Ep. 1 “Museum of Moments” - Dreaming Across Time & Space - Part I

“We've lost the language to talk about dreams. We've lost the language to discuss non-linear experiences because, I mean, it makes sense. Our language structure is completely linear, designed to describe and communicate linear experiences. So when we have non-linear experiences, our language somehow fails.”

The Dream

Title: “Museum of Moments”

I am scavenging for food and supplies from a house. There are people there but i could not name them. It’s a nice house, modern and white. I get ingredients to make pasta dinner.

Then I am walking through the streets at night with Carl, and the others I know but not their names, are ahead.

I see a house I recognize and a face I recognize. It’s Mark Henry but his hair is longer to his shoulders and curly. I say his name and he turns to me walking over. I think he says my name and asks if it’s me, but i can not remember now the sound of my own name. He comes in and embraces me with a kiss on the cheek, and tells me he still thinks about me but doesn't know how to reach out.

I tell him I am single now, so maybe we can get together sometime. And then Carl notices he has a wedding band on and I explain he is married and Ava is the sister of Copland who has died.

And then I am walking up the stairs of a museum of art. The staircase is a squared spiral, with long shallow white steps and big open landings at the curve where art is hung. I am holding my back pack straps with either hands. I feel behind my group already, and am measuring my steps and then I pass him and say “grandpa” and he turns to me and it's him. He’s wearing a light blue button down shirt, with a breast pocket and pocket protector full of pens and other small long items. He is in his 60’s maybe, graying hair, no glasses.

He is standing in front of a painting with an Asian male colleague, he was discussing buying the painting for his wife, and though he is of the age he is married to Karen, I know he means Hiroko.

He is with me now though, he recognizes me but does not speak, though i can see his consciousness is reunited with his body. He is him. I hold his face and tell him he has 5 granddaughters, grandsons, and many great grandchildren who all love him entirely. I see his smiling face, his stubble, and his glowing blue eyes. He holds my arm that holds his face with his hands and we are locked in observation of the moment, exchanging all that was and where we were now as a place of proof that death is more than nothingness. I start to feel myself well with emotion. We squeeze each other and I leave up the stairs to the balcony where everyone is waiting and sitting. And then I wake.

Feeling Upon Waking: I wake feeling that our signature of a person's feeling self is the same throughout dimensions.

Intention for Dreaming: I made no intention before sleep that night

Future Check: Mark Henry and Carl are still alive, and the street we were on felt like Austin.it is possible that this section of the dream could be present in waking life.

Background Context: I see a lot of themes of names. And needing to know someone’s name to recognize their identity. I recognize alot of my surroundings and alot of the people in my dream.

This dream came to me directly after my grandfather passed away after Alzheimers split his body and himself. He and I fought an intellectual and friendly fight about his insistence that death was simply blackness, lights out, nothing more. As a scientist I asked him many times to haunt me if he’s wrong.

The emotions that run through all three phases of this dream are feeling like I’m slightly behind some crowd I am supposed to be with, being pulled in by faces who once made me feel safe and loved.

What do I Want to Know?: I want to know more about my inability to recognize the sound of my own name.

—————————————————————

SHER:  The first thing I notice is the environment. It feels like this future timeline keeps pulling her throughout the story. But then there's people from the past coming back. So it's like she's retrieving parts from the past while also feeling like she's catching up to the future. And people looking different from how she knows them, either older or clearer, more themselves, or even more youthful, I would say. Because there's the long and curly hair, which reminds me of new life, and Spring. And then her grandpa not having glasses, too. He's more coherent.

I'm just curious, more so, to what her relationship is to these people? 

It seems like she brings up Mark and Carl as people who are close to her, or she's had a history with. I'm curious about the dynamics there, if I were to ask her myself. There are parts she's integrating. It feels like she's reviewing and gathering pieces to move forward. But maybe there's something she still needs to address, or baggage she's still carrying.

MICHAELA:  To me, this is a super standard and common dream of when people dream of their departed loved ones, especially recently departed loved ones. I actually know this person whose dream this was, and she's told me another dream about her grandfather where she found him in a place of an afterlife. She said that the setting was perfect to him as a person—his personality as a scientist. I knew that he was going to show up in this dream the second she talked about the environment. I immediately thought, “Oh! That sounds like the afterlife environment she was talking about, the one she told me about before.” White, modern—white is very typical, and the most common color associated with the afterlife, although it's not necessarily an objective fact by any means.

Robert Moss says—which I think gets shown clearly in dreams—is that a lot of people's afterlife environments will be made of their imaginations. How we imagine, and what our imagination is like, will actually design where we go after we die, at least for the first part/initial experience of the afterlife.

The afterlife will be made of the contents of our imagination. So, for him, as a scientist, it would make sense that he's in a place of education. We will design a place where we feel comfortable or is based upon our expectations. This environment to me makes sense with his personality type from what I know of him and from speaking with her throughout the years.

