All manifestation has its source in dreams. Can you find the dream that stands beside the manifestation? It lives in the field of potential that surrounds us all like webbing made of strands of gold. This webbing of glistening light encompasses the field of creativity, the wide-open meadow where all possibility exists. Can you see it? It is always there and your eyes can discover it if only you knew where to look.

The dreaming lives in the shadows that outline the light. Sunlight dappled upon leaves is a good place to begin looking for the dreaming field. A dreaming artist's eye finds the dreaming in the shadowy black line of definition that surrounds the light. See it on a leaf that has captured a drop of golden sunlight. Find the dreaming forever present in the shadows.

Light and shadow are constant companions just as dreaming and waking are coupled in the yin/yang bed of duality. All day long, practice looking to the shadows that delineate the light of your waking life. Can you see the happy couple standing side by side? Did you know that even shadows have a kind of glow to them which is a drop of light's essence, just as light cradles a drop of shadowed darkness at its center? The two halves make up the whole of existence and are truly never parted. Your waking and dreaming worlds overlap, intersecting into a textured weaving of totality.

The dreaming is always with you my friends. The shadow's shine is the soul of dreaming. Therefore, within the shadows you observe in your waking world is the dreaming world, forever beckoning to you, asking you to see it and remember its presence in your life. It is the other half of your perceptual reality and your acknowledgment of its presence will balance your life in ways you can only dream of. For it holds all the aspects of you that are mysterious, beyond explanation, perhaps even beyond comprehension. It is a basket filled with your destiny and it whispers to you in the mythic symbology that is the languaging of your soul. All it asks for is your attention. So can you look to the shadows in your daily world and see the dreaming's shine illuminating your waking life? Look for it every day and you will find that it has a magnetic quality that attracts your attention like the moth to the flame. See the shadows of dreaming living beside the light of your waking self and awaken to the totality of who you are.

When discussing dreaming practices, I often hear the lament, "I can't get out of my body and dream in the higher realms.'' It seems to me that this concern comes from the ego -- that part of our personality that directs our physical reality. I wonder why so many of us get stuck in the process of using the ego's perceptual awareness when we are trying to further our dreaming. The dreaming realm is not limited to the confines of the physical world. We can fly in our dreams, walk through walls, appear and disappear at will. So why use precepts utilized by the ego to define our dreaming realm? Why impose the limits of waking reality on the dreaming reality? Why allow the ego to lead you in a reality where its rules don't apply?

The ego thinks it dreams, but does it? The ego hears our dreams when we awaken and come home to the ego's realm. When the spirit dreams, the ego awakens later from sleeping or meditation or daydreaming or visioning, and it hears the story of our dreams and then mistakenly claims them as its own. The ego grasps at all the stimuli and inspiration the energy of our dreams encompasses. The ego wants so much to understand and to interpret our dreaming realm and that is good, for this is where the ego has its function. For without the ego, we would have no memory of our dreams and our Soul's mythic whisperings would be lost to us. So the ego is our tool, our friend and companion who comes to us after the dream is dreamt and it helps us to hold the vision and the gifts of our dream messages.

The conditioning of everyday life has trained us to only trust what our third dimensional senses can perceive, so of course, we feel limited by the spatial expanse of the dreaming world. This is the dreaming glass ceiling and the good news is that it exists only in the world of physical reality, for there are no ceilings in the dreaming world. There are neither walls nor fences in the realm of dreams. Imagine for a moment that your ego is like a box. It has defined its space with lines and corners and limits. Your dreaming realm is like loops of string that hurl through space in tunnels of dimensions. Your imagination is the initial force that propels the loops of string through the tunnels of the cosmos of dreaming. Imagination is a close and intimate companion of intent. When activated, it just goes swimming and flying and streaming along. It doesn't work at imagining. Imagination intends its launch to happen and then like a bird on a branch, it lifts off and takes flight. Imagination is the ultimate Dream Flyer.

So if you find your ego pushing up against the dreaming glass ceiling, just stop trying to dream because you cannot think your way up and out into the higher realms of dreaming. Dreaming is an aspect of spirit flight which follows the energy of intent. Intend, intend, intend to dream by creating an out-picturing of the dreaming world beyond your ego's self-imposed glass ceiling and then allow your intent to guide you there along the streams of imagination. The movement into the higher realms of dreaming is a flow, not a push.

