Tag: vision | In your dreams …

And it bloomed …

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 9 Comments

“One day she decided to plant a garden of her own … and it bloomed.”

I know that as you contemplate Marylou Falstreau’s print, a garden of your own calls to you. Not a physical garden, but something that you’d love to create, become, or do, something that’s completely of your own.

Artist Marylou Falstreau was inspired by a dream to create her Woman and the Hourglass series of prints and cards, and, being totally unique and of her own, they’ve bloomed and found their way into shops, homes, hearts, and minds.

I love the sense of surprise – ‘and it bloomed!’ How often have you planted other people’s ideas, cultivated other people’s expectations, and wondered what might have happened if you had planted your own?

A style that bloomed into what we now recognise as iconic Matisse.

I went to the Matisse Drawing Life exhibition at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) last weekend. Henri Matisse drew from life every morning, before he got down to the work of the day, and there were some 300 drawings on show for us to view. His earlier drawings were heavily influenced by the prominent artists he studied, his style shifting radically from season to season until he found himself drawing in a style completely of his own, a style that bloomed into what we now recognise as iconic Matisse.

We can’t all be Matisse – and his apparently simple style is very hard to emulate, as we discovered when we sat in The Drawing Room, an interactive part of the exhibition, a lush Matisse-like studio dotted with stools, easels, and drawing boards, contemplating the smorgasbord of still life on offer, our pencils poised, and poised, and poised. I drew a few squiggles and lines, and had fun. Fun was a rewarding outcome. I discarded the inept squiggles and kept the Matisse souvenir pencil for inspiration.

No, we can’t all be Matisse, but like Matisse, or like Marylou Falstreau, we can all create, become, or do, something that’s completely of our own.

No, we can’t all be Matisse, but like Matisse, or like Marylou Falstreau, we can all create, become, or do, something that’s completely of our own. All we have to do is simply decide, one day, to plant a garden of our own … and it will bloom!

Tip 1: If you’re not sure what you want to create, become, or do, pay attention to your dreams as they reveal the limiting beliefs – largely those built around your past and present experiences of other people’s expectations of you – that block your connection to this knowing.

Tip 2: Pick a number from 1-27, and count through Marylou’s Women and the Hourglass prints to add some synchronistic insight.

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One small adjustment

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

What if you were just one small adjustment away from having the life you want?

In the movie How do you know, George (Paul Rudd) gives Lisa (Reese Witherspoon) a can of Play Doh for her birthday, and tells her how Play Doh was invented.

Joe McVicker of Kutol Chemicals invented a putty-like wallpaper cleaner that sold well until vinyl wallpaper was introduced after World War II. Vinyl wallpaper was easy to clean with soap and water, and Joe’s putty cleaner was fast becoming obsolete. The company’s future looked dire. Then his sister-in-law, Kay Zufall, a kindergarten teacher, gave her class some of Joe’s wallpaper cleaner to play with because it was easier for them to shape than the standard classroom modelling clay. It was also non-toxic and less messy. They both saw potential for repurposing Joe’s wallpaper cleaner, but it was still missing a magical element.

“What if you make it bright yellow?” Kay asked. And that’s what they did. One small adjustment, and Play Doh was born. It was 1955. Joe became a millionaire before his 27th birthday, and more than two billion cans of Play Doh were sold over the next fifty years.

“We’re all just one small adjustment away from having the life we want,” George tells Lisa in the movie, ‘How Do You Know’.

The movie, How do you know, was not such a resounding success, going on the record as one of the biggest flops of 2010, but George’s Play Doh story sticks (oops, sorry) in the mind. “We’re all just one small adjustment away from having the life we want,” George tells Lisa in the movie.

George isn’t talking about a business success outcome. He’s talking about Lisa’s happiness and her sense of purpose and connection with life.

Does Lisa know what small adjustment she needs to make to have the life she really wants? And does she make it? Watch the movie to find out!

So what if you were just one small adjustment away from having the life you want? What might that adjustment be, and would you make it?

The catch is that we’re generally blind to the adjustments we need to make, otherwise we would make them. And if we’re not blind, we lack courage because we haven’t discovered the small adjustments we need to make to overcome our fears.

What if your small adjustment was a shift of focus, a new way of looking at a situation, a change in approach?

The answer is in your dreams. Your dreams reflect your mindset and how it results in the life you are experiencing.

