I’m curious: since those years in my 40s and 50s, my nightly dream life has greatly subsided. I ask myself: Does this mean that I no longer need to dream? That I am more capable of delving into unconscious material in waking life? Well, certainly, I am much more familiar with and able to access multidimensional realms now. The boundaries between self and other, internal and external, waking and sleeping, not to mention the taking on and quicksilver alteration of roles that mask the self  when necessary or helpful — all these polarities feel artificial, and easily penetrated, diffused, altered, played with! At 75 years of age, and having awakened long ago to so much else that accompanies and envelops our tiny 3D world, I cavort easily with and within a vast kaleidoscoping panorama, still capable of being shocked when conscious or unconscious desired expectations are not met, but only briefly; so quickly do I now wake up inside the conscious noticing of any desired expectation that is suddenly yanked out from under. Furthermore, I have learned to welcome each shock as an impulse to expanding awareness. 

 

Chapter Five

DREAMS as a Dialogue with the Soul

 

Discovering Value

During my first marriage I was subjected to many dreams with a similar theme. Either I was running on a treadmill, not getting anywhere; or I was trying to run, but can’t — my legs are too heavy, or I am enveloped in water.

 The general tone of my life as a young wife and mother was that of extreme frustration, of having huge energy, but not being able to use it — of being afraid to contact it because it would show up as rage, towards my husband, or heaven forbid! — my children. I didn’t consciously think of dreams as important, though these particular ones were — I knew that. I didn’t know how I knew, or why they were important. I didn’t connect them to my frustration. My conscious concerns were piecemeal — whether these new diapers were helping Colin’s diaper rash, what to fix for dinner. I was immersed in life, not evaluating it — until that first peritonitis attack.

At 27, during the first year after separating from my husband, my dreams changed completely, to invoke new themes: I am walking alone through huge natural landscapes, mountains, valleys. The feelings were that of trepidation, awe, exploration, dwarfed by the elemental power of my surroundings. By this time I knewmy dreams were important, and I knew that these dreams symbolized my still tentative investigation into the powerful presence of my own mysterious nature.

To go from not paying much attention to dreams to realizing that dreams are of extraordinary value is a big switch. And one does not make this switch without making others, too. Transformation is multidimensional. Changes in one area of life bleed into others. For me, one of the first signs of change had to do with books.

 

Like others who describe the process of “waking up” to a larger reality, at some point during the year proceeding my peritonitis attack I had begun to magnetize certain books. One would be recommended by a friend, another would call to me on the shelf of the book store, a third would fall to the floor in front of me at the library. Consciousness was beginning to pierce the fog I had been in since childhood. Soul was guiding that awareness to select what would influence it, choosing from millions of published volumes, those particular ones which would help meevolve.

One such book was R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience.When someone loaned this book to me in early 1969, I dismissed it as “simpleminded.” One year later, post-peritonitis, I read it again. This time it was as if I was reading between the lines, or better: it was as if I was sensing, or even inhabiting, the space within which the words were written. Now, as far as I was concerned, this book was “the simple truth.”

I was fascinated to notice the shift in my perception of the meaning of Laing’s book. I found this shift in me as fascinating as the book itself.

Two science fiction books called to me during that period: Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which talks about a generation which merges and rises into space, and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in A Strange Land, in which the title says it all. I was feeling strange, and I was lonely, and had it not been for these and other books, I would have — what? Gone mad? Been mad? Yet what is “sanity,” says Laing, but social agreement as to what is real. If I was the only one in my social reality who was seeing/feeling the world differently, then, to discover authors whose books resonated in me, I knew I was not mad.

Perhaps the most valuable book for me during that period was C.G. Jung’s Memories, Dreams, and Reflections. I treasured this little impressionistic account of his inner life, poring over it to glean the value so missing in my own life. Something had happened to me. Something profound and life-changing. The entire tone and rhythm of my life had altered, deepened. Pre-peritonitis, a student in one of my undergraduate seminars had asked me if she could write a paper on “value.” “Value?!” I had scoffed. “What is value? I have no idea what that word means.” My outburst had shocked us all. And it left me vaguely puzzled: why did her innocent question provoke such an attack?