A few months ago I was at a major turning point in my life where I experienced moments of great fear that pressed upon my chest leaving me breathless and filled with the kind of dread that comes with great change and our resistance to it. I laid in bed one night and opened the wings of my dream flyer and as I lifted up into the realm of possible dreams, I asked for help. I called in my spiritual guardians and I beseeched them for guidance. Then I floated with ease into my dreaming.

I found myself on a hillside in a vast mountain range somewhere in the Far East. Gigantic jagged mountain peaks rose high above the clouds. This was a land of exquisite pristine beauty and its presence filled me with a softness I can only describe as peace. I sat on that hillside looking down into a valley where there was a lake with an island at its center. On the island lived a great tree, strong and full, with sturdy branches that reached out to me, seemingly calling to me with hands that wanted to clasp mine. The rising sun spilled golden light over a high peak that showered down onto the valley, sparkling across the lake and illuminating the tree. When the sunlight touched the tips of the tree branches, they appeared to bloom in vibrant colors. The tree was laden with jewels of every color of the rainbow that sparkled like multifaceted diamonds.

It was at this point in the dream that my Spirit awakened my Ego and said, "Wake up in this dream and remember this, she needs to remember the Jewel Tree. Got it?" My Ego woke up and realized I was dreaming and said, "Okay, yes, the Jewel Tree. I've got it and I'm taking it back with me to her waking reality. She will remember the Jewel Tree in the morning. Thanks and goodnight."

I awoke the next morning with the term, Jewel Tree on my lips. I wondered about it all day, remembering the hillside where I sat, the beautiful mountains that surrounded me, the lake and most of all, the tree that blossomed with jewels. But what to do about such a vision? What did it mean? Later in the day I sat at my computer typing email responses and the thought occurred to me to Google the term, Jewel Tree. What the heck, I thought. I will give it a whirl. So I googled Jewel Tree and many hits came up, but one caught my eye and wouldn't let go. It was the name of a book, by Robert Thurman - The Jewel Tree of Tibet, The Enlightenment Engine of Tibetan Buddhism. The title ignited my curiosity so I decided to go ahead and purchase the book online.

The cover of the book is illustrated with a painting of a tree filled with enlightened beings of many colors. Much to my surprise I learned that the wish-granting jewel tree is the tree of life and wisdom, where the Buddha attained perfect enlightenment! The author describes the tree in a meditation where the reader could access the jewel tree through a visualization of "this vast tree that rises before us from our position on a hill high above earth, out of an island in a jewel lake that sits below us on the top of the world. And this vast tree rises there, shining radiantly, filling us with rainbow light." (Thurman, Robert, The Jewel Tree of Tibet, (New York, New York, Free Press, 2005) pg., 42.

My dream guidance led me to a book that held precious teachings about the path of enlightenment within the vision of the Jewel Tree. Imagine that! This book has become a treasure of comfort for me as I walk through a very important transition in my life and this dream about the book has demonstrated that help does come from your dreams, when you open your imagination and activate your intent to rise above the ego's limits. If you lift up your sights and aim high, you will land in the field of dreaming potential where guidance springs forth from a fountainhead of eternal flow.

Last month I introduced the concept of vertical movement on the Dreamcatcher's wheel, where we find the inspiration of the dream in the north and we bring it into our daily awareness in the south. This melding of the spirit and ego is found in the movement between the worlds of dreaming and waking consciousness. Vertical movement lifts us up and beyond the dreaming glass ceiling, into all the possibility the higher realms offer. Perhaps this is the teaching then of my experience of the Jewel Tree dream. A dream can move you vertically beyond all barriers into the flow of your Soul's mythic dream that forever guides you along your path of destiny. What could be better than to awaken with guidance and hope when you are in the midst of tremendous change?

Thank you for your enthusiastic response to Spirit's Scroll. This newsletter is a dream come true for me and my heart is singing with gratitude for all your support and interest. I've heard from some of you with questions and requests for dream interpretation. I will do my best to oblige you in each issue of Spirit's Scroll and please feel free to email me with your thoughts. Let's keep the dialogue flowing!

A Dreamer's Question

Dear Margaret,

Would you please mention in your next spirit scroll that Dreaming isn't just dreaming asleep but dreaming awake. The skilled Dreamers in our distant past (Neolithic times) held the very survival of the tribe in their visioning. The Dreamers were seen as more of a threat than the warriors and were killed off (particularly in Britain by the Romans). To dream awake is a particular skill, and is in the lineage (genes) of certain families. It's the ability to move across thresholds into other dimensions AT WILL, and not the same as the dreams we have when we sleep. It's important to make the distinction between the two types of dreaming I feel, as one is a more personal journey and the other is a journey to the "Gods" so to speak, with symbology that's not necessarily the Dreamer's own language. The Dreamers were the skilled Interpreters of this language of symbols, and their visions were taken very seriously and acted on for the good of the whole tribe. I've been doing a lot of work in this "field" as you've probably guessed! Thanks.