There's other details that are very common with dreams of the afterlife which are, like you said, people looking different. What I've noticed from my own experience of dreaming of the departed is that they’ll have very different appearances. The quality of their presence is very different from when it's a dream where for example: I am with this person that is my grandmother, versus my grandma was in my dream, an apparition of her, a figure with her face and name, you know? I can tell that by the quality of the imagery and what she said, the feeling tone of their presence, makes it super, super different.

And you can really tell. Having the experience be very clear and HD, hyper realistic, with a very strong emotional feeling tone is often meaning that, this is an actual encounter. 

Another common feature of Dreams of the Departed is people looking younger. So, someone who passed away when they're 90 or 80, they'll often appear in dreams looking around their 30s, which is usually the most common. Any point in their life where they’re healthy and matured. People don't come as kids or teenagers, but they come as matured adults in their most exalted, healthiest, youthful form. That's really, really common.

It was interesting, too, what you said about how you felt there was this future timeline—being pulled into the future, but with people from the past. That's how I think the death process might be: you're being pulled into this future zone, like your new future but incorporated with past experiences, at least at first. It’s a life review, a gathering of information to be able to move forward, letting go and forgiveness. 

I believe that's part of the initial death process for everyone, or if not most people—letting go, like finally letting go of our attachments to the material world, whether that's people or drugs and alcohol or material things, possessions, all the things we're attached to—there needs to be a letting go.

In my understanding, it's easier for some, more than others, depending on the state in which we live our lives and how we die. How willing are we to let go of those parts of our identity? And to know what we're maybe not willing to let go? Our energy will cling to the material world, but that's not what we want to do. Not recommended. I'll say that. 

SHER:  Is it a little bit of both? How do you know to take it? Whether it's an actual account, as you were saying, having an actual encounter with a spirit in the spirit realm… You mentioned that it's clearer, that it's more vivid; stronger feeling.

MICHAELA:  In my experience and for example in this dream, the way she wrote it is he is him. To me, that means it's a real encounter. There is an emotional frequency, or an energetic— What did she say? She said it well—signature, like a feeling signature. That is what’s really different, between dreams where we are having a legitimate encounter with a departed loved one versus a dream where they are there as a symbol—acting symbolically.

If this were my dream, I would say that this is a literal encounter. 

I'm having a dream where I've traveled to the environment where my grandfather is currently in and or currently has access to as a midway point that we can meet. And he is showing me that I'm traveling here for a reason.

There are various reasons the dead will summon us into their realm or a middle realm where we can both meet in and then there are plenty of dreams where I dream of my dead grandmother, but it's apparent to me that she's a symbol, she's there symbolically. I've had dreams where I'm with her. It's the emotional quality of the dream, the emotional signature of the experience is completely different. In either experience, it's something that I can share, but it's something that anybody would have to experience for themselves to truly know.

SHER:  Have you had it where you're having a visceral experience with someone who's still alive? But it's like your souls are communicating. They seem more vulnerable, less defenses are up, I would say. Have you ever had reconciliation dreams with people where it really felt like you guys were mending something on a heart level?

MICHAELA:  Not specifically reconciliation dreams, but the clue to how to distinguish it will always be in the emotional signature of the dream.

SHER:  Okay. So, if the emotional signature was like, “Wow, it was right there and it felt so heart-centered and it was super impactful and really intense, and I woke up feeling the impact, versus waking up and feeling pretty neutral…

MICHAELA:  The best way to try to begin to distinguish between literal and symbolic content of any dream is if I had a dream where I walked outside of my house and I got hit by a car. And I woke up feeling like that was a nightmare—super anxious, floored, like holy shit. Before moving on to what that could mean symbolically in my life, I would pay really close attention to my actual literal surroundings and environments for the next week or month or so.

The literal content will come for our basic survival, our soul path and purpose. Major life themes. Dreaming as a technology for physical survival is less used now that we have all this other technology for our physical survival like houses and weather reports and cars. All the modern stuff. But that doesn't mean that they're not still a useful technology for physical survival.

SHER:  I love that you're connecting premonitions as a survival tool because that makes it seem much more biological versus something supernatural. 

MICHAELA:  I mean, that opens a whole can of worms about how our body is actually interacting with the physical world and gathering information and how far out our fields reach informationally. Is that spatial, but also temporal?

Can we actually, biologically, with our electromagnetic fields, reach not only to the opposite wall—which is measurable, like say five feet, because you can measure the electromagnetic fields around us—but also do that in time? Can I also reach a day in advance? That's the question, and if we can, which I think we can, then that means that we can definitely receive that information in dreams about the times ahead.

Even if we can't measure it yet, there are thousands and thousands of anecdotal evidences for that, where people have premonition dreams that come true in very literal and straightforward ways.

SHER:  I love that, like reaching across dimensions. Going back to her grandpa, I like that you said to “note the feeling” because that creates the umbrella of focus. Her feeling in the dream was the signature of her grandpa. You're saying that it's an interaction. If her grandpa was coming through as a message, for example, I'm noticing that there's a lot of other male characters that she's interacting with and having a relationship with. This Mark guy feels significant to her. And I'm curious if her grandpa is trying to help her with some of her male relationships. Also, masculine can represent ‘moving forward,’ so helping her letting things go, addressing them, or maybe an internal masculine aspect she's integrating. 