Now, only one year later, I was steeped in value, having discovered its riches in the underground mine of the unconscious and its messages, symbolized in dreams.

Most autobiographies detail their authors’ accounts of and reflections upon worldly events in which they were participants or observers. Jung’s autobiography records his opening to the larger life within, as presented through the recounting of certain dreams and paranormal experiences. For Jung, dreams seemed to be more important than his waking life! Never had I encountered an author so fascinated with exploring the mysterious unbounded ocean of his own unconscious. I treasured this book like a love letter.

During the second year of living on my own, I began to have dreams of huge warehouse-sized structures being built within huge spaces. In a series of three dreams with this theme, over a number of months, the structures became more and more complex and multi-dimensional. I viewed these structures as symbols for my psyche, which was differentiating through an expanding awareness.

 

During this time, I was also dreaming of masks, stages, of being embarrassed in public without any clothes. My old persona had ripped off, and I was trying on new ones, or I was feeling naked, unprotected, vulnerable.

 

It has now been nearly 30 years since I first began to reflect on my dreams. During this entire time, whenever I have felt utterly alone and abandoned, I have sooner or later remembered my dreams, and my dreaming self. The “I” of my waking life is paired with this larger, more mysterious other which is not confined to the usual laws of time and space. There are times when my dreams have overlapped the dreams of others who are close to me. (The poet Yeats, in his autobiography, also speaks of this phenomenon.) At other times my dreams have been prophetic, letting me know what was coming, preparing me, or warning me.

No matter what is going on, when I am in a serious quandary, my principal teacher and advisor has been this mysterious Other. I ask my unconscious for a dream, I focus my intent on receiving that dream — and it usually comes, that very night.

I don’t always “understand” these dreams, yet they are always helpful; they throw a new light on my situation, or they place the present conundrum within a larger, more comprehensive framework. I shift my focus, and regroup. What bothers me before I go to bed, by morning dissolves into a larger space.

This may be the original meaning behind the old saying, “sleep on it.”

Big Dreams

In my early 30s, after I was fired from the experimental college, and during the recovery period from my third and final peritonitis attack, I was visited by this dream:

I am on my horse, Goldie [this is the horse I had as a child].We are going towards the east, and the rising sun. [As a child, I would ride Goldie at dawn. Her full name was Golden Sunlight.]Suddenly Goldie wants to go home again. I turn her around to go back home. We come to a great stone wall. There is a large open gate in the wall, guarded by a wolf sitting on his haunches in front of the gate to the left. The wolf has fierce yellow eyes, and they are staring at me. In order to go through the gate, I must stare the wolf down.

This dream was the first of what I call “Big Dreams.” These are dreams I remember as well as or even better than events in my waking life, and from which I date particular eras. The dream itself constitutes or at least signals the beginning of some kind of vast, psychic shift.

I awakened from this dream feeling like a shock wave had ricocheted through my body. One particular image struck me, the wolf’s yellow eyes, how they stared at me. This part of the dream felt numinous, shining, sacred. The intent of the dream was to go home again, but in order to do so I had to get through the gate, and in order to do that I had to stare the wolf down. Instinctively also, I knew that this wolf was called “The Guardian of the Gate,” and indeed, looking it up in a symbol dictionary later, I discovered that there is such an archetype, that it takes the form of a Wolf, that “Guardian of the Gate” is its name.

For many months afterwards, the dream haunted me. I had “to go home again,” but to what dimension was the dream referring?

Six months later, I was visiting my old home town in Idaho when I met up again with my old high school boyfriend. Dick and I had not seen each other for many years. That night we discovered that each of us had been dreaming of the other all this time. He became my second husband, I his second wife, our brief marriage a wonderfully mutual healing experience.