Just as a chiropractor makes one small adjustment to free your stiff neck …

Just as a mechanic can look at a broken engine and know what small adjustment is needed to make it work, or a chiropractor can look at your stiff neck and know what small spinal adjustment is needed to free it up, or a Kay Zufall can see that a small adjustment to colour can change a family fortune and bring creative pleasure to hundreds of millions of children, a professional dream interpreter can look at a dream and identify the small adjustment that you can make – the one you are currently blind to – that can bring positive, sunshiny yellow changes into your life.

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Watch my lips

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 1 Comment

What you need to know is right in front of you, and in your dreams, if you know how to look. The tricky bit is that the reason you are seeing a problem instead of a solution, darkness instead of light, is that your vision is blocked by your expectations, especially your unconscious expectations.

Your waking life and dreams are often speaking plainly, loud and clear, but the block distorts the message.

“Watch my lips,” we might say to someone who isn’t hearing the simple statement we are making because it doesn’t match their expectation of the moment.

One of Michael’s friends from way back handed her lotto (lottery) ticket to her newsagent to see if she’d won anything. He ran the ticket through the machine. “You’d better sit down,” he told her, handing her a piece of paper with the result. “Congratulations!”

She sat down, and read the print out. “$3,000, wonderful!” she laughed.

“Take a deep breath, and read it properly,” insisted the newsagent.

“Look again,” said the newsagent.

“Oh, $30,000!” she said, surprised at having misread it the first time, and rather excited at the timing of this much-needed gift.

“Take a deep breath, and read it properly,” insisted the newsagent.

“$300,000! It can’t be,” her heart fluttering, a little panic rising.

This was several years ago, in New Zealand, and she had just gone back into the workforce after having children, needing to make ends meet. In the space of a minute, she had gone from winning a celebratory $3,000 (a holiday, perhaps), to a debt-clearing $30,000, to the prospect of paying off their mortgage and buying a new house with the $300,000 winnings.

But can you guess what happened next?

“Look again,” said the newsagent.

She had won three million dollars. She had been unable to see all the zeroes at first because winning such a sum simply did not fit her expectation, and/or because the thought of having three million dollars raised confusion, worry and negative beliefs about being rich.

I smiled when she told me, a few weeks later, that the only thing she’d bought so far was a new pair of sunglasses (shades). A great way to view the world while accustoming to a new perspective! Which, she did, in the end!

He needed to be rescued from a weird cult, where they taught false creationist theories.

I was reminded of this last week when a client sent me a dream about a ten year old boy who needed to be rescued from a weird cult, where they taught “false creationist theories”. (She was so surprised on learning what it meant that she offered it to me to share in public.) The boy in the dream was ten years old. “I was ten when my father died,” she told me. “My father, who later turned out to be my stepfather.”

Can you see the connection?

To me it was loud, clear, and obvious. Her dream was about the “false creationist theories” she was given, as a child, about her origins. She was falsely informed – or it was implied – that the man she called father was her biological father, responsible, with her mother, for her creation.

The rest of her dream showed how the emotional trauma she had experienced when she discovered the truth (or falsity) of her identity has been blocking her from moving her work into the public arena. She feels vulnerable about public exposure. The block has been her unconscious mind’s way of ‘protecting’ her from further hurt, even though life would be more rewarding for her today if she were freed from this ‘protection’. This was welcome information, and her new awareness combined with applying dream alchemy will break through the block and she will find herself moving forward comfortably.

Although she has known for many years that her father was, in fact, her stepfather …

Although she has known for many years that her father was, in fact, her stepfather, she did not know that she carried an emotional wound that was influencing the way she lives her life today. The wound was the block that blinded her from seeing, even as she described her dream to me, that her ten year old self had learned “false creationist theories”.

I love that dream symbols that can appear so weird at first glance make perfect commonsense when we look again and watch their lips.

Sometimes you can do that looking again and watching of lips yourself. Sometimes your block is too big, your expectations too set. That’s where I can help you, of course.

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Dream vibrations and the LOA

Posted on May 12, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 3 Comments

I am often asked about the Law of Attraction, and whether nightmares and dreams with negative vibes attract negative people and events into our lives. It’s a good question. So, let’s explore:

Books about the Law of Attraction have enjoyed waves of popularity since the early 1900s

Books about the Law of Attraction have enjoyed waves of popularity since the early 1900s, with a recent resurgence in the early 1990s and a deluge of interest since 2000. Rhonda Byrne’s ‘The Secret’ DVD and book, published in 2006, repackaged the Law of Attraction in a way that inspired millions of people to start making the LOA – as it is now commonly known – help them achieve their goals. So, what is the LOA, exactly?

