force I still find difficult to explain away. Was this past-life memory? Remote viewing across time? An archetypal identification so strong it found historical resonance? I remain open. What I cannot do is pretend the dream was trivial.
This significant dream will also be discussed in much greater detail in a later chapter.
Another dream from that era carried both prophecy and personal tenderness. On March 17, 1988, I dreamed of searching feverishly for a discarded ring with eight jewels. I found seven of them, but not the mounting or the final stone. The dream communicated that the last jewel would be found mounted to the lost ring itself. There was also an unknown woman beside me, and I somehow knew she was not the final answer. Years later, in 2004, Sharon showed me the ring she had purchased for our second wedding in Las Vegas without my involvement in its selection. It held seven small stones and one larger, distinct eighth stone set in place. I had never told her about the dream. There are moments when symbolism arrives so specifically into life that the intellect can only stand back and stare.
Then there was the dream concerning my lifelong friend Randy Olson and Boston. In that dream, the sky opened and heaven itself seemed to sing the words “Boston, Massachusetts.” I was flying without an airplane over what felt like the Atlantic, and the message came that I would be leaving Randy behind for that phase of life. I obeyed the strange pull and flew to Boston, eventually finding myself in Mary Baker Eddy’s world through the Mother Church and an improbable access to her private study. Meanwhile, my life and Randy’s diverged as recovery and self-destruction moved in opposite directions. He remained beloved to me, but the dream had named a separation before I consciously understood it. Years later, when he died, the dream stood behind that whole stretch of history like a quiet witness.
One of the most striking dreams in the category of projection, remote viewing, or radical empathy came on May 12, 2016. June Thomas, a dear friend and in many ways a spiritual sister, was visiting her ill brother Dale in Medford, Oregon. That night I dreamed that I had fallen in an unfamiliar bathroom and become trapped between the toilet and the wall. The dream was so vivid and unsettling that I told Sharon about it upon waking. Later that same morning, June called and reported that during the night Dale had gone to the bathroom, fallen, and become trapped between the toilet and the wall.
This dream matters immensely to me because it is so difficult to flatten into conventional explanation. It was not a vague premonition. It was a highly specific embodied experience, one that later corresponded to an actual event involving someone I cared about but was not physically near. What am I to do with such a thing? Dismiss it to preserve orthodoxy? I cannot. Dreams like this suggest that consciousness may extend beyond the physical body’s immediate limits, particularly in states where the ego’s defensive structure is softened. They do not prove a tidy theory, but they break the spell of reductionism.
What may be happening in such a dream? Perhaps love creates channels of sensitivity we scarcely understand. Perhaps relational bonds remain active across distance. Perhaps the dream state allows one to enter what I have elsewhere called the collective or shared field of consciousness. June had long felt to me like kin at the soul level. It would not surprise me if dreams move most freely along the lines of such invisible kinship.
Taken together, these dreams have formed a kind of counter-education to modern certainty. They do not ask me to abandon reason. They ask reason to grow larger. They ask me to consider that grief, love, history, identity, and consciousness are far more fluid than our waking categories admit. The dream world has been, for me, a laboratory of the sacred, a site where the inner and outer worlds repeatedly cross.
I do not offer these accounts as dogma. I offer them as testimony. They belong to the strange archive of a lived life. If they suggest anything to the reader, I hope it is this: do not dismiss the dream because it disrupts your inherited worldview. Sometimes disruption is the beginning of a more spacious truth. Sometimes a dream is not an escape from life, but life arriving from another direction.
Chapter 36: The Cup, the Map, and the Inner Electric: Healing, Lucidity, Radical Empathy, and the Work of Conscious Evolution
Among all the dreams that have shaped me, a few stand apart because they do more than comfort or symbolize. They instruct. They diagnose the soul. They illuminate the hidden labor of transformation. They act almost as initiations. Some expose wounds. Some reveal what must be surrendered. Some open into states of consciousness so refined and lucid that one wakes knowing that the dream was not merely about truth. It was itself an event of truth.