I was going back to my home town to marry my high school boyfriend . . . I had fulfilled the dream! But part of the dream didn’t make sense. What about the Wolf? His yellow eyes? Staring him down? This aspect of the dream puzzled me, made me uneasy.

I married Dick in 1974. By 1976 I was dreaming of snakes. In the first dream I am turning around to view a bowel movement I have just made in the toilet, and seeing it turn into writhing snakes. In the second, I am walking up a grassy hill — the grass is lime green, the color of early spring, and the individual blades of grass are turning into tiny green snakes.

Like a snake, despite our love, I had begun to shed the skin of my second marriage. And though we didn’t divorce until 1977, those snake dreams were prophetic. I knew, I knew— not consciously, but in my gut. I didn’t like those dreams. I knew they meant change, and was heartsick to think I would actually have to leave our warm, stable, utterly secure and loving home.

I had gone home again, in one sense. But the dream wasn’t finished with me. The finale didn’t come until three years later, when I married my nemesis, Phil Lowman (see chapter 4, pp. ___ ). One night in September of 1981 I was talking to Phil’s teenage niece who had just arrived for a visit. (Phil had “gone out,” for the evening.) I mentioned to her a story Phil had told about his past, and she told me it hadn’t happened quite that way. What? I brought up another story. Again, a slight, but decided fabrication. The scales began to fall from my eyes. I sat there across the table from Phil’s favorite niece, stunned, my eyes opening wider and wider I discovered story after story was either embroidered to make Phil into a hero, or just plain false.

This discovery had an immediate repercussion: it freed me up from 13 months of psychic emprisonment. I could not leave him until I finally understood what was going on. No matter how awful my life with Phil, I was not able to leave him until I had gained some understanding of what was keeping me there.

Now I knew. Phil was an alcoholic, and he was a pathological liar. What others had insisted to me, what I had long suspected, but never dared admit or confront, was true. Not only could I not change him, heal him, save him, I had no idea who he was! He had deceived me from the beginning. He had presented the mirror to my face. I had deceived myself from the beginning. Not only was I not a “guru,” I was a stupid fool.

By the time she and I were through talking it was midnight. The job was done. In the morning I would pack up and leave, taking her with me.

At 1:00 AM I was startled awake by noise outside — the sound of the door of his big old Chevy truck slamming. A voice inside me commanded: CENTER YOURSELF. YOU HAVE ONE MINUTE.

The truck door slammed. The outside door to the house creaked open, slammed shut. Then the inside door. Opened, slammed shut. A light flicked on. Footfalls, somewhat unsteady, but loud, heavy, coming closer. The bedroom door opened to reveal his dark form illumined from behind.

Phil was drunk. In our long and difficult journey I had never seen him drunk. Now, after thirteen terrible months, he was finally showing me who he was. His soul, so long burdened by his wounded personality (he had said he had been a “black beret” in Vietnam and elsewhere, both a sniper and an “assassin.” True? Who knows!) was now displaying for me the full extent of the damage.

Phil was not a slap happy drunk, nor a dull drunk. He was a mean drunk — intimidating and violent. He sat down on the bed, where I was now sitting up, centered. I looked into his glittering eyes. Shock! Phil’s eyes were yellow. Not the whites of the eyes, but the iris.(His eyes were normally greenish.) The shock of that sudden soul contact began a four hour ordeal. In order to get out of there, I had to take power over him. In order to do that I had to continuously stare him down. Lock in eye contact. Meanwhile, he was slowly, deliberately, getting out his guns, caressing them, threatening me with them. Meanwhile, I was telling him, as quietly and calmly as possible, that I was going to call the police. He kept grabbing the phone out of my hands. Finally, he grabbed the phone a final time and called up the owner of the bar where he had been drinking. That man — bless him, a stranger! — came over at 4:00 AM. I asked him to please keep Phil there so that his niece and I could leave the house. Which we did, stopping at a phone booth to call a woman I had only recently met to beg her to let us hide in her house until I could decide what to do next.

