Botticelli Tarot – The World
More often than not, dreams are pretty banal: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dreamt about being late for work, doing the dishes, or travelling on a train through a tunnel while smoking a cigar and eating oysters (ha, just kidding! I’m a vegetarian).
But once in a blue moon, a dream blossoms in your sleep as powerful as a myth written just for you, leaving you blinking in the dawn light and wondering ‘where on earth did that come from??’ This article is to help you get some insight into those dreams; the ones that are too precious or personal to share with anyone else, but are too rich for you to decipher alone.
First things first
Write the dream down as soon as you can, preferably just after you’ve woken up. Don’t edit yourself or try to be fancy, just write and use whatever words come naturally. When it comes to dreams, the words you use are incredibly telling. For example, imagine you have a dream in which you’re lighter than air and ready to float away, when a friend comes and holds your hand to keep you on the ground. You could write that they ‘tethered’ you, or you could say that they ‘bound’ you. Although the words are synonymous, their connotation is different: ‘tethered’ could be for your own good, ‘bound’ could be against your wishes. The language we use is a great indicator of how we feel about an issue, so when writing down our dreams it’s important that we’re honest and uncensored!
Break it down
No matter how long or intense the dream, chances are a handful of scenes/images/etc. will resonate with you upon waking. Select the parts of the dream which stand out and journal about them in detail – note how they make you feel (physically and emotionally), what colours stand out and any associations you may have towards the dream. Another example: a dream dictionary may tell you that roses mean love, but for someone who placed roses on a loved one’s grave, they’ll have a different meaning. I’ve mentioned before that dreams and Tarot speak to us in a language we already know, so trust yourself and your intuition. Believe me, there’s a part of you that already knows what the dream means.
Pick a card, any card
Once you have decided which parts of the dream are important, you can ascribe a card to each one. Go through your deck and look at all the images: try to find an illustration that suits the theme, mood, action or object from the dream fragment. Once you have a selection of cards (aim for at least three), lay them out in front of you in chronological order and read them as if they were a Tarot spread. This can give you some distance from the dream and will help you come at it from a fresh angle.
A Tarot spread for dream interpretation and insight
For this spread, you can either use the cards you chose in the previous exercise (shuffled and laid out randomly), or you can shuffle your whole deck as you usually would. Neither exercise is mutually exclusive, you can do both if you want to!
- You the dreamer.
- The theme of the dream.
- What the dream is trying to tell you.
- What you already know.
- What you should pay attention to.
- Which part of your conscious world the dream is referring to.
The Sleeping Beauty – Scottish Ballet
‘Dream a little dream’ ritual
You can request that your subconscious give you a dream to clarify the issues brought up by the first, and the best way to do this is with a simple ritual you can perform regularly. I recommend the following, done the night before your day off when you’re least likely to have you dreams interrupted by that pesky alarm.
You will need:
- Either The High Priestess or the Moon card from your Tarot deck.
- A moonstone.
- An amethyst.
- A seashell.
- A feather.
- A candle.
- Lavender essential oil.
- Your dream journal.
What to do:
- At bed time, lay your objects before you on a heat-proof surface: place your chosen card in the middle with the feather in the east, the candle in the south, the shell in the west and the amethyst in the north. Finally, lay the moonstone on top of the card.
- Take a few deep breaths. If you have a favourite prayer, poem or meditation, you may want to utilise it now.
- Anoint your temples and the back of your neck with a small amount of lavender oil. As you do so, say:
“May the east bless my dreams with inspiration,
May the south bless my dreams with strong insight,
May the west bless my dreams with intuition,
May the north bless me with strong roots, so I may remember my dreams come morning light.
By earth and air, sky and sea:
May my dreams be clear to me.”
- Allow yourself a few moments of meditation on the Tarot card before blowing out the candle.
- Slip the moonstone under your pillow and place your dream journal next to your bed. Once you are comfortable and the lights are out, repeat ‘by earth and air, sky and sea: may my dreams be clear to me’ silently until you fall asleep (the simpler the rhyme, the more likely it is to anchor into your mind as you fall asleep. Look at it this way: how many nursery rhymes can you remember? Exactly).
- Write down any dreams you have in your dream journal as soon as you wake up. Don’t worry if you can’t remember much to begin with, developing this skill is like exercising a muscle: the more you use it, the stronger it will become. Therefore, the more attention you pay to your dreams, the more details you’ll be able to remember.
This ritual should be done once a week until you feel it is no longer necessary. In between rituals, keep the moonstone under your pillow and repeat the rhyme as you’re lying in bed.
I have found my dreams to be a great source of inspiration and wisdom: the more attention I pay to them, the more treasure they give me. Often times my conscious mind will be stuck in a rut about a particular issue, looping around and around itself until it’s worn a pathway through my thoughts. That’s usually the moment when a dream will appear in which I’ll read a book or have a discussion with a friend that will illuminate the problem in a way I’d never considered. Dreams shouldn’t be dismissed or ignored, they’re an important part of our psyche and, like the Tarot, are a great tool for accessing the wisdom we aren’t even aware we already possess.
“Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.”
~ C. G. Jung
