Two close male friends have both urged me to publish these experiences in which my dream enabled each of them to move forward psychologically and emotionally. They also both requested to remain anonymous, so I will call them John and Mark, respectively.
My Lucid Dream of October 21, 2016—Phone Call to John from God
Written as an email to John:
From between 1:30 a.m. - 4:15 a.m. I was with you in a long dream.
For a long time, we sat side-by-side on a bed in a dark room, inside a dark house. You talked as I listened. There was a phone to our left that rang once, then twice, and both times you got up to answer it, but only briefly, before returning to sit on the bed with me. The third time it rang, you showed no inclination to answer it. But I knew the call was for you, and that you had to answer it, so I got up. At the same time, however, I knew I wouldn't be able to reach the phone simply because you had to answer it. “Answer the phone, John!” I begged.
You rose reluctantly, picked up the receiver, listened for a long moment, then hanging up came back to me again, only now we were on the floor sitting cross legged on some kind of threshold. The dark room was to our left, and some other open space to our right. I asked, “Who was it?” and you replied, “God.” Having already sort of known and hoped that was the case, I asked you what He said, and you told me He had spoken just one word to you because you were too sensitive, and you didn't share it with me.
At this point – gazing across the threshold to something like daylight just barely visible beyond us – I became lucid as I explained, “You're no more sensitive than I am, I simply have not had an experience that you have had. You are a victim of child abuse.” You began talking quickly then, with suppressed emotion, ending with, “And he was so strong, I couldn't fight him!” to which I replied, “Of course not; he was a man in his twenties, at the height of his strength, and you were just a little child.”
It came to me then – as if this was what the dream phone call had communicated – what you had to do. “John, you need to see a hypnotherapist, not for a so-called past life regression, but so you can consciously remember those experiences of being abused. The trauma, fear, helplessness and pain are stored in your body, and now your grown man's consciousness must embrace them so your body might be freed of them.”
I understood that, as you gradually approached the age your abuser was when he became an even worse hypochondriac (and then eventually had all his fears realized when he suddenly developed a fatal cancer and died) that the reality of old age, illness and death are experienced by your body as the looming, terrifying, relentless impossible-to-fight father who – struggling with sadness, anger, frustration, insecurity and despair himself – took it out on you, his disappointingly small and delicate son. He beat you, yelled at you, and locked you up alone in a small dark space where you were powerless and helpless. But it doesn't have to be that way. Your Divine Father wants to reach you, and be everything yours was not as you approach what can be the glorious time of your second childhood.
John's email Response a few days later:
Maria, thank you for telling me of your dream with me, and please tell me more you have had with me if you think they might be helpful, as I think many of them would be! I didn't even really have any sense until I read your dream that experience so early in life might have shaped me, and yesterday in therapy it really was like some light bulbs turning on when the therapist asked me a bunch of questions that showed me that, without realizing it, I was looking at myself and my possibilities in life through the lens of that formative experience. I thought that it was because it was so long ago I don't even remember it, that it couldn't possibly have anything to do with what I am going through now, that includes my assuming the role of the abuser to myself. But it was a formative time so it makes sense, and I feel like I really have to go back to that time, to look at how that lens has shaped the way I see, so I can see more clearly and be free.
Then the other night, I was with the beautiful woman I sometimes meet in my dreams, and she kissed me on the lips. I think you wrote somewhere that a kiss in a dream communicates or relays something, an energy that just talking doesn't. And I felt that, which was a tremendous sense of reassurance, heightened by thinking of her as an expression of my guardian angel.
I replied: "The word Angel comes from the Greek Angelus which means Messenger. Angels are messengers of God. It's possible your Angel worked with mine to bring us together in that dream so that you could receive an important message from God.
After sending this email to John, with his permission I wrote another one to my close friend Mark, an experienced lucid dreamer who is also virtually acquainted with John. For several years we have been experimenting with meeting consciously in a lucid dream, and have logged quite a few fascinating experiences:
Dear Mark,
I feel really good today because John called me this morning to tell me that, because of the dream I had with him – in which I knew he was getting a phone call from God and begged him to answer the phone in the dream, because I couldn't answer it for him – he suddenly realized, like a light bulb turned on in his head – that what the dream telepathically communicated to me, and which I told him, is true. It began when he reluctantly shared my dream with his therapist, who jumped on the information as a key to what is going on with him. They made huge progress in just one session, and the therapist was so impressed, he referred him to a psychiatrist, who is also finding herself able to get a handle on his issues because of my dream.
This morning he sounded like he hasn't in years as he also told me that, last night, he found himself in a dream for the first time in a long time, which was nice enough, but a beautiful woman was also sitting beside him, talking to him, then she kissed him! He woke up feeling renewed, and happy, and really wanting to get his dream life back. He actually had lucid dreams years before I ever did, when he was in his twenties, but then they stopped.