That night climaxed my experience of the progressed Sun opposite Pluto “empowerment” I had been eagerly awaiting in my astrological chart. I thought “power” would just come to me as my due during this once-in-a-lifetime progression. Though I had spouted theories about “Pluto” and its effects to my astrological clients, I had had no idea what death and resurrection actually meant to the psycheuntil that fateful night. The woman who left the house in the early dawn with Phil’s niece in her protection was notthe woman who had welcomed that niece the night before.

And that was the night I finally fulfilled the promise of the dream, staring down the Wolf with Yellow Eyes, the Guardian of the Gate, Phil Lowman. Seven years after the dream, I had finally come home — not to Dick, not to my home town, but to myself.

I was almost 40 years old.

Dreams in My Forties

I remember somewhere Jung said that in the first half of our life we are busy in the outside world; that once we hit midlife we turn inward. He called the resulting process of integrating the heretofore undiscovered layers of our self “individuation.”

Meeting, living with, and escaping from Phil Lowman had unnerved me. I realized I didn’t know myself very well, didn’t understand the part of me that could throw me into hell and keep me there for so long. I was beginning to understand that every light throws a shadow. That, as the macrobiotic philosophy puts it. “Every front has a back.” My shadow was self-destructive. I wanted to know why.

Then I discovered Orphan Annie (see chapter 4, pp ___). During the time I was consciously working with her, I was dreaming of babies, small children. Usually I was the mother, or the caretaker. I had left the baby in the bathwater, untended. Or, I was trying to revive the baby.Or, the parents came to take the baby from me, not appreciating that I had been tending it.

 A dream theme which occurred with variations throughout my entire 40s was that of being chased by a “scuzzy white male.”Knowing this had to do with the integration of my animus, my own inner male energy, I was grateful to finally dream that I turned to face the one who was stalking me.This ended the series; soon after, I met my husband, Jeffrey Joel, a man with a powerful, protective, gentle energy.

Earlier, towards the end of the period during which I was seeing the man who was abandoning me every three weeks on schedule (see Walking, chapter ___), I had another Big Dream. This dream gave me the final insight needed to break the spell of my original childhood drama: I am walking with a long stick to see some dead snakes. They are on the rooftop of an old building. But first I see a huge old tree, under which is a blanket, spread out. I know that under that blanket is a porcupine, with a snake wrapped around it. I use my stick to flip the blanket off, and am surprised to see not just one snake, but two snakes, wrapped around the porcupine. All three of them are dead. The porcupine’s quills have so decayed, they have turned to mush, and are no long protective. The two snakes, though dead, look alive, and they are wound around the porcupine in perfect alignment, their heads in the same direction. I go to the building and start flipping the dead snakes off the roof with my stick. One of them almost lands on me. I am so revulsed, I walk away from the entire situation.

The difference between this dream with snakes and the snake dreams during the end of my time with Dick was immediately apparent. If snakes are the energy of renewal, aliveness, then these snakes only seemed alive; they represented dead energy, something I no longer needed.

The next day I went walking with my friend Clarissa, wanting to process this dream. “The dream,” I told her, “is about my lover, his wife, and me. I am the porcupine, they are perfectly aligned with one another, and both are squeezing me. I cannot simply blame her, but must look to them equally for what they have done to me.” Immediately Clarissa responded, “I think you have to look deeper, Ann. The snakes are your parents.”

The finality in her tone sent a shock wave through my body. She was correct. The triangle I had created with this man and his ex-wife mirrored the dynamic among my mother and father and me as a small child. The sense of abandonment began when he went off to World War II and she was left weeping, despondent, unable to mother me. Yet she was all I had. Then, when he returned from the war, my sense of abandonment deepened when she “sided with him” over me.

