Discerning Dreams

and Familiar Spirits

Growing through the cracks

A deep shift in perspective is taking root inside of me, from the intellectual that calls itself Psychology, to the Spiritual that quenches my soul beyond thoughts.

I am breaking free from concepts like healthy versus unhealthy, normal versus pathological, and reality versus non reality.

I refuse to extinguish my heart for the spiritual, because an increasingly secular society has told me that intellectualism is the new religion, that God is not real, and that the supernatural world is a figment of my imagination; a byproduct of delusion. Imagination is the door to the Spiritual world. It is God’s playground. A place where truth, insight, and wisdom wait to be encountered. God is wild, and he is playful. This is why I am choosing to swim away from the shores of safety I’ve long known, in favor of the waters of his mystery.

I begin to question the way I’ve organized the world around me, reality, and what I’ve been taught about mental illness. I am embracing possibilities that were invisible to me before because I couldn’t reach for them. I didn’t trust myself beyond what I’ve been told, and what I’ve been taught as a psychotherapist.

However, transcendence, does not come by believing everything we are told. It comes about by searching beyond that thing, into the truth, draped around the edges, requiring sight deeper than the naked eye can provide. Transcendence is not a state of mind, it is a state of heart, and a state of being, in the presence of truth long enough that we become truth, and in becoming truth, we learn to discern the truth from the lie.

I am running full force toward the spiritual world, and the spiritual world is running full force toward me. I drop deeper into trust, and begin to see all that was there for me to see, waiting in the shadows of the fear I was not willing to face. I’ve worked hard to keep my perceptions at bay, to call them symptoms, so they would be more tasteful, more quantifiable for those who do not possess the same perceptive sensitives, for those who call vision insanity. But spiritual blindness makes it hard to really see. I have been sane, and I have been insane. And I have to admit, that insanity, albeit the hardest time of my life (more on that later), was the catalyst that blasted open my spiritual eyes. Without it, I could have not learned to perceive beyond what was physically in front of me.

Dreams, visions, insights, spiritual experiences, feelings, hearing, and knowing are becoming my steady communication with God. I am trusting him beyond convention, beyond boxes I never fit in, beyond boxes he created me to think outside of.

My dream life has become increasingly alive and animated. It is currently the loudest form of the communication I am naming. I’ve continued analyzing my dreams to the extent that I can remember them.

Because my dreams, lately, have been full of my deceased loved ones, I’ve begun to seek out guidance, from my source; God, and the word of God, about the origin and meaning of these dreams.

I used to be fearful of delving into the spiritual world, afraid that it was too big and too vast to fully comprehend; a rabbit hole I wouldn’t be able to find my way out of. But, as I create distance between myself and the superficial explanations Psychology has to offer me, opting instead to look through a spiritual lens, I open myself to learn what I do not know, what Science cannot teach me or answer for me.

Dreams, from a psychological perspective, are the unconscious work we do, when something is too difficult to process consciously; the act of facing what we cannot face while awake.

Biblically, it is thought that dreams come from three sources; the Self, the Divine, or the Demonic. Discerning these dreams has been a puzzle I’ve been working through.

The concept of a Familiar Spirit is one I am learning about, and still not sure how to fully integrate. A Familiar Spirit, it appears, is one who knows detailed information about our lives, and essentially poses as the person who is deceased. The trick is used to gain access to the dreamer. This is why occult practices and contacting the dead are so strongly discouraged.

A Visitation Dream, on the other hand, is one in which it is believed that the deceased loved one, who we are dreaming of, is actually visiting.

In a recent dream, my mother came to me glowing; a true characteristic she possessed. I asked her, “Mom, is that really you?” She smiled and said, “Yes, A mamma.” I then tested her by asking if she knew she had died. She said yes. I don’t know why I am always asking this question. Anyway, we walked and talked. I asked her if others could see her. She said, “Sort of, I have a physical shadow.” But others couldn’t really see her. I asked her a few more questions, and told her about some of things going on in my life, things I wished I could process with her, and get her opinion on. She said nothing. Then I asked her, “Are you a familiar spirit?” My stomach sank as I waited for her response. She said no. But I could not shake a very prominent feeling, a suspiciousness like something wasn’t right. Intuition was directing me to the feeling the dream was rendering, rather than the content itself. It was subtle and could have been easily missed.

Shortly after she passed away, I had a dream in which she came to me. The dream was a lucid dream. So when I fell asleep, I woke in the dream, laying in the exact position I’d fallen asleep in, only my mother was sitting on my bedside. It was the first birthday I was spending without her. I asked her why she wasn’t coming to my birthday party. She told me she couldn’t come, but that she was right here, always right here (with me, in my house).

What I am sensing, is that in one dream, for whatever reason, it was not her. In the second it was, and if it was, it was allowed by the divine for healing purposes. What this highlights to me, is an increasing need for discernment, especially because I am still finding my way through my Spiritual Experiences. I don’t have mastery over the information coming through. I am not even quite sure what to do with it at times, so, for now, I will gather, wait, and attempt to discern the source from which it comes, until I understand more about the gift and what to do with it.