In this dream analysis, Ann tells her dream of a castle and a dragon, with the twist ending of a friend getting a divorce. This leads to a discussion of the fundamental process of spiritual awakening, which is triggered when a person says “Yes” to something greater than themselves. When this happens, a new world opens up, but it can happen in surprising ways. (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.)

Ann: Okay, it was an interesting dream.

I was in a really large castle and there were lots of rooms, and I found myself going from room to room seeing these different people in these different rooms and kind of helping them along. I keep going from one room to another, and along the way people tell me there’s a dragon in the castle and I tell them there’s nothing to be afraid of it’s just a dragon.

I go into one room and there’s a woman I know and I used to work with her, but anyway she tells me she’s getting a divorce from her husband of 17 years and she says “I’ve made my decision, I’ve had enough, I’m going to make changes in my life.” Just very emphatic that that was what was going to happen, and then I woke up.

John: Well, you have very simple images complicated by a final image that is going to be a type of pressure that is going to be put on you very quickly.

The first two images are images that you greet and you face enthusiastically. I mean, this is wonderful stuff. Basically you have three images there. You have the image of the big castle, you have the image of the dragon, and then you have the image of something that’s about to change.

The image of the castle shows that you’ve developed a particular kind of depth. In other words, whenever you dream about a house you’re dreaming about yourself as you’re growing, and you have this room and that room and more rooms and more rooms and so on, but it’s now a castle – it’s huge.

So that means that you have developed a base. When a person comes to a path such as this, there’s a certain putting together that has to happen. In other words, they have developed a certain woundology, and they’ve been damaged by the world, and there’s a certain degree of fracturing that’s occurred that has to somehow or another be accommodated or dealt with, so that the person can sustain what’s about to hit them, so that they don’t completely crack up and become like an easily broken glass bottle person.

Well the problem is you’re going to crack up anyway, but you’re really not an easily broken glass bottle person because you can handle it. But if you got hit with this straight away you wouldn’t be able to handle it, you could go insane. Because the dragon is the kundalini energy, and kundalini energy in and of itself is dangerous and, typically, when people access it unnaturally in the outer world they end up in insane asylums, they flip out.

It’s very, very dangerous energy because unless you’ve developed a certain inner awakened acuity to it, meaning able to handle the greater space of yourself inside, it can throw you around.

For example, kundalini energy opening up too much: An example of the teacher was that he was walking the streets at 3:00am, he couldn’t sleep, and got just enough sleep to stay alive but could hardly work, could hardly function, because it puts you under… it puts you through a lot of paces.

An example of the kundalini energy opening up in this one woman that I came across in Germany, was she had this dream and instead of the teacher having his normal talk, he out of the blue called upon her to tell her dream. And she was terrified over this dream. She was afraid to go to sleep at night because what would happen at night was more than she could handle. And the whole depiction was like being broken into a million pieces.

Instead of interpreting it or anything like that, the teacher just took it as the way things happen, and he turned and essentially took the contents of the energetic of what she was portraying – instead of offering any condolences or soothingness or anything like that – he turned to everybody else and he said, “I don’t know why most of you are here. This is going to happen to all of you. It’s just a matter of time.”

Of course this was her time and of course she portrayed the inability to be able to handle it, but what the teacher’s teacher used to always say is that, he awakens this kundalini energy and never ever has it gone wrong. In other words, the kundalini energy basically is described and even the teacher has described this in terms of the West saying that there is no one that knows how to teach this or to handle this.

There are a lot of people who get to the point where they realize that it’s important, but no one knows how to work with it, and his teacher said that he awakens this and it’s a slow, steady process and what opens up involves a lot of mutual trust that has to go back and forth between the teacher and the student.

There’s lots of room for things to go wrong, and when he awakens the kundalini energy, and this trust gets established with the student, it never ever ever goes wrong.