This man had always reminded me of my mother, rather than my father. In being with him, I was proud to think I was breaking the pattern of attracting (and then fighting) with men who reminded me of my father. What this dream told me, though it would take another year before I was able to fully feel its early childhood ramifications, was that my parents were aligned, that it was the dynamicbetween them which had suffocated me, not just one parent or the other. In order to integrate the male and female within myself, I would first have to dismantle the dynamics of that original triangle.

A few years later I made another discovery about that dream, and laughed at the obvious symbolism: the snakes were wrapped around the porcupine like a caduceus, symbol of the medical profession. My father is a medical doctor and my mother a nurse.

Then, in 1988, when I was 45 years old, another Big Dream: I am standing on a huge ice field. I am part of an excavation team of researchers. We have dug down to a huge head of a bull, its horns like crescent moons. The bull’s head is the size of a many-storied building. Frozen in ancient times, it is now thawing, coming to life.

At the time of the dream, I instantly interpreted it as the reawakening of sex force within myself. The next day I drove over to the house of the man I had broken up with several months earlier, and brazenly forced myself on him sexually. He was shocked — and delighted.

Fifteen months later, I was in Crete with Clarissa. At Knossos, a famous ruins of the ancient Minoan civilization, the last outpost of the goddess, we saw the huge horns of a bull, like crescent moons, carved out of stone. Later, at the museum, we picked up a postcard showing a bull’s head, with crescent horns. The entire head looked exactly like the image in my dream.

The dream had been prophetic. First, of our trip to Greece, 18 months later — and perhaps that dream unconsciously set that trip in motion. Secondly, though I didn’t realize it at the time, the sex force that surged through me in the aftermath of the dream is, I would say now, synonymous with sacred Goddess energy, what we must reintegrate, in order to heal our civilization.

After Crete, Clarissa and I travelled to the Peloponnesus, to the ruins of the sanctuary of Asclepios, the Greek god of healing. It was a brilliant late autumn afternoon. As soon as we got off the bus there, the surrounding hills and proximity to the sea felt so familiar . . . I felt like I was drugged, in trance. Within minutes of beginning to wander through the ruins I lay down next to a crumbling wall and fell fast asleep.

Later, in the museum, I was astonished to discover that this sanctuary of Asclepios was a temple of dreams. That when one who needed to be healed arrived there, he or she would sleep in a great oblong hall with others. In the morning, his or her dream of that night would be told to the healers, who would see in it instructions for regaining health.

Shortly before our trip to Greece, I had started the magazine, Crone Chronicles, of which the founding purpose was and is “to activate the archetype of the Crone within contemporary western culture.” The symbol of this publication [which ultimately ran for 12 years] is the Raven, which came to me in a dream just prior to the sudden decision to start the magazine. I didn’t remember the dream itself. But it did wake me up. Or rather, a huge black bird woke me up, clutching my shoulders with its talons from behind. It cawed — or crowed — at me, “Wake Up! Wake Up! It’s Time! It’s Time!”

Goddess Dreams, 1996

As I allow my dreams to permeate my waking life, paying attention to their sometimes prophetic nature, to how individual and collective orders interpenetrate, I move further and further out of the mainstream and into magic. Perhaps this is why so few people dare to take their dreams seriously. To do so is to profoundly disturb our socially constructed, linear, logical façade.

In 1996, I had three Big Dreams, one right after another, which I will be contemplating and fulfilling for years. All three of these dreams have, I feel, both individual and collective significance. I will conclude this chapter by presenting them with commentary, from my journal.

“Dream, 2/24/96: I woke up in the early AM feeling as if I had been on a long journey, of which only two images remained, and they were vague and fuzzy; then I dove down again into sleep, and it felt as if I reviewed the entire journey, again leaving me with the same two images: * First image: I am before a tribunal, which is siting in judgment on me. Sitting in a chair, I face four people who are sitting in a line at a table. They are all professors of philosophy at B.U. The one on the left speaks first. He is a hooded figure, dressed in a long robe, with its hood shading his face so I cannot even see the eyes. The figure feels more archetypal than personal, although he says his name is “Husserl.” He demands an accounting of me: Who am I? What have I done with my life? All the time, I am aware that Agassi [my graduate school mentor]sits next to him. I am thankful for his presence, and feel a heart connection between us. The other two figures are in the background.

