I don’t normally do this–share details about personal experience, particularly of a spiritual nature–but last night I had a very powerful experience through the medium of my dream. I have been struggling for a few weeks now sleeping regularly. Bouts of insomnia, stress, disturbing sometimes graphic and horrifying nightmares. This is very odd for me–normally I hit the pillow lights out and I sleep like a baby.
Over the weeks I have been increasingly praying the prayer from The Book of Common Prayer’s Compline service (the final prayers of the evening) which petition the Lord to send the angels to guard this house from the “terrors of the night.”
Last night I had a dream that I was killed. I watched myself die. Technically I was murdered (shot) but the imagery was not particularly violent or bloody. More cartoon-y almost in a sense. I was shot and then fell back into a cavernous swimming pool. It was almost more like a lake within a cave (double womb/death imagery). I watched myself fall endlessly through the crystal blue water. At this point in the dream, my proximate self-sense was the Witness, the observer of my-self, (my distal self) which in this case was my idealized-emotional-subtle-dream self. I watched that self plummet gracefully through the water and simply relaxed into the process of watching myself die.
At some point in this process, I became lucid (aware of being one was dreaming). I then re-entered the perspective of my now dead subtle-dream self and immediately re-awoke and was jolted up through the water (rebirth-resurrection theme). I maintained both the awareness of being in a dream while simultaneously taking up the position of the subtle-self. i.e. I made choices, felt the expression of my emotional-subtle self.
Upon waking from that dream, I could feel a definite release of bodily and emotional contractions, especially in my chest. I really have no idea what was going on through this process–nor now with some (partial?) resolution.
