Practical Witchery!, John Stormm [ap literature book list txt] 📗

aware that an X, Y and Z axis along with a proscribed time are required to connect anything in this realm. But some of us arrive from a different direction than the rest.

Some of us are more visually attuned and see our visions, while others respond better to the music of the spheres. What could be more natural? I’m a bit holistic in my approaches to many things and I’ll get dreams where I can see the sunshine on the surf under azure skies, hear the pounding of the breaking waves and the cries of the gulls, smell and taste the salt breezes and feel the sun on my shoulders and the warm sand beneath my bare feet. If that weren’t enough, on the odd occasion, I’ll wake up with change in Cayman Island currency in my bedclothes or an interesting seashell I found still in my hand. There’s something to all of this. Obviously the math goes beyond the simple 4D equation and the shortest distance between two points is no longer just a straight line, but a fold in space and time.

Think about it: If you can *feel* someone watching you and invariably find this to be true and not simple paranoia or find that you’ll regret not following your instincts about someone you’ve never met or know a place you’ve never been to, then you are obviously moving around in this plane of existence by roads far less traveled than the norm. Ask yourself how your intuition manifests itself to you. Are you artistically inclined or have an architect’s handle on form and space? Or maybe still life works, or film is your forte. It’s a good guess that when it kicks in, that it is a primarily visual experience. Are you a great fan of music of any sort? It is likely at certain times you hear snatches of conversation that is taking place well beyond your natural earshot in your intuitive episodes.

For myself, I study the patterns of many things in an effort to understand them. I’ve been somewhat of an adrenaline junkie in my own right and been in a few too many situations where I had to live so fully “in the moment” to survive that the time scale I experienced was far different of that experienced by those around me. Someone looking to shoot me and I would feel their scrutiny and roll that part of my body out of the line of fire. There’s not much help for moving away from the crazy bastard spraying bullets indiscriminately. For that, only a sense of an overall pattern of events can give me the discretion to avoid being in certain places at specified times. My movements had to be spontaneous as there was no second guessing second perceptions and living to be this old and this healthy. I saved the questions of *why* this was so for a later and more relaxed time of speculation. Coming from the back ground I had, I knew enough to trust my senses, such as they are.

The point of this, and other exercises of thoughts on topics so bizarre as these get is because of yet another pattern I had observed as a child. I knew sometimes my dreams took me to actual places and I was seeing people and things I had never seen before. Accurately. I knew this was, among other things, called astral projection or remote viewing though sometimes it went beyond just simple viewing. Grandma stocked me up in books on many topics and I had read case histories of people even a hundred years ago or more that had experienced some of the things I was going through and I started looking for the patterns. “Oh well.” and “It’s just one of those things.” were not going to suffice, and I was not going to be driven mad from the inexplicable “why me?”.

Many decades later, in the Intellec Paranormal forum, we took these correlated circumstances and took the common formulae inherent in the overall experiences of astral projection and duplicated the results on a monthly basis. Some did better than others, naturally but *all* of us learned something. Some of us learned how to do this on purpose… or at the very least, increase our chances of doing it accidentally. We each have our own case histories on our own intuitive processes. I’m suggesting we share what we can, no matter how slight it might seem, to better discern the patterns of what brings it on or what makes it work and how we each are benefited by our perceptions.

Years ago when I was raising my babies, I wanted to increase their survivability. I taught them skills and we played games together that would enhance those traits in such a way that they wouldn’t be such total strangers when they happened. Perhaps, these experiences are best recorded in the Inner Circles of WitchClan, but I want you all to think about them.

Some of you want to be better witches or wizards. Some have been burned in their coven or other group experiences. We *have* the means here for study and safe experimentation at little cost… except that you get out of a thing factors with what study and application you put into it. Some of us are teachers, and some are students, or BOTH… which asserts to me that no matter what topics we want to explore, *none* of us are strangers to study. We *have* a “rabbit hole”, dear Alice… is anyone interested in finding out just how far it goes?