 I tell “Husserl” my name, and say that though I didn’t have him for a teacher at B.U., I was there between 1966 and 1972.

The scene now shifts so that Agassi is sitting where “Husserl” was, and I am sitting near him at the end of the table. Nancy [a friend from my 20s] is there, witnessing my conversation with him. The feeling is warm, familiar, intimate. I tell him how much I appreciate him, and am grateful to him, that he has remained with me all these years, that I often think about trying to connect with him again . . . He replies quietly, in a sort of awestruck tone: “After the explosion in Washington, I saw the face of God.” The feeling is that he is telling me that he now understands where I was coming from back then, and he shares the same reality.

 The second scene: A white wall, in the center of which is a closed white door. I am standing directly in front of the door. The feeling is I must go through it.*

“At first, when I woke up from this dream, the two images of the grim reaper and the white door made me think of death. I spent a few days mulling it over, feeling that I needed to prepare for death, if necessary. Going through initial panic, then just getting into the feeling of ‘Wow, am I being asked to move into a different reality now; am I needed elsewhere?’

“When I told the dream to Jeff, he agreed it represented ‘a death of some kind.’ And gave the name “Husserl” a dimension, by saying he (a German philosopher) talked about “the thing in itself,” in phenomenology, as if it was unknowable, i.e., he was anti-mystic. He also mentioned Husserl’s association with Heidigger, who has been linked to Hitler. My heritage is German, and as a child I had experienced my father as a dictator.

From my journal: “I wasn’t able to speak to Claudia about the dream until last night (Monday, February 26). She brought out the implied polarity between the “grim reaper” figure and Agassi. The grim reaper is my father, and he does not know me, or feel me, and so I have to give him an accounting of my life, to explain and defend myself. Agassi was the good father, in a sense, as he helped me overcome my own father, and, it turns out, he understood the religious nature of my quest. The paradoxes here! Mystic (Agassi/me) versus the Materialist (Husserl/my father). The mystic/materialist polarity, working with that all my life. How to embrace them, integrate them?

“Also, at first I saw the wall as having a colonial feeling, and connected that to “Washington” which meant Washington D.C. Then one night later, I realized Washington could, or could also mean Seattle, where I am going in ten days, again to be “judged” by my father. The explosion, then could be something psychic. And/or, this could be a prophetic dream about this country, its politics. Blowing up the White House? Claudia mentioned this, and I had also thought of it, and there is now a current movie preview that shows this happening.

“Having talked to her, now feeling much more profoundly the Gemini twin polarity between the grim reaper and Agassi figures, how I am symbiotic with both, and they symbiotic with each other. I sense that the door represents the future. The door and the wall felt peaceful. As if this is what lies beyond this deep-seated polarity within me.

(Astrologers: in my natal chart,  Saturn and Uranus ara  in early Gemini, conjunct. Gemini symbolizes the conscious mind; Saturn in Gemini refers to a mind that is strong, rational, logical, traditional; Uranus in Gemini refers to its opposite: a mind which is intuitive, unpredictable, unusual, open to the unknown. This conjunction is opposed to Mars, in early Sagittarius. Sagittarius, directly opposite Gemini, is the sign of the search for universal understanding. Mars, as focused energy, or drive, in Sagittarius means that I am driven to search for universal understanding. The entire configuration of Saturn/Uranus opposite Mars is now (1996) beginning to be conjuncted by transit Pluto in early Sagittarius. Thus this dream was symbolizing the Pluto transit of this significant aspect of my chart.)