Now, in the West, when you hear a teacher talk about it, he talks about it as if no one understands this kundalini energy and when it awakens no one knows how to work with it. Never does he refer to himself as the person who stirs this sort of stuff up, and does know how to work with it. He just talks as if no one in the West knows how to work with it, and that’s why it is considered extremely dangerous and why you have a lot of people that flip out.

And he’ll give examples like where a person will do a particular practice, and the way he’ll put it is they did it a little too well, and they opened up more than they can handle and it flipped them.

This is a path where you die before you die. And it’s a path where the friend slays the friend. This is a very peculiar image, you know the friend that kills the friend. All of course to get to the “die before you die,” or to the point where you have reached and let go of how it is that you hold onto an appearance of yourself.

And you don’t break that appearance without picking up speed, without gaining power, without this kundalini energy awakening. And if you don’t know how to work with it, because it works more in a macro level than on a micro level, and if you apply it on a micro level it can drive you insane, it can make you very dizzy, very jittery, and very unsettled and not able to be comfortable.

And so it tends to be dormant when you’re going through and occupying a real small mud puddle. The image of the castle is a little bit like the image of the ocean frog and the inland frog, where the ocean frog has the ocean and the inland frog has the back little pond that it has as the entire world and swims around it and points it out to the ocean frog that came to visit, nothing gets bigger than that. Because that’s all that it’s experienced, and that’s how it has pigeonholed its way of being.

The image of the castle is the same, that’s the ocean. In other words, you have found a much greater expanse to yourself than otherwise, and in a castle there’s so much room that you can have the kundalini energy, which is the dragon.

Okay, that’s all rubbing your hands together. This is great kind of stuff, but then comes the hail maker. Now it comes down to… and how did you describe that part again?

Ann: Okay, so anyway I’m telling everybody they can handle the dragon. So I walk into this room and it’s a woman I know and she tells me she’s getting a divorce from her husband of 17 years. She says, “I’ve had enough, I’ve got to make some positive changes, I’ve got to change things in my life.”

John: So first of all when you say that you can handle the dragon, you are inside of yourself saying “Yes” to a process. You don’t say this “Yes” or this “No” in an outward way. You say it on the inner soul level and, somehow or another, the teacher knows when you want the juice turned up or turned off or you want to take a respite or whatever it is so that you can handle the kundalini energy.

You’re now saying it’s time, you can handle it. You’re saying “Yes” to the process. So when the process is turned up, you now access an awakening in terms of yourself that enables you to have an overall sight or, I should say, intertwining that’s not otherwise possible.

Before, you’ve got the small pond and that’s it, but now you are having to confront throwing off the shackles of things that keep you from experiencing something much greater, more on a macro level now as opposed to the micro level. The micro level being the frog pond.

Other images of this kind of throwing away, in other words, you haven’t done it really loudly. I mean, in your way that was pretty loud. But here’s one that I suppose in its way is pretty loud. A woman is chained by a torturer in the bottom of the pit. And she’s been that way, abused, for so doggone long that she knows nothing different.

And it’s been so long that the chains and everything have kind of gotten kind of old and rusty and the connections have gotten brittle. And all of a sudden she realizes that she can break those chains, come out and run naked down the street.

That’s an image of breaking out of the shackles of things. Your image is similar to that. Your image is that you’re under a certain kind of masculine oppression that has kept you from opening up to the depth of who you are.

The feminine is the person who brings things into life in creation, that opens something up from the inner into the outer, and that is not possible when it’s subjugated by its inner masculine that keeps it in a state of bondage, identifying with things in terms of the environment.

And when it is caught dribbling away – identifying with things in the outer – it gets caught in what is called a doingness. This term is associated with women more than guys, the doingness thing. Because somewhere in the echo of the feminine is this idea of having to sustain the family unit and all of that and it does it well. It takes that responsibility on.

The masculine doesn’t do that. The masculine is kind of rude that way, kind of callous and kind of checked out. Now it can recognize the protocol, but it’s the feminine that makes sure that it’s followed. It’s the feminine that wants to make sure that the holidays are honored and the get-togethers happen and that everybody’s comfortable.