Let me know when you're up to trying to find a door into each other's dream space again. We're so close, it's making me a little crazy:-)
Mark's Response:
Oh that really is a wonderful story, and I agree you should totally publish it! It shows both the power of dreams and, more importantly, God speaking through dreams. It's like God wanted to be with John all this time, and you were able to show him this – that he only needed to 'pick up'. I think this is inspiring to all of us:)
Approximately seven months later, on May 16, 2017, Mark found the courage to confess to me in an email:
Hi Maria
Just between me and you...
I had another intense dream last night regarding my stepfather and my childhood, and while I was OK once I awoke, I started crying today when trying to tell my wife about it, but I don't really understand why, my memories are still sketchy, I do not really understand why I cannot accept these things. I think I need your help to get me through this. I know facing this thing with a friend in my dreams will hopefully make it easier. Or do you think I should face these things alone?
I replied:
My dear Mark, of course you don't have to face this alone! Of course I will help you.
It takes a long time for our self to work out traumas. I know. It's perfectly natural for you not to be able to accept things overnight. Emotional injuries take time to heal just like physical ones. They need to be cleaned out completely before the bandaging and healing can begin, and it's the cleansing process that is so painful. But you have the healing solution needed now in your soul. The important thing is to remember what is happening to you is GOOD. And you are not alone, believe me.
Just tell me what you want me to do. I'm ready.
Mark:
Thank you Maria! In my dreams, my stepfather scares the hell out of me. If you could be there to help me face him that would be amazing:)
My Lucid Dream of May 17, 2016—Helping Protect Mark
Helping Mark now is my primary intent.
I had some powerful dreams last night. It began with being in my dark house, with my husband occupied elsewhere. Suddenly, as I approached the glass doors, someone slipped a black hood over my head from behind, a man, and I knew he meant to take me outside, and that I would probably end up dead. So I fought him. From somewhere I procured a pair of fine sharp small silver scissors, and a very realistic struggle ensued with me doing my best to stab him in the tender areas between his collar bones. He soon pulled out his own sharp weapon, but I managed to penetrate his skin and weaken him so he could not harm me, and finally I freed myself from him...
For a long time, I was holding a baby boy protectively in my arms. He was just old enough to stand on his own two feet, but he still preferred being held by me, and I was more than happy to oblige him. He was smart and sweet, no burden at all, and even though he was heavy, I didn't feel his weight. There were other adults around me, also holding young children in their arms. We were gathered there for a purpose. These children had been given to us to watch over and protect, until such time as they could safely return to their home, which was, for all of them, an immense Mansion that rose over us on my left. It was sort of dusk or early dawn, and the children were either all unclothed or wearing identical transparent seamless garments.
At this point in my dream report, I switched to the present tense:
My awareness is observing a vivid scene of a man, and the child I was holding, lying beneath a vehicle. The man is clutching the boy and, it seems, using him to protect himself from the vicious tiger determined to thrust its paw beneath the car/truck, like a giant cat trying to root out mice it is intent on devouring. The vicious claws come dangerously close to the child's head, but with my willpower, I shift the man's position so he is now the one in danger of being clawed to death. Then I somehow end the scene with the child coming to no harm...
I am observing, and then enter a woman who is holding the same male child. The room is almost empty, and resembles a cage more than a room, although I cannot see bars and the floor is white. The feeling is one of isolation and empty imprisonment. A man enters, he and the women exchange words, and I realize he's the man I saw beneath the vehicle the tiger was attacking, and that the tiger knows this woman and child from before, and that it won't hurt them. It is the man the tiger is hunting...
My husband and I enter a truly immense building with white floors and walls, like a cross between a Mall and a storage warehouse. We walk a ways, then he goes ahead of me while I stand in what is roughly the center of the immense open space located between other vast areas concealed behind doors. To my right, yards away, I see black glass doors leading out into the night. Behind me, I sense a massive space behind another door. I'm standing beside a rectangular metal column I know I can get my arms around, but it's incredibly tall, a major support beam. I can't explain why I get the urge, feel the need, to grab this beam, and send it slowly crashing down in the direction of the black doors leading outside. The beam falls in slow motion, and there is no doubt it's going to wreak major destruction on this place. And so it does, crashing through ceilings and glass walls, while in the process shifting the very structure of the whole place, which to me feels like a necessary thing, as if this support beam was making it impossible for the place to function properly; as if its presence was keeping the main important room behind me closed off and inaccessible.
Once all the crashing sounds end and all is still again, I turn and go through the white doors, entering another huge space, dark now, where I perceive row upon row of white balcony-like tiers. It's as if this space adjoins an immense white tower, and I sense the stirrings of great and mysterious things in here that can now awaken because I toppled that central beam. I become lucid then as I understand that, from the beginning, I treated this entire place like a dream, which is why I wasn't afraid to push down that beam, because I knew it was necessary, and that it wouldn't hurt me, or anything else. On the contrary.