One such dream came through grief and love. Diane “Di Di” Mcloud was not a peripheral figure in my life. I loved her deeply. Ours was not a simple romance, and I knew even while in it that both of us carried toxic faults that would make permanence difficult. Yet love does not wait for perfection before it binds itself to memory. After her death in 1988 as the result of a drunk driver, she appeared in one of the most important healing dreams I have ever received.
In the dream, I was confronted by a violent, abusive, deeply unkind man whose presence revolted and frightened me. I called to a policeman, pleading for protection and for the man’s arrest. Then Di Di stepped forward, replacing the policeman, and spoke with piercing clarity: if love was to return fully to my life, I must first arrest these same qualities within myself. I must rehabilitate my own passions. Only then would love reappear.
That dream was not sentimental. It did not flatter me in grief. It used grief as an opening for moral truth. It revealed that what I found intolerable outside myself was not wholly absent within. The dream called for self-interruption, for an arrest of toxic masculine force, aggression, domination, and unredeemed passion. It insisted that love is not merely found; it must be made possible by inner work. The dream ended, but its demand did not. In many ways, I have been living inside that instruction ever since.
Another dream of enormous significance came in 1992 and involved what I can only call Grandfather Great Spirit. In that dream, I was in my grandfather’s home, in the bedroom of my childhood, and above me hovered a fierce orb or cluster of pure light and love. Though it had no human form, I knew it was my deceased grandfather. In shamanic language, one might speak of higher chakra experience; in the language of my own heart, it was my grandfather as a vessel of transcendent love and wisdom. I felt myself being drawn upward into that field, and I knew with certainty that my body was too weak to sustain it. Yet I wanted to go. Sharon, hearing my physical distress, woke me from what she assumed was a nightmare. I woke devastated, not relieved.
The significance of that dream deepened over years. It taught me that if I wished to embody higher vibrations of love, my physical and psychological structures had to be strengthened. Revelation without capacity can become destructive. Energy requires grounding. Spirit requires embodiment. I have long believed that this dream was part of the hidden motivation behind the strengthening of my body and life in the years that followed. Love, if it is real, is not vague. It demands preparation.
A later follow-up dream involving my grandfather brought further clarity. In that dream, dark threatening figures were in the car with us, and I knew I had to confront them to protect him. Over time I came to see these “tricksters” as embedded wounds of trauma within my own life energy. To save Grandfather, Great Spirit, was to clear the field of those destructive forces. The deepest spiritual presences in our lives do not remove us from shadow work. They compel it.
Then there is the dream about June’s brother Dale, which I maintain as a major instance of radical empathy or remote viewing. The dream’s importance lies not only in its eerie accuracy, but in what it suggests about the moral architecture of consciousness. I did not merely observe an event from a distance. I felt the predicament from within. I awoke shaken because the dream had the density of embodiment. For me, this dream remains one of the clearest indicators that dreaming can involve participation in another’s experience through channels of connection we do not understand. The implications are spiritual, psychological, and ethical. If consciousness can extend itself in compassion through dream space, then perhaps empathy is not merely emotional imagination. Perhaps it is a latent faculty of shared being.
And then there is the dream that emerged around the Cosmic Christ workshop with Matthew Fox, which I regard as one of the clearest dream teachings of my entire life.
After an evening seminar on mysticism, I slept deeply and dreamed with unusual lucidity. I entered a well-lit room. A man stood to the right of the entrance holding out a cup. I knew that if I drank from it I would become intoxicated, but not in contradiction to sobriety. This was a different order of intoxication, a holy intoxication, a dissolving of conditioned limitations rather than a descent into unconsciousness. Near him was a table holding an open topographic map. On the right side of the map ran one dark, solid line from bottom to top. On the left were many dotted lines, intersecting, wandering, curving, paralleling without merging. None had obvious beginnings or endings.