The Paths of Dreams

 

For some of us, going to bed is every bit as important as getting up in the morning. To a shaman, this is yet another day of business as usual. Closing our eyes to the mundane world and opening them to a larger and far more profound universe. It is tackled with all the purpose a doctor might use in opening their office in the morning. No detail is allowed to be forgotten or overlooked.

The secrets of the human soul are an open book in the college of dreams. Knowledge is power, and here is where much of it is found. As in our daily world, we cross the paths of many and diverse peoples and observe them in their day-to-day lives. We know as much of them as they show us. Actions speak louder than words. Even as a liar is found out by the disparity of their actions and words, so a thief is caught by what their actions are when they believe no one sees them. The wisest know to weigh by deeds and not words. In dreams we find yet another level of human nature to explore as the subconscious is as deep as it is vast. Here too, the shaman crosses many paths besides their own.

In an old Disney cartoon, it was crooned that a dream is a wish the heart makes. Here is the place where monsters and saints are wholly themselves when no one sees. This is the place where Mother Teresa sits side by side in a secret garden with her Lord, and they commune together of the affairs of their hearts. Or it could be the place where a much younger and virile pope soaks naked in a hot tub with Anna Nicole Smith, or maybe Brad Pitt, and leaves thoughts of holy water far behind him.

For some, this is the stage they create to do and be only what they desire and those acts tell the shaman secrets that would make anyone uncomfortable. These are the secrets that people read in their eyes and cause them to look away. No world is truly so private. Wandering souls and spirits cross many paths and planes and the shaman knows the neighborhood. Just as any professional would be useless in their field, if they lost the memories of the previous day upon waking, so it is with the shaman. They are taught to cultivate the connections between their conscious and subconscious minds early in their training.

Imagine, a full third of the average person’s lifespan is spent asleep and the memories fade within moments of waking and are lost, all but the little flashes that come to us in moments of déjà vu. Further more, dream time doesn’t match waking time as hour for hour. One might live an entire lifetime in a single night’s dreams and all but the highlights lost to them by the finish of the morning’s breakfast. Sometimes we meet people there that we remember the rest of our waking lives. A lucky few even marry them, or they know well enough not to, because these experiences were not lost to them. These are the “old souls” who have the wisdom of many years at a very young age. They have lived and recorded a lifetime in the time that their peers may have spent in the oblivion that some poets call “the little death”.

How many times have we known a people who were too immature to act their age? If we deducted the full third of their lifetime that was lost to them as being unimportant experience, the remainder would come as no surprise. Many times, a wiser soul may counsel us to sleep on a problem, and truly in the course of a night’s dreaming, the answers we seek will come. The things that were important to us in waking were sought in the greater levels of freedom that dreams afford. We can fly to great altitudes and look upon vast problems in better perspective. We can seek out the company or advice of long lost friends and family.

Other times, we are happily at play with some pleasant environment we built to relax and then someone or something enters that scenario and turns it into an adventure or a nightmare. Whether we remember it or push it out of our minds as just a dream, the residues of such are long known to effect our waking hours and even our physical and mental health.

Many times, what we meet in dream realms are but facets of ourselves that we repress as unacceptable in our social circles. Cat lovers still enjoy cats, and pedophiles are still pedophiles in their dreams, if only younger versions of themselves. A shaman, or even a psychologist might explore those dreams and bring health and healing by reconciling those facets to the greater whole. The difference is, the shaman will actually walk the paths of those dreams, and gather their information and make the introductions.

Just as shamans walk those seemingly private paths, they recognize that others do as well. Like in our waking worlds, not all is of our own making and these must be sorted out. If our house is not as we would have it, we become uncomfortable with it and remove the unwanted items to be left for hauling on the curb. Rabid or unruly pets are dealt with and normalcy returns to our homes. It’s a convenience to be able to call a vet, or animal control to help in these situations, but imagine the stress and loneliness of someone without a phone or the