Dreaming My Third Eye Awake

Last night, as I sat in brief meditation at the close of yoga class, my awareness was instantaneously drawn to my third eye. It was not an intentional focus, but felt more like being sucked through a vacuum at the speed of light. My eyes were open and cast downward and I noticed, despite the dim lighting in the room, it seemed my head was engulfed in a hazy cloud of light. As I mentioned, the meditation was brief, so I didn’t have much time to explore the phenomenon. I likely would have forgotten it entirely had it not been followed up by a very bizarre dream.

Since reading Jeremy Taylor’s Wisdom of Your Dreams several months ago, bizarre dreams have been a recurrent theme in my life, one I’ve been listening to with great interest. And I’ve been experiencing what feels like a strangely orchestrated opening of my chakras during this time. Without going into all the details of each chakra, I have become increasingly aware of events in my life that seem to be challenging me to awaken individual chakras. These events have been accompanied by corresponding physical ailments that bring acute attention to the parts of my body associated with each chakra, as well as an intense and strangely symbolic dream. Almost as though I am navigating some sort of mystical obstacle course, each time I rise to the challenge of a certain chakra, the physical ailment dissipates, and I find I have opened up to, and settled into a profound comfort with, my experience of the world as it relates to that chakra’s realm of influence.

Last week I was suffering from a swollen throat. I participated in a group shamanic journeying session intended to facilitate the encountering of my power animal. This journey did not involve the use of hallucinogens, and yet at the end of my journey I had a vision, as vivid as any I’ve ever had, of a lion’s face floating in front of my third eye. It was a male lion with blazing green eyes and a mane of wavy hair illuminated with hues of red and blue. Shortly after, the time for the journey ended and we were all called back into our bodies. As we discussed our experiences in the group, the facilitator who had been tracking me said she had seen a very vivid image of lion…fierce and angry. I shared that I had not been able to speak with the lion and wondered what message he was intended to bring me. The woman next to me, who is an intuitive healer, told me she thought my journey had intermingled with hers some and that she knew the message. She said the lion’s message was for me to let loose my roar, to let my voice be heard, that I had so much to offer, but I was holding myself back.

At the time, I did not make a connection between the vision and my swollen throat. As the week progressed, my throat became tighter and tighter. My neck and shoulders were beginning to tense. I stretched and practiced relaxation techniques, all to no avail. Then, a big argument broke out with a person who is very close to me, a person who for many years has said destructive things to me in the course of such arguments. Because I cared so much about this person’s opinion of me, I absorbed those things as potential truths. However, with this particular argument I saw through the words. I rejected them. I was not the slightest bit shaken by them. It was an incredibly empowering stand.

That night, I had a vivid dream of myself puking. I was vomiting so profusely I could barely even breathe. I was looking over at my loved one, wondering why he wasn’t helping me, but he didn’t seem to even care what I was going through. I awoke in the middle of the night with an incredible sense of clarity. I knew, without having to think about it, what the dream represented. I was vomiting up all the toxins he had tried to inject in me. Rather than digesting his words, as I had done countless times before, I had purged them before they could harm me. For so many years, I had let his words impact my very core, making me doubt myself on every imaginable level. That night, I had finally learned how to erect a boundary between what another person says or thinks about me and what I know to be true.

The following evening, I shared the dream with him, wanting to share the profound step I felt I had taken. Perhaps understandably, he took this as a re-engagement in the original argument. For the first time in my life, and I’m not proud of this, I unleashed a fury of my own words on him. I said brutal things I would never have imagined saying to him or anyone before. The next morning when I awoke, my swollen throat was gone. We ended up discussing the entire situation and he told me I had hurt his feelings very deeply with what I had said. I apologized and we made our peace again, but something important had been learned by both of us in the experience. All those years he had made himself feel better about saying destructive things in anger by telling me I shouldn’t let his words effect me so deeply. Having been on the receiving end of it, he finally realized how words can really hurt. Upon reflection, I saw the message of the lion in my vision had challenged me to test out my roar. My throat chakra had been opened.