Fully lucid now, I close the door on this space which, large as it was, also feels mysteriously private, and go rejoin my husband. We sit down on a couch facing a television, and watch the gold-orange light swirling on the screen forming a vortex-like portal. My eyes fixed on this portal, I think about Mark, and about the TV I saw him watching that night we met up in a dream in my old house. I ask my husband if he sees the TV and what's on the screen, and he replies, "Yes." Apparently, he sees exactly what I do.
Mark replied:
That first dream with the tiger and child was pretty intense, I can’t help but think it may have related to me (it describes exactly how I feel with my stepfather).
The visual sync you described at the end, that was interesting. I was so tired last night, I can't remember anything, but I have this vague impression the only fragment of a dream I can recall was with you, and we were facing my stepfather together, but then I was not sure if this was just wishful thinking since I can't retrieve anything more.
I responded:
Personally, I believe all my dreams last night related to you. A negative force attempted to stop me at the very beginning of my dreaming. I defeated it. My silver scissor was the size of the white-gold cross I often wear.
The little boy I was holding and protecting could be the part of your self that is still terrified of your stepfather. You are not alone; I was waiting with you for help that was coming through dream work.
The killer tiger may symbolize the demons that plagued your stepfather, and made him the abusive person he was, which bred the fears tormenting you now. The woman with the boy I see as your mother, who was empty inside in many ways, and imprisoned in an abusive relationship, yet of her own free will.
The huge white building is less obvious, but I feel it relates to the structure of our self and personality and how it affects our soul and our access to its healing powers. That narrow support beam needed to come down because your stepfather failed to provide you with the support all children need to build their own fully healthy lives. The beam was isolated, surrounded by empty space. Perhaps in knocking it down, and sending it crashing through other levels of the place, I initiated a process of damage repair which, in my dream, opened the door to a wondrous place full of mystery and promise, symbolized by all those different levels of white balconies like in a great theater. Then focusing on the portal in the TV, I thought of you. I'm sure now we connected.
Mark:
Oh damn Maria, my mind is blown!!
Maria:
Okay, this is my favorite email I've ever received. That's what it's all about, blowing each other’s minds for all eternity!:-)
Mark:
Yes. I read your response before going to bed last night, and then your dream again, and it was so blindingly obvious that I cannot believe I missed it.
This is pretty big I think, not just for me, but as a new form of real hands on psychotherapy (you will have to use this in a future book!:)
Okay... so going through the dream once more, I would like to add my own thoughts to what you experienced, as I believe you were in MY head and it was a pretty big deal.
I think the negative force preventing you from going into the dream was the same as the walls you knocked down. You see, after I left home at seventeen, I never looked back. I stayed in a new home, a shared house with friends, it was a pit, but I had never felt more happy, more free. My friends helped me become who I am now, and then I met my wife and moved away. Part of me will always be with those friends I made back then, and this is why I often dream of them. In the first dream you had of me, I remember you saw so many young people around me, in my house. (Gosh, just thinking of this, writing it, made me tear up.) And so... when I moved away from my childhood home I forgot; I put everything inside a box and stored it away. Each time it surfaced, I reduced it more and more, reduced it to something of an exaggerated confused memory... It was not 'that' bad I would keep telling myself.
You see, my stepfather, if he was simply a twat (British slang for stupid or annoying person) this would have been easier to figure out. But the way you perceived him is exactly how he was, which is funny because I never told you this directly. He was a tiger, a monster, but also a human, a regular guy who used to take me to places and could be a nice guy. He had this split side to him, he'd flip out, he'd be controlling, he was horrid, but then sometimes he would reflect and I would feel bad for him. In my mind, I could never reconcile the two halves, understand how they were the same person, so I buried the horrid crazy side of him and tried only to remember the nice times.
YES! What you said about my mother was exactly it. She actually had an affair with him while with my real dad, it was a choice she had made. My real dad moved away to live with his parents miles and miles away, so we only got to see him on holidays (those were the happiest times in my childhood). One day, when my real father came to pick us up, my stepfather answered the door. My real father (a small man dwarfed by my stepfather) started shouting, "You stole my children!" over and over again at my stepfather, who just started beating him, bloodied his face all up. It was horrid. After that, he never went to our house directly, but picked us up at our Nan's house. My older sister told me (just the other day) that when we would be driving back home from being on holiday with my real father, me, her and my younger sister would just start crying, getting anxiety-type attacks. My real father had no idea what was going on... So my stepfather, the tiger, who was also a weak pathetic man, was pushing me toward the tiger. Yes, that makes sense Maria.