The dream stayed with me not merely because of its beauty, but because of its interior certainty. I was unusually awake within it. There was lucidity there, not only in the technical sense of knowing one is dreaming, but in the spiritual sense of receiving coherent instruction from within the dream state itself. The next day, at the workshop, Matthew Fox invited anyone with a dream to share. I hesitated. Later, privately, I told him about it. He smiled and refused to explain it for me, saying only to let the dream tell me its meaning.
It did.
On the drive home, as I recounted it again to Sharon, the meaning broke open through horripilation, through what I call God chills. The solid line on the right was the rut of conditioned life: inherited systems, institutional certainty, socially approved pathways, the road of obedience without discovery. The dotted lines on the left were the pilgrimage of conscious evolution, where the path is made only through walking, where uncertainty is not a problem but a companion, where one chooses curiosity over conformity. The offered cup was the invitation to drink from Spirit itself, to accept a consciousness-altering participation in mystery without abandoning sobriety of soul.
That dream deserves development because it captures something central to the whole dream world: dreams do not merely reflect the life we have lived. They invite the life we have not yet dared to live. The map was not geography. It was vocation. It named the difference between a managed life and an awakened one.
This dream also belongs in the category of lucid mystery because it aligns strikingly with what research has begun to suggest about lucid dreaming. Studies drawing on EEG data have indicated that lucid dreams involve unusual combinations of REM sleep and waking-like brain activity, particularly beta-wave associations tied to conscious awareness, problem-solving, spatial processing, and self-reflective cognition. That matters to me because it implies that the dream world can host not only symbolism and emotion, but genuine conscious participation. Dreaming may be one of the states in which the self becomes aware within mystery rather than simply carried by it.
Some researchers have even noted neurological echoes between lucid dreaming and psychedelic states, particularly in relation to altered imagery and modified self-processing. Yet lucid dreams may preserve more agency than psychedelics often do. This is a profound idea. It means that the dreamer may enter visionary terrain without losing the capacity for response. Consciousness need not be extinguished for transcendence to occur.
That possibility aligns with my own experience. The Cosmic Christ dream did not reduce me to passive awe. It invited interpretation, participation, and eventually commitment. It asked me which side of the map I intended to live on.
The same pattern appears in the electrician dream connected to Marty Crouch. We were in a noisy industrial plant. An electrical system needed reconditioning. I was told that a security lock had to be removed from an electrical panel. Symbolically, it was obvious: self-protective mechanisms can keep the system safe during emergency work, but they must eventually be removed if energy is to flow again. Protection can become obstruction. Fear can masquerade as wisdom. Healing requires re-energizing the system after the repair.
For an electrician, this symbolism is not decorative. It is organic. I understand systems, grounding, overload, flow, interruption, and restoration. Dreams have repeatedly used that language because it is native to my life. The soul speaks in the images we are built to understand.
To honor dreams, then, is not to become irrational. It is to become more fully human. It is to admit that consciousness is wider than our daylight habits. It is to recognize that some of our deepest repair work occurs offstage, in the unseen workshop of sleep, where maps are opened, cups are offered, the dead speak, the future flickers, and the hidden system waits for re-energizing.
Yet, as this circuitry is re-energized, we inevitably discover that the power coursing through us does not originate solely from our present waking life. The hidden system connects to a much older grid. When we truly begin the process of healing from our human condition, we never know in advance how far back the wires will lead us. To fully reclaim the self, we must turn our attention not only to the nocturnal nexus of dreams, but to the distant echoes of past incarnations and the disassociated fragments of our soul that await our conscious embrace.
Chapter 37: The Power of Then: The Process of Reclaiming Disassociated Parts of Ourselves, And Healing Traumas from Present or Past Lives
Embracing a Distant Past
Writer’s note: As explored throughout the broader journey of An Electrician’s guide to our universe, and a life, love, and death upon its unlimited bandwidth, when we begin the process of healing from our human condition, we never know in advance what direction our path will lead us. Such continues to be the case for me.
