John: The imagery in your dream (Not So Itsy-Bitsy) about the spider that grows larger and larger shows an aspect of the imagination that can create a situation where a person can psych himself or herself out. Say for example you go to a doctor’s office and get upset by what the doctor doesn’t say. What the doctor says doesn’t satisfy on some level, so the imagination keeps working and all sorts of scenarios can pop up. So this dream shows this kind of exaggeration, to the point of creating that heebie-jeebie quality. It shows how a notion can get into one’s head and become greatly exaggerated.
Imagination is a good quality if it doesn’t run rampant, because it’s actually necessary to be able to bring insightfulness from deeper inside into cognition. This kind of active imagination quality seems to be intangible, but actually has tangibility in terms of the listening center of the heart, enabling one to have a sense of things from the other side. But when it sits there kind of percolating, so that one’s condition in the outer is one aspect, and then there is a flicker from inside that isn’t fully realized, it creates an in-between zone where you can be affected by things that haven’t completely awakened. I have seen it occurring in you in stages and by degrees. And I guess that it might occur in the outer world in stages and degrees as well.
Typically a person approaches life from a basic understanding, but if they’re able to get outside of that and realize that there’s something more going on, it can destabilize them a bit and their imagination can run. It’s an illusory thing, and if you have a certain insight along with a certain kind of imagination, fantastic ideas can arise as possibilities if the listening center of the heart isn’t able to keep it aligned. In other words, it is like the seeing center is going slightly askew – it’s almost like a type of delirium.
Often, the outer world can seem too much and a person may resort to alcohol or drugs as a buffer. They can go off into this delirium state and get lost there, being unable to find their way back. This happens to a lot of people who go askew. It can happen in terms of becoming too sensitive as well, where one loses a certain rootedness. Our view of the reality around us can be a kind of grounding; it can help if one begins to perceive another reality that one is not ready for.
The whole thing of the vivid imagination is interesting because it causes you to look at something like this in order to stay sober or keep yourself focused. I see in you sometimes a type of hyper vigilance when something is stirred in you – you watch it with great focus and attention. That vigilance is also what can set off the whole traumatic weirdness, too, of a giant spider. If you let the vibration go on like that, you can actually create an altered reality.
So in your dream you did that to an extreme, so that you could then get a sense of… well, that’s why they say that a person needs a spiritual teacher because there are things on the other side that are experiences and sensations that one can go through that throw one off balance. Typically, they are all in the imagination.
It’s an integral part of letting go of one thing in order to be able to grasp something new that’s part of a much greater realm or dimension. It’s easy to take a particular vibration, give it a spin that has some weirdness connected to it, and turn it to something else that, for all intents and purposes, can appear to be very literally dramatic and traumatic.
You show a capability for doing that. It can actually be interpreted as kind of funny, but it’s also kind of interesting. To the degree that you do something like that, the initial jest is something that one can look at and chuckle – it lightens something up. But when it gets carried to an extreme it can actually become a torment to you.
So your dream, as I see it, gave you a dose of it, and when that happens it can keep one from greater bizarreness because it reminds one to stay focused and clear-eyed about things.
To continue this discussion, see Keeping Rooted.