What has evolved over time is that feminine has fallen underneath the directive of, you might say, the idiot, the masculine, that doesn’t do any of this but still barks out the orders, and that then creates a shutting down. In other words, that’s what causes the veil to hit, whereby you let go of your greater sense of knowingness, you compromise it, as if something else knows better.

So you then are veiling yourself and making yourself more unconscious. Ultimately this reaches a point of an energetic that is like a nausea, and that’s what you came to in your dream. You needed to break free from something in order to be yourself, to live yourself now. And, you know, the jig is up  – you know, enough is enough.

It’s interesting that you dreamed something like this because if I’d have just jumped in and started talking about things, this would have been the theme of what we would have talked about.

In other words, you get to a particular point where you cannot handle the sight, in other words you can’t see yourself in relationship to the outer appearances. Whatever you look at in the outer you cannot use that to stroke yourself as a reason for being alive or however you’d say that. In other words, you lose the ordinary, what used to be creature comforts, of identification.

And actually you probably never ever had it, more than anything you always had the means to an end, means to an end, you know constantly just out of reach kind of on a treadmill kind of momentum, but you get to a point in time where some part of you inside just knows that you’re not going to get satisfied in this way anymore.

Then you find yourself in a kind of agitation. It’s kind of like a kundalini raw energy aspect again, that you can now handle, in that you can’t settle for the simplistic anymore, or the normal comforts that everybody else would find wonderful – you tend to find repulsive, insulting, inhibiting, nauseating, and nobody else that you know, if you’re in an environment or a setting and you’ve got other people around, they don’t seem to act like there’s anything wrong.

But you just can’t handle it. It used to be, yeah you could go through, you could shuck and jive and carry on the whole sort of thing, but now, all of a sudden, you can’t. This is a type of starting to die before you die.

The teacher likes to put it something like this: You lose a certain sense of freedom that others have. I mean, is it really a freedom that they have?

You can’t buy into that anymore, which is another way of saying that you can’t do the things that you used to be able to do because it doesn’t have any value for you. For them it has value because they can still lie to themselves and believe that it’s true. But you can’t.

Ann: Isn’t that interesting. Wow.

John: And as a consequence this disrupts everything around you. It can get so severe that you lose all your friends, because what they relate to, and you used to relate to… but what if you do not relate to that anymore? You know, what do you have in common? It can become peculiar like that.

Where this goes and what is taking place, a part of you is… it’s a type of intertwining. Well, let’s see. How would one put it? A human being always takes the energetic that they are experiencing inside of themselves and they have to arrange it into some sort of kind of pitch or spitball that they can project.

And so as you experience things inside yourself, rather than taking them too literally to heart, you use what you learn to sharpen yourself, or think that you’re sharpening yourself, in terms of an outer persona.

For quite some time you become, to your way of thinking, wiser, sharper, have a little more dexterity, a little more sense than you had before in terms of how you approach things in the outer.

That’s how you tend to see yourself for quite some time, because what you’re doing is when you are opening this stuff up, and you’re finding the treasure chest, so to speak, of this greater domain inside of yourself, it’s all wonderful. And yet a certain string hasn’t been pulled yet, to point out that it won’t work very well if it is strictly applied outwardly.

You know to try to build a better gadget or palace or whatever for yourself. It doesn’t quite work that well because all of that, technically, on one level it looks like it’s being enhanced, but on another level it is falling away. And when you finally get to the point where it’s like falling away that can be scary.

But you have recognized the sweet pain of being able to work with the kundalini energy, you’ve developed a trust in that, and more than a trust you’ve developed an intertwining, whereby you cannot tell yourself that this is separate anymore.

You can see how there’s some part of you that affects everything in your environment, and that you have an effect over everything, as if you are the Whole, or the Whole is connected to you and streams through you in some fashion, so that you have to take a kind of responsibility that everything that is going on is somehow or another part of you.

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