After last night’s meditation and the hazy cloud that engulfed my third eye, I had another bizarre dream. I saw two images of myself as though they were drawings of me on two cards held side by side. The edges of the cards appeared as one line dividing the two versions of me. One version was traced with lines of blue, the other with lines of red. I was consciously aware in my dream that this was meant to represent duality. The next image I recall was of a Hindu woman, round and old with an orange dot painted on her third eye. Then, I had an awareness of myself as a creative, almost god-like energy. As this energy, I had been given the task of molding a face from clay. An image of a gorilla appeared before me and I remember thinking, this isn’t right. I began reshaping the clay, drawing the nose down to make it longer and thinning it . My vision seemed to have narrowed just to that task, so the nose was all I could see. Then, I painted an eye. It seemed my intention was to use that eye for the eyes of the face, but as I put my finger on it to move it into place, it slid up to the forehead just between the eyebrows. My view expanded again and I could see the face already had eyes. The eye I had created was the third eye.

This morning I recalled the dream with brief fascination and then began the day’s tasks. Around noon, I began feeling a strange cloudiness in my head. It was difficult to think and I felt like there was a buzzing in my head. I’ve been dealing the past few days with pretty intense vertigo. I have been taking decongestants under the assumption that it has been related to allergy accumulation in my head. The vertigo was still lingering, though much less pronounced, but today’s feeling was different. It felt very much like my head was absorbed in a cloud. As I was driving, I suddenly made the connection between my dream last night and what was happening in my head. The cloudiness at my third eye in meditation, the dream of myself represented as duality, then reshaping an ape’s face into a human’s face and painting a third eye on it. Was I initiating the opening of my third eye in my dream?

Given what’s been happening these past few months, it seems this is very likely. I am full of awe and wonder at this process I seem to be undergoing at both a subconscious and conscious level. In the past I’ve worked with my chakras from a conscious level, using different techniques and studying the nature of each chakra, but what I’ve experienced at those times has been quite different. It has felt more like an energetic thrill at the moment accompanied by a deeper cognitive understanding of those aspects of myself, but I can’t say it’s ever felt like a true settling into that openness. I might equate it to taking two steps forward and one step back, again and again, like a dance made up of habits, emotions, dramas, inspirations and aspirations. What’s been happening recently feels more like quantum leaps, true evolutionary steps. It’s as though the realm of my subconscious has ventured openly into the realm of my conscious, orchestrating a symphony of events, insights, and dreams in just the right way to catapult me beyond all my old barriers.

I am wondering if this is because I am simply paying more attention now. Perhaps all of this has been done a multitude of times before, only I wasn’t watching closely enough to recognize the intention. I wasn’t courageous enough to rise to the challenges. Is this what it means to wake up? I’ve spent so much time and energy throughout my life looking for the answers, looking for the path to enlightenment. I’ve read over 100 books. I’ve practiced many hundreds of hours of yoga and meditation. I’ve expanded my mind through so many avenues, always searching for some ultimate truth that would finally bring me to a state of…well, I guess I never really knew what that state was. I only knew how other people described their experience of some transcendent state to be.

It occurs to me that through a steady practice of mindfulness that has evolved into my basic way of being, I recently found myself at the point of watching my passionate pursuit of enlightenment in and of itself. I saw all the effort I was putting into it, and the effort itself suddenly appeared to me as an obstacle. When I saw my efforts in this light, a shift occurred. I realized enlightenment as an end-goal, as a place or state to reach, as a destination, did not actually exist. I saw that I’d been searching for something that would forever be illusive so long as I continued to search for it. So I stopped searching and started simply being. Being with whatever was happening, whether internally or externally, and witnessing it as it all unfolded. I remember having an image of myself as a canvas being painted over and over again, layer upon layer…each experience a new layer. It was like I was an ever-evolving work of art being painted simply for the sake of artistic expression.

That shift occurred a few months ago, and looking back now, I sense it may well have been this shift that invited my subconscious into my conscious world in this powerful way. I wonder if the act of writing this now, of seeing all of this from the broader perspective of an eagle’s eye, is the step my subconscious intended me to take. If this act will complete the opening of my third eye. And I feel a little thrill of anticipation as I ponder the crescendo my subconscious conductor will create to burst open my crown chakra. The unfolding of consciousness through the medium of human life feels to me extraordinarily majestic. I stand in amazement as its witness, and I bow in humble honor of it all.