The tapestry of our lives is often far richer and more intricate than it first appears. Lying beneath the surface of a singular human experience may be countless threads spun from human archetypes, historical narratives, past incarnations, or disassociated aspects of the present self. Each holds the echoes of forgotten traumas, triumphs, and incomplete journeys. When these fragments of the soul remain hidden in the unconscious, they operate as invisible puppeteers. They dictate our reactions, define our fears, and enforce limitations, giving us the illusion of free will while secretly binding us to ancient scripts. True freedom is an impossibility until these unseen forces—whether born of past-life karma or present-life disassociation—are brought into the light of conscious awareness.
Human consciousness is not a singular, fixed entity. The soul houses wounds older than the body it inhabits, wrapped delicately in layers of forgotten incarnations. During a meditation on July 21, 1987, I received a profound spiritual teaching intertwined with a most confusing revelation. Ever so briefly, in a twice-in-a-lifetime experience, I could see the field of energy that constituted my body/mind awareness. I saw embedded within it two almost complete thought or identity forms, which I recognized as distinct caricatures, or entities. I had two “extras” attached to my field, and I immediately understood that they were not there for my greater good.
I came to regard these two unwelcome components of my life force as tricksters, though I noted that their presence allayed the feelings of loneliness of my ego, perhaps because they seemed vaguely familiar. I sensed that I was supposed to let go of these illusions of self, but I did not know what to do with them until I revisited them consciously in recent years. Little did I know that they were to become the most critical components to understand in my desire to heal from trauma and reclaim my autonomy.
Part 1: Unraveling the Wounded Energy Vortices of the Soul
Two specific vortices have shaped my energy field, mirroring fragments of past lives that resonate powerfully in my present. One emerges from a life as an ancient shaman, a healer tethered to the spiritual forces of the earth. The other stems from the life of Bobby Clements, an ill-fated WWII pilot surrounded by camaraderie and sacrifice but plagued by loss.
The Wounded Healer
The shamanic vortex was deeply rooted in the archetype of the wounded healer, a paradox I have often lived without fully understanding. My childhood was rife with night terrors, bedwetting, abandonment fears, and a desperate yearning for connection that rarely found nourishment in peers. Yet, intuitively, I always bridged my inner world with spiritual forces I could barely name.
At eight years old, in 1964, I had a unique, realistic dream that perfectly encapsulated this ancient energy. Having received his directive from “on high,” a priest returned to his village along a high mountain lake. He instructed the villagers to throw every golden figurine and sacred symbol into the lake, telling them they must face the “evil one” without protection from their gods. The priest then retreated to his own home, stripped himself bare, and began summoning the dark forces. Surrounded by fog, sparks flew from his fingertips toward an unknown adversary. As he sacrificed all his life force to pierce the fog and finally see the face of the force that had terrorized his village, a face materialized before his faltering gaze. Collapsing, he could no longer fight an undeniable truth: the face of the evil one was his own.
This dream remains a significant teaching. Idolatry and psychological projection are the modern names for the phenomena shown to me. The shaman forced his village to face their shadow without the help of gods, and I feel certain the village shadow prematurely ended his life for his efforts. Before this energy was made conscious, its negative influence manifested in my present life as a deep-seated fear of abandonment and a crippling hesitation to share my spiritual truths. The shaman’s unresolved trauma whispered that spiritual authenticity equated to alienation and destruction, erecting invisible walls around my heart that prevented true communion with the world.
The Unfulfilled Leader
The second vortex bore the mark of Bobby Clements. In April of 1987, after being sober for about a month following sixteen years of hell, I had a series of three dreams on consecutive nights. In the first dream, I was a young teenager named Bobby Clements, hanging out with five close buddies. In the second, we were all enlisting together to enter WWII, demanding to fly on the same plane. In the third, I was piloting the aircraft with my friends in support roles. We flew into anti-aircraft shelling, taking a fatal blow. As the plane plummeted, I knew we were all going to die.