One day, when I was a little older, fifteen, my stepfather came back after splitting with my mum for a few months, but in this period I had time to grow, to become my own person. I felt stronger as a person but had so much rage. He had cheated on her, and my mum had been drinking a lot at the time (this was after the period of time she would try repeatedly to kill herself so my older sister would have to go around the house hiding the knives and pills) and she started shouting back at him, and I just leaped on him and starting beating on him, I didn't care anymore, I didn't care if he beat me or ripped me apart, I was just so freaking angry, so I punched and punched him, and my mum joined in, it was surreal. And then he cried out, pleaded for us to stop. At that point, I realized the tiger was just a man, a pathetic weakling of a man.
You going into my head, my dream space, seeing all of that, breaking those walls, those barriers, making it easier for me to confront these things, you did this for me, Maria.
Last night I was dreaming I was with my wife and her family, and they have always been loving toward me, but in the dream I felt alone. I lay on the floor and I felt so down, so depressed. Nobody could understand, there was no point trying to explain. It was dinner, and everybody put themselves around the table, and there was no space for me, just a stall perched between two chairs at the corner of the table. I excused myself and went to the toilet and stared into the mirror, and a realization came to me as I understood that this was not my bathroom, in fact, I had never seen this bathroom before. I flew out of the window. I at first wanted to find you, but then I just wanted to let go, just fly into the dream, just breathe. Blackness surrounded me, and then a street started to form. The street was of the place I grew up, my childhood home street, I knew what was happening: I would follow my street and be led to my house, my dream wanted me to be here, the path had been unlocked, my dream had NEVER done this before. But alas, the alarm went off and I was forced awake.
I was scared to face all this before, but you already faced this with me, Maria, and now the path lies open, and I have the confidence to go forward. I think this is the biggest shared dreaming experience we've had so far. For me, at least, THIS is what shared dreaming is about, helping each other’s souls. You wrote:
Once all the crashing sounds end and all is still again, I turn and go through the white doors and enter another huge space, dark now, with row upon row of white balcony-like tiers. It's as if this space adjoins a great white tower, and I feel the stirrings of great and mysterious things in here that can now awaken because I toppled that metal beam.
This is exciting. It was a beautiful dream Maria. It rings so true with me, it feels so poetic and beautiful, it is my story, and you experienced it.
Maria:
Okay, this is my favorite email I've ever received. Seriously, God is great. The afternoon before I had these dreams, I prayed for help in helping you. I asked the Archangel Michael for protection, and Saint Peter for strength. I agree, this is what dream sharing is all about. And I don't think it matters that you woke up before reaching your childhood house. The path was open, your soul is well on its way to being healed. It's true this is a whole new form of psychotherapy that involves a mysterious collaboration of our souls with higher powers who want to help us, but we have to be open to them first, which is what lucid dreaming has the potential to do, and then we have to ask for help, even as we are also willing to help.
Have a wonderful day, and I hope I'll see you soon in the dream space!
Mark:
It's getting closer! Last night my dream started out about me being with a bunch of people, it was in a dark place, all piled into a corner of an alley that was barricaded up. We were being attacked by some dark creatures, they would come through the gutter system, come through the cracks of the wall. I could not see them but I felt them, they were evil. Someone in our group suggested we go out and fight them directly, that we stop hiding and fight. I agree we should not cower, although my voice is small, and as we set off, I follow the group not at the very back, but toward the end of the group. But then something inside me realizes that I have to stand up and fight. I push my way to the front and co-lead with another guy, pointing a pistol in front of me as I stride forward... At some point, I've become semi lucid, and I start to pray to God and Jesus, asking them to give me strength. I'm scared, but I feel safe somehow saying this out loud...
Then we wait, and as I wait my dreams fades and I go in and out between dreams. I know if I move around too much in this dream space I will wake, so I just wait, reading a book. The feeling of apprehension rises as I know these evil things are all around, and could come at any moment...
Then I find myself with my wife, and I walk upstairs again into the bathroom and do a reality check and realize I'm dreaming. I'm so tired for some reason, and only half sure I'm dreaming. I jump out the window to fly away, but then crash onto the floor because I feel so tired. Then I fly off again, and this time knowing where I need to go. I head toward my town of birth, this time arriving at a street which leads to my earlier house (where I was living when I was between three and nine years old) earlier memories. I am ready, prepared, not scared. But I wake up again. My mind is taking it slow but the gates are open:) Perhaps next time I will find you and take you with me?
Maria:
Awesome! This night of dreaming is profoundly great. Spiritual growth and spiritual warfare are interwoven. I was so thrilled when you prayed out loud to God and Jesus for strength. As I continue experiencing, that not only makes us feel safe, it actually truly makes us safe, and gives us strength.
Yes, the gates are open! I did a lot of demolition damage the other night with that metal pillar!:-) I'll never forget standing there listening to glass shattering and walls tumbling down and feeling at once concerned and mysteriously gratified.
This article was released in issue from
March 2021
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