“On Sunday, the very day Pluto turned to go retrograde, more insights into this dream with Agassi and the Grim Reaper. (When a planet turns, to go either retrograde or direct, is when that planet’s energy is felt most intensely.) Sitting in a restaurant with three women I do not know well. I tell them the dream. One of them says (in reference to Agassi’s remark “When the explosion happened I saw the face of God”): “The explosion has already happened.”

“All of a sudden I focused on the time I lived in Washington, D.C. as an undergraduate. And then I felt my mind, like a laser beam, go rooting for what that explosion was, like a sort of rat, tat, tat, bingo! There it was: the image of my first son, Sean, being born. The entrance into the mysteries, there on that awful sterile table in the middle of the hospital with the macho doctor and all the artificial lights, and the gleaming steel. The miracle of creation, that this fully formed human being should emerge from between my legs, like two pillars; that I was the vessel for creation. Yes, when that explosion happened in Washington, I saw the face of the Goddess, and that was the other world that I entered (and soon tucked away) and which was the grounding for everything that happened next.

By the time I met Agassi (who, for me, represents Uranus in Gemini), I was ready for him. He taught me that truth cannot be accessed through the left brain. And yet he was caught up in the left brain, and knew it was a dead end. He, somehow, was also in touch with the mysteries, with mysticism, though he couldn’t afford to feel. Seeing Dad as Saturn in Gemini, and these two, Dad and Agassi, Saturn and Uranus in Gemini, the twins, with me opposing them both as Mars in Sagittarius, the seeker, going after the Truth. Now with transit Pluto right on top of Mars, and turning, I remember this extraordinary time when Sean was born and how it has been the foundation for all my seeking since.”

A few months later, a second Big Dream moved me deeper into Goddess reality. • I see a small motor boat leaving the dock to go out on the open water. In it, I see, standing in the center of the boat with her back to me, a tall, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, well-muscled woman in full wedding dress. I realize then that this event is a wedding of some kind.

 

“I talk to Claudia about these dreams and she tells me the woman in the boat “feels like an Amazon.” Laury comments: “Aha, bird of Neptune!”

 

“Despite the deeply feminine and sacred feeling in the second Big Dream, a few months later I was reliving, once again, the feeling of worthlessness that had accompanied me as a child. The sense of depression and futility was so strong that I had stayed in bed for a day. That night, I received the third Big Dream of this year. Again, the theme is that of a wedding, or integration, a celebration of feminine energy. • Judy [an artist with whom I am acquainted] is to receive some kind of huge recognition or award, after a lifetime of expressing her extraordinary talent without any kind of recognition or recompense. In order to receive her award properly, she is going to get out a dress of hers which comes from her mother’s line — was her grandmother’s or great grandmother’s. The dress is pure white, made out of a heavy rich material, and is in perfect condition, as if it has never been worn. I see a small section of it, how the seams are beautifully and intricately done, etc. She is going to have an artist sew on huge jewels in some kind of pattern on the chest of the dress to make it fit for her presentation at the award-giving ceremony. She is going to hire Laury, no she is going to hire Renee (another friend), to sew on the jewels in a pattern of her own (Judy’s) design. She will ask $2000 for this task of designing pattern and sewing on the jewels, to be received from the same people who are now building her a house. *

“Judy is the perfect symbol for that rich, artistic, feminine part of me that has not been recognized. And in waking life, Judy really is having a house built for her! Judy’s physical build reminds me of Amazon energy, as does this dream resonate with the other dream of the Amazon Goddess woman dressed in a white backless wedding gown, standing in a small boat with her back to me, being motored out to sea. Again, feels like a bride, like some kind of integration is taking place. But this time the emphasis seems to be on receiving reward for work well done.

“Renee . . . wait . . . my mother’s name is Renee! Claudia: “You say, ‘as if it has never been worn. But of course it has been worn. What was real long ago is returning . . .” The word, Renee, comes from the French: Re-nee: reborn.

I await the fulfillment of these three dreams.