I researched the name extensively, coming up short until decades later when my sister discovered Robert “Bobby” Kelly Clements of Nova Scotia, Canada. Robert flew a Lancaster bomber for the RAF out of England, and records showed he hand-picked his crew: his five Nova Scotia friends. His story was identical to my dream sequence.
Because Bobby’s final conscious act was one of fatal failure—plummeting from the sky with the crew he had sworn to protect—my own subconscious decision-making was infected by an expectation of inevitable ruin. Bobby’s despair turned inward against me, breeding a profound self-doubt and a depressive paralysis that culminated in a desire to end my own life in 1986. I hesitated to commit to a path, to build a future, or to trust my own leadership, because an unintegrated part of my soul believed that taking the helm would only lead to devastating loss.
The Synergistic Paralysis
These two past incarnations did not merely influence me independently; they merged into a powerful, synergistic force that severely restricted my freedom in this life. The shaman’s trauma dictated that exposing my spiritual authenticity would lead to my ultimate destruction at the hands of those I tried to help. Simultaneously, Bobby’s unresolved grief convinced me that stepping into any leadership role would inevitably result in the catastrophic ruin of those who trusted me. Together, these intertwined energies created a compounding paralysis. I was terrified to step forward as a spiritual leader or guide, trapped by the dual subconscious conviction that doing so would simultaneously destroy me and fail everyone who relied on me. My free will was entirely usurped by this invisible intersection of ancient fears.
Part 2: Revisiting the Unraveling and the Path to Wholeness
There is an infinite power accessible through becoming lovingly present for “the then.” Yet, many of us live within the confines of “the now,” unable to fathom the depth of these fragments’ influence. Cultural norms and modern-day psychology have conditioned us to frame our challenges solely within the narrative of our childhoods. While significant, it is not the full picture.
These energy vortices do not emerge as straightforward figures but as patterns in your energy field, recurring dreams, vivid meditations, or deeply embedded emotions that feel larger than this life alone. Clues of past-life dynamics often appear through frequent dreams, compulsion-driven decisions, and karmic relationships. Understanding these themes is not about being stuck in the past; it is a path to reclaiming your autonomy. Through introspection, I have developed a three-step process to dismantle these unconscious controls:
Recognition: Notice recurring patterns or archetypal behaviors. Honor the inner acknowledgment of dissonance.
Integration: Employ tools like meditation or journaling to invite the fragments back home. The goal is not to erase the past but to honor it.
Transcendence: View these echoes not as burdens, but as teachers. Acknowledge that time simply creates the context for understanding cycles of spiritual growth.
While there is value in understanding the psychological utility of archetypes, dismissing these experiences as mere imagination strips them of their transformative power. Treating these fragments as real, living components of the spiritual self demands a level of radical vulnerability and accountability that traditional therapy often skirts. By meeting these energies where they are, we stop pathologizing our spiritual depths and begin the sacred work of reclaiming our disassociated parts.
The Spiral of Healing
Healing from the wounds of past incarnations is not a linear march toward perfection; it is a continuous, upward spiral of self-awareness. When I finally recognized and integrated the shaman and the pilot, they ceased to be my captors. They transformed from architects of my suffering into wise companions on my expansive spiritual path. The shaman taught me to transform suffering into light without seeking external validation, and the pilot provided a compass for deep loyalty that does not require the sacrifice of my own individuality.
We are all carrying the weight of wounds far older than the bodies we inhabit. Yet, within those very wounds lies the dormant light of countless lifetimes, waiting to be unleashed. I urge you to look closely at the recurring patterns, the inexplicable fears, and the persistent shadows that haunt the periphery of your life. Do not dismiss them. Seek out the forgotten fragments of your soul and invite them back into the whole. It is only by bravely facing the entirety of our “then” that we can untangle the strings of the unconscious and truly embody the freedom, the peace, and the unlimited bandwidth of our “now.”