MICHAELA:  That would make sense. She said that these people are still alive, but otherwise I have no idea who they are within the context of her life. Hard to say. In that case, I would probably go with what you were saying about the internal masculine.

SHER:  She mentioned marriage, and I thought about how marriage and separation are like significant chapters of life, phases. Past and present merging, and how love transcends time and space.

MICHAELA:  Well, that's what she said was her message for him. She said to him, “You have five granddaughters, grandsons and many great grandchildren who all love you entirely.” And he smiles and his eyes are glowing which is another theme. There are many different reasons why the departed will reach out to the living in dreams.

It seems to be quite benign, reaching out to create or confirm a connection. First of all, it's also to confirm a connection of love. And a tether of familial—generations and ancestry throughout life and death. There is a tether, a connection throughout life and death, which she mentions. All these generations of people confirm this line of connection. The most interesting part of this dream, to me, is what you were talking about with the masculine. Her grandpa seems, according to what she says, to be very energetically masculine in his life.

He's a scientist, and he's very concerned with the material world,  to the point where he doesn't believe past it. She said they would banter about life after death and he would always take the very heavily materialistic and masculine side of that. Like, you can't prove anything exists beyond the material world so I don't believe it, and she would argue for the feminine side, that just because it's not material, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

She tells him, “Okay, we'll have one way to resolve this. If there's life after death, you promise to come back and tell me.” And this is that, this is the dream.

SHER:  And he wasn't wearing glasses. He's clearer now, too. It's almost like he's merging [Feminine and Masculine]. He's finding that, not the overly masculine way of seeing things, because now he's in it. It feels like two pieces coming together. Very symbolic. And I like what you said about the tether, because there's also a spiral staircase, which makes me think of genetics, DNA, generations. Going up that staircase to look at pictures. Traveling from place to place. It's like a structure of time, going across time.

MICHAELA:  There's themes of identity in here too: the name, his identity… because she said he suffered from Alzheimer's, which is where you're disassociated from the mind and body. Identity comes into play because superficial identity can start to fade as we lose our memory, our place and associations.

Hypothetically, the dead often come to us in a place where they seem far more peaceful and harmonious than they might have when they're at waking life, because we often are able to let go of our attachments to our identity, to our beliefs and our proofs, and our need to be this way or that way. You can see a more harmonious person. It can be really healing to see someone if they were suffering for a long time before they died and see them in a dream restored. Youthful, energized and happy. That in itself can be totally transformational and healing for somebody who was affected by, or even traumatized by, watching someone deteriorate before their eyes. A healing from that trauma or situation can come in the form of a dream where they appear again happy and healthy. 

SHER:  It's like a wholing/union process that's happening. You mentioned he had Alzheimer's. She also didn't recognize her own name in the dream. Is there a part of her, an old version of herself, some kind of identification she's not letting go of that could support her with moving forward? 

Because he's coming back, winking at her. ‘I was losing a part of myself, not being open to the potential that there's more beyond who I am now, beyond the facts and structures I know now…’ So, she's experiencing a similar process in her dream as he did in a way.

MICHAELA: Definitely. I would say so—I would weigh this dream as far more literal than symbolic, however, dreams can be both symbolic and literal at the same time. Everything that is literal can also be largely symbolic. And that's what she wants to know too. That was her focus, which is, “I want to know more about my inability to recognize the sound of my own name.”

SHER: I noted how it was an old version of herself shedding. 

MICHAELA: I could definitely say that. We have to go into realms beyond the ordinary, to do things that are beyond the ordinary. We have to expand beyond our common expectations of what's possible. Beyond common roles and routines, to be able to really fit this information into our life. The idea I picked up on when she said that, “Mark Henry says my name and asks if it's me. I cannot remember the sound of my own name.” That's really interesting. I've never heard that in a dream.

I've never experienced that in a dream. It's very unique to her and this situation. It's not a common theme. This is a detail unique to her and her life, for sure. It does relate to the overall theme of her grandfather dying from Alzheimer's, because that's a memory loss. One could assume that people with Alzheimer's would forget their own name, like they could forget the sound of their own name.

It could be a lot of things. It could be, like you said, an invitation to shed identity and to step into an expanded part of myself or to let go of things that I'm holding on to in terms of who I think I am or who I think I need to be. It can also be an experience of empathy where I have an actual experience that I can now empathize with people who are suffering from things like Alzheimer's because we can sympathize, but until we actually have our own experience of something, we can't actually. It's hard to relate. How could we? That's not really an experience we could have in the waking world.

It's possible, but it's not probable—that we have a waking experience where we forget the sound of our own names. It's one of those things that dreams are so good for: simulating experiences that we wouldn't be able to have in our waking lives so that we can—for many reasons, but empathy is a big one. And also being able to know what to do in certain situations. It can be so many things at once. 


PART II COMING SOON