Dreams were the jumping off point on my spiritual journey.  I had had a few dreams and other spiritual experiences up to the time when I started having a lot of dreams that were clearly trying to tell me something. That is when I began taking them seriously and started writing them down on pieces of paper until there were so many scraps of paper that I  knew I had to get a journal. I have saved all my dream journals. Soon after,  I started talking about some of the dreams I was having with other people.  Suffice to say, in the early 1990’s talking about dreams were not in the mainstream. Some humored me and others thought it was weird. Feeling a little like a freak  was the last thing I wanted to be. 

And suddenly, the synchronicity’s started.  I found a dream dictionary by Rosemary Ellen Guiley in the early 1990’s that helped me understand symbols. My intuition was all that I was using then. The more I recalled, journaled and interpreted my dreams the better I got at this practice. And all types of dreams kept coming. At that time I still had to learn all the many dream types there are – one of the components to dream interpretation.   

My dreams profoundly affected me. I found that I was on a path that felt very real to me.  My experiences went deeper when  I learned about reincarnation and past lives. What I didn’t understand yet was how interconnected dreams, past lives and reincarnation are.  

In my book Sweet Dreams, I threaded dreams and past lives into the dreams that the main character, Rosie has: prophetic, precognitive, visitations and a past life dream.  

Some of the dreams are my own dreams and others include a tarot card reading and a past life reading I had with two different intuitive mediums. 

The book opens with a dream of Rosie running through Janie’s house trying to find her to go buy records. She finds her on the way out of the house but she was already dead.  That’s the gist of it. This was an actual dream I had. The wierd thing about this dream was that I did not recall it when I woke up but recalled it nearly six months after her death  while reading a book on the history of rock and roll. Interesting is how I describe it now. Mine and Spacey’s common link was rock and roll.  I remember talking with my grandma Shirley about it. She calmed my fears when I told her that I must have made it happen somehow. A year after Spacey’s death I had a visitation dream that she was calling me from a payphone to tell me she was okay. As funny as that seems, it made sense to me. We talked on the phone almost everyday after school. Having her visit me in  my dream helped me to move on. 

The first time I heard the word or concept of reincarnation was from a conversation with Grandma Shirley while eating lunch one afternoon at her home in Florida around the same time I had that dream recall. I just looked at her. I didn’t know what to say. It sounded too out there for me just as if she was talking about extra terrestrials. It was too much information for me to absorb at eighteen so soon after my friends death. Fast forward about eight years…I saw grandma Shirley again and we ate lunch in her kitchen nook and again she brought up reincarnation. (I had been reading about reincarnation since a friend had re-introduced it to me in that eight year time.) She had not been well and was in and out of the hospital. It was a good conversation and one of the last in person conversations I would have with her before her death in 1992. Prior to her passing I had a tarot card reading with a intuitive medium I had started seeing. The Death card – upside down – came up and the intuitive told me that grandma Shirley might be anemic. The doctors weren’t sure yet. It could be turned around. I used this reading as a dream in the story. Rosie woke up and called her grandma to tell her to take care of herself and listen to her doctors.  

Almost ten years after her passing I had a visitation from her. In this ‘dream’, I was propped up on my left arm as she was talking to me – telepathically –  sitting on the left side of my bed. She was etherial, beautiful. I don’t recall what she was saying to me but it seemed like she was talking to me for a long time. I could see my windows, wallpaper border, my dresser and jewelry box and a small television my husband and I had in the bedroom. When I woke up she wasn’t there but my bedroom was just as it was in this visitation. I kept looking at the spot where she was sitting in this dream. I wanted to see her again. Maybe she was still there but I couldn’t see her with my actual two eyes. I didn’t talk with my husband about this – he did not believe in anything metaphysical or spiritual. It was not something I felt I could share with him or anyone other than one of my sisters. I  kept this experience to myself.  I think about this now and wonder what if my daughter and son who were toddlers at the time had walked in my bedroom that night and saw this visitation. Children are very intuitive.  What would they have told me if they had seen my grandma’s spirit sitting on the bed talking to me. 

I had a friend connection in this lifetime that for a while had a strong pull. She was someone I had met through my boyfriend at the time. I looked up to her and admired her and wanted to emulate her. Our friend group went to New York City on a really cold New Years Eve and stood in Times Square until the ball dropped. I took lots of photographs to remember that last night of 1994. About a year after that I had taken a couple of photographs to an intuitive who could read the energy of a person from a photograph. One of those photos was of my friend. In Sweet Dreams she is named Pamela. The intuitive told me we had travelled by covered wagon during the migration heading to the western United States in the 1800’s. When we got to California we took jobs as domestics. I wanted to know more about this past- life with her and in meditation I got that she was the older sister and took care of me when we were smaller. Even though this was a past life reading, I’ve had past life dreams. Like visitations dreams, for me, I know they are real.  

Dreams can show us what we need to know about ourselves or about a situation. I never judge the dreams that I recall while I’m journaling them in the morning or the middle of the night or whenever the recall happens. I believe there is a message in there somewhere. I am really happy that talking about one’s dreams and all things metaphysical have been in the mainstream. It has been easier to talk about dreams with other people and many  have shared their dreams with me and I feel honored. I really love to help empower them to journal and interpret their own dreams and to find out for themselves the message the universe has for them.