Natalia Snider is a certified dream practitioner living in Carbondale. She works with people’s dreams and imaginations to facilitate self-healing. Every month, she will analyze someone’s dream in The Sopris Sun. Anyone can submit a dream for personal analysis or inclusion in this column by visiting dreamhealings.com
Dreams
1) I had a lucid dream in the same dream house I always become lucid in, but this time my recently deceased grandma showed up suddenly to tell me she loves me. The other “characters” in the dream noticed her, too, and looked shocked like she wasn’t supposed to be there. She was only there for a few seconds and I wish I could’ve talked to her.
2) I never remember my dreams, but I remembered this one. I had a dream a year after my grandfather passed that he came to check up on me. I hadn’t gotten the chance to talk to him or update him on my life before he passed, but in the dream he was asking all about my truck — which he didn’t know I had. It was an identical interaction to the conversations we would have when he was alive. It felt real to me; his presence was beyond dream-like.
3) A friend told me of a dream he had of his father, which he said was as real as talking to someone fully awake. They discussed many matters in which he found healing from. He relayed that he knew his father had passed that night when he awoke, and moments later got the call that confirmed this. He said that having that dream helped him with the passing and he was able to tell his sibling that their father was okay.
Interpretation
These dreams are what we call visitation dreams, where one is visited by the astral body (soul) of a deceased person. They are not to be interpreted, but rather believed in and cherished. For those of you who have had one, you will never be convinced that it wasn’t real.
I am not here to do that. On the contrary, I am an ally. Having had many of my own, I understand how important it is to be believed, especially since oftentimes they are life changing experiences. Such dreams are also an incredible validation of the vastness of experiences one can have while asleep.
These dreams have strong signifiers of being hyper realistic, tangible and invite a feeling of clear headedness as opposed to the haziness of the normal dream state. For me, I always feel as if I wake up into them from my personal convoluted dream realm into the clarity of the astral realm.
Think back to your dreams, have you had one with these signifiers? They happen more often than we realize. Although the important ones leave an impact impossible to ignore, we often take counsel with loved ones in the astral without remembering. If you wake with a feeling of having just been somewhere very real but can’t recall, chances are you were in the astral.
For those dreamers who are highly lucid, meaning that you can manipulate your dreams at will, there are dream character checks that can be applied as an additional validation. Does this visitor obey your thought control? If so, then they are of your own creation and this is probably not their astral body. Can you see their eyes if you get closer? If you get farther away does their face change? Nothing about them should behave like a typical dream if this is really them.
I could go on, but I would like to leave space for a method for those of you who have lost someone and are longing to see them again in this way. Of course these dreams happen on their own but, if you wish to call someone in, I can’t stress enough the importance of doing so in full conscious protection and clarity of mind.
To try for a visitation dream, you must set and hold protected space. In bed before you fall asleep, use precise wording to create a space in your mind’s eye. Protect this space from all outside influences with your words and will. With your words: Allow this space to stay open until you choose to close it, or until they come. This is like leaving the light on for a meeting place in which they are the only ones with the key.
Next, write down your dreams as best you can because you may have had signs of a visitation but aren’t realizing it until you write it down or look back to read it. If you see signs but don’t remember, trust that the information shared was only for your subconscious at the time.
If you need better dream recall or want to wake right from the astral, you can utilize the common dream recall method of drinking water before bed, enough to wake you to use the bathroom. The goal is for your body to wake within a natural deep-to-light cycle. This is important because we frequent the astral realm most often from deep sleep, and deep sleep happens for longer periods of time earlier in the night.
Lastly, share your visitation dreams because the more dreams we share the more we understand.