Sincerely, Suzanne

Answer

Dear Suzanne,

Yes, there is certainly dreaming while sleeping and dreaming awake -- which is a form of inner journeying. I write about dreaming awake quite a bit in my book, Wisdom Walks, in particular, when I go on the dream journey's to encounter the Goddesses who teach me about how to further develop my inner voice of intuition.

In the previous issues of Spirit's Scroll, my purpose in focusing on dreaming while sleeping has been to place emphasis on the importance of your soul's mythic journey and to call attention to the symbology of your dreams so that you find the relevance in your dream's messages. All of life is a teaching and we are always learning even while asleep and dreaming! Crossing thresholds of dimensions of consciousness can happen whenever we dream either while sleeping or through journeying. It is a shifting of awareness and perception that allows us to move into other dimensions of reality. Last month I gave you the exercise of opening the wings of your Dream Flyer. When you open your dream flyer's wings you are actually able to shift the place in your back where all the modes of perceiving assemble. Shamans call this area between your shoulder blades the assemblage point - the place of perception that gathers into a pinpoint that allows you to perceive the waking world of your physical life. This point of perception can shift a little bit to the right or left or up or down and when it does move, your mode of perceiving changes and you begin to perceive another slice in the loaf of bread of reality. Quantum physicists say there are layers of parallel realities stacked next to each other like slices of bread that make up the loaf of our many universes. So when you open your wings, you can indeed shift your assemblage point and actually move into another slice of reality that we call the dreaming realm. I wonder if the ancient Neolithic dreamers opened their dream flyer's wings? I sense that you Suzanne know a great deal about the ancient practices of dreaming awake because you are a journeyer of Neolithic vintage! Enjoy the remembering of this ancient wisdom and I hope you will bring this learning into your creative expressions in the world. You have this dreamer's gift.

Love and light, Margaret

Question to ponder:How might your life be different if you could stay aware of the dreaming world at the same time that you are aware of the waking world?

Until next time, sweet dreams my friends.

Margaret H. Lewis is a highly regarded professional speaker, workshop facilitator, business and personal development consultant, gifted spiritual practitioner and writer. For over 20 years she has provided countless training seminars and workshops on a wide range of life management and personal development skills.

Margaret is a graduate of an intensive four-year program of spiritual study, receiving her professional certification and ministerial license. She is continually engaged in many areas of research and study that further her continuing education as a spiritual practitioner.

From 2000 - 2005, Margaret directed Lynn Andrews website where she designed, wrote and taught Online Spirituality Courses with Ms. Andrews. In her role as the Online Course Creator, Margaret oversaw the entire learning environment and curriculum presentation. Now Margaret has ventured out on her own and will soon be offering many new online courses and learning adventures on her website at www.wisdomwalks.com. Please keep checking the website and new issues of Spirit's Scroll for updates!

In private consultations, Margaret has assisted hundreds of people in releasing the blocks that are holding them back from achieving their goals and visions of fulfillment. To set up an appointment with Margaret, please email her at info@wisdomwalks.com.


Coming Soon to Wisdomwalks.com are my New Online Courses!

• The Wisdom Walks In Circles Series is coming soon!
• Our First Course, Artemis, The She-Bear of Intuition will begin on September 4th and run through September 25, 2005.
• Each course in our Wisdom Walks series will focus on a particular direction on the wheel of a woman's life spanning from childhood, to the maiden adolescent, the mother and then the sage.
• Every course will offer guided journeys via online audio or CD set, an indepth course workbook, conference calls and daily interaction with me online, as well as many practices to assist in honing your intuitive skills!
• Our first course will take us to the South direction on the Intuition Mystery Wheels where we will work deeply with the incredible wisdom of your Inner Child who holds many answers and keys to your destiny.
• I will be available daily in our private forum at www.wisdomwalks.com to interact with you and answer your questions.
• Distance learning on the world wide web is a marvelous tool for education. I believe the most effective teaching tool is the presence of the guide. This quality of human touch is a skill and a style I've developed over the years in my online course work with students. So look for me to be your companion throughout this work on a daily basis as well as via phone conferences. I feel it is very important for the Guide to be present for the participants while the course is ongoing!
• Look for many new enhancements to my website at www.wisdomwalks.com which will soon feature our online course interactive work.