It has been 18 months since I had my healing Octopus dream and almost 12 months since I started offering free lucid dream therapy to the public every Wednesday on Zoom. Each week as I guide groups into my Octopus dream, I relive the experience again and again. Although ideas come and fade quickly in this day and age, I have not grown bored of the Octopus dream as I thought I might. On the contrary, the more I engage with the Octopus dream, the more I learn from it, and the more I am committed to the mission of saving the world with its transformative power.
The underwater dreaming journey is vivid, ethereal, and peaceful. Each week, I begin the session by leading participants into a mind place by the water to relax and fall asleep. I then wake them up in the underwater dream to meet my Octopus dream friend, who slowly swims from the ocean's depth. It dances gracefully to the gentle flow of the water and expands into a giant healing bubble. Participants move inside and find their energy body melting, freeing all emotional shackles as their egos dissolve and become one with the quantum field of shimmering healing substance.
At the end of the dreaming journey, I welcome participants back into the Zoom meeting. Although most were strangers a mere hour ago, they are profoundly relaxed, amazed, and grateful - eager to share personal experiences from their underwater dreaming journeys. Feeling lighter is a general consensus. A young man said he felt a 50-ton truck had been lifted off him. Consistently people report significant pain and stress reduction. Most people notice the quality of their sleep improves afterwards.
While visiting my dreamscape, some people have their own dreaming visions. Last week, two people dreamt of swimming with sea turtles, and one person discovered a giant crystal flower on the seafloor. The week before, two people dreamt of turning into mermaids. Some see aquatic creatures such as whales and dolphins, and others reconnected with lost memories from childhood and deceased loved ones. These shared experiences validate my belief that my dream therapy opens a pathway to the inner, unseen realm and that a healing dream improves physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing.
What is the Octopus teaching us? The answer lies deep within each person. Softening, expanding, and ultimately dissolving, the dreaming journey is a gradual process of loosening and letting go of emotions. First the body, then the mind, and eventually we dissolve the vessel of emotions itself - our energy bodies or the ego - so that there is nothing left to contain the heaviness from waking life. Inside the healing bubble, after the energy body has completely melted, there is no more me and they, inside and outside, Yin and Yang, right and wrong... Everything is the same, and I am everything. There is no time, space, and no more boundary. One is no longer limited to gender, age, ethnicities, religion, political ideologies, and other defining attributes. In that state of pure consciousness, one dissolves and becomes one with the universal healing energy like a drop of water returning into the ocean.
A few sessions ago, a woman mentioned that she felt guilty for depleting the Octopus's energy. My mother has similar concerns and often asks if I feel tired from giving these sessions. When I lead these sessions, I also experience the healing dream and benefit from the great dissolving. I, too, feel more relaxed, lighter, and energized from the dreaming experience. As for the Octopus, I don't know for sure. But, my intuition tells me that its energy is as old as water, which never depletes, only shapeshifts from one form to another.
The healing bubble that the Octopus shapeshifts into reminds me much of a chrysalis. A caterpillar undergoes metamorphosis to grow into a butterfly. When it's time to transform, the caterpillar sheds its old skin and makes a chrysalis out of the hard shell underneath the skin. Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar's body liquefies, dissolves into cells, and then rearranges to build a butterfly, complete with wings and ready to take flight!
The Octopus teaches the art of shapeshifting and dissolving, which is unfolding in my own life. Compared to 18 months ago, I have pivoted away from that overworked, anxious, self-doubting mom entrepreneur to one who has found purpose in life and has embarked on a healing journey that facilitates positive transformation. This inner transformation has healed my past traumas, revived my relationships, expanded my life's purpose, and provided me with the confidence to reach out and help others navigate a rapidly changing and deeply divided world.
Besides leading the weekly group practices, I also practice the Octopus dream lucidly during the day in meditations and daydreams as well as at night before falling asleep and in between periods of sleep. My continued practice has instilled a deep sense of calm and awareness in my waking life - an invaluable asset in keeping calm and adapting to changes in these uncertain times as the Pandemic and extreme weather unfolds.
When I encounter stressors and find my body hardened and compacted in response, I close my eyes and visualize my spirit body opening and expanding like the Octopus, then dissolving and becoming one with the healing light all around me. As I typed these words, a text message came in from one of my new employees to resign so she could work from home. She had been a great addition to the team, and I'd spent time training her over the last two months. Losing her would mean going back to hiring and training again and would typically elicit a sense of panic and dread in me, especially now when Covid-19 is causing widespread staff shortages. However, not this time. A challenge such as this is the perfect opportunity to put dream therapy to practice. I close my eyes, connect with my breath, and visualize dissolving in the healing light. When I open my eyes, I feel enlightened and begin tending to the new tasks, rescheduling and hiring, with calmness, ease, and clarity.