According to the LOA, you receive according to the vibe you give out. Like vibes attract like vibes. If your focus on money is all positive you attract plenty of it into your life, whereas if your focus on money is negative (for example, if you focus on debt or lack of money), then you attract debt or lack into your life. According to the law, whatever you focus on, you get more of the same.

The LOA is working all the time, whether you believe in it or not. I know this to be true. The secret everyone is searching for is how to become an active participant in the process – how to create and maintain the vibe that brings you what you want.

Imagine you know that secret, and you put all your waking hours into maintaining the vibe that will bring you what you want, and then you go to sleep and have a dream …

Imagine you know that secret, and you put all your waking hours into maintaining the vibe that will bring you what you want, and then you go to sleep and have a dream brimming with negative emotions, perhaps grief, anger or loss of confidence. Does the negative vibe of your dream beam out into the universe and undo all that daytime work?

Here’s where the magic of working with your dreams comes in. If you really want the LOA to work for you, then pay attention to your dreams. First up, there are a few basics you need to know:

1. Remember that dreams are symbolic, not literal. So if you dream that someone you know dies, your dream is NOT predicting that person’s death. The dream is symbolic and it is about something that is ending (dying off) in your life. Dreams of death are very common, and many people are frightened to mention them because they fear that putting the dream into words, or paying it attention, will cause it to happen. Please be assured that this is not the way it works. In fact, not talking about a worrying dream increases your waking life anxiety – and this affects your vibe. It’s better to talk about a worrying dream, interpret it, understand more about yourself as a result, and move on, free of any negative vibe. In this example, once you understand what is coming to an end in your life, you can decide to bring it back to life or to let it go and move on to something better. Interpretation brings you self understanding and choice.

2. The emotions you feel in your dreams are emotions that belong to you. Sometimes they’re emotions you’re aware of; most often they’re unconscious emotions that you’ve buried long ago, or emotions you’ve repressed because you can’t acknowledge them in your waking life.

3. In the same way, the beliefs, limitations and blocks you encounter in your dreams are your own unconscious beliefs, limitations and blocks.

4. So, when you interpret a dream, you discover your unconscious emotions, beliefs, limitations and blocks.

Whether you’re awake or asleep, your unconscious mind continuously sends out its vibe.

Now here’s the most important thing to understand. Whether you’re awake or asleep, your unconscious mind continuously sends out its vibe. And your unconscious mind is far more powerful than your conscious mind.

For example, you might choose to focus on sending out a positive vibe about money all day. You spend all day doing this, feeling totally positive and good about it. As far as you are aware, you have absolutely no block to having vast amounts of money in your life. However, your unconscious mind may have a different agenda. You may have unconscious doubts, limiting beliefs and blocks about having so much money. Because your unconscious mind is stronger than your conscious mind, it wins in the battle of the vibes. You don’t see the results you wanted and you declare the LOA to be a crock. But it isn’t! The LOA is working for you perfectly. Your overall vibe, dictated by your unconscious mind, is attracting according to the law. You are receiving according to the vibe you are giving out.

The real secret to getting the Law of Attraction to bring you what you consciously want is to get your unconscious mind on side.

If you want the LOA to work for you, pay attention to your dreams.

So rather than ask if a worrying dream is sending out a negative vibe, attracting negative things to you, celebrate the fact that being able to remember your dream is the first step to identifying a negative vibe that your unconscious mind is sending out while you are awake, a negative vibe of which you are oblivious, a negative vibe that is attracting negative stuff to you.

You dream every night, and a dream has a vibe whether or not your remember it. Learning to remember your dreams and interpret them is an empowering step to take if you’re serious about attracting what you want into your life.

Dream interpretation identifies your unconscious beliefs, so you can easily pick the ones that are working against your conscious wishes. The next question is, how do you change those unconscious beliefs to align them to your conscious wishes?

This is done through the process of dream alchemy. These are simple exercises such as visualisations and affirmations that reprogram your unconscious beliefs. Here’s an example:

You dream you are driving a car but you can’t see ahead clearly because the windscreen is dark. This is a common dream indicating that you are unclear about your vision for your future. This lack of clarity is the work of an unconscious block sabotaging your vision. To apply dream alchemy when you wake up, visualise yourself back in the dream only this time the windscreen is exceptionally clear and you can see your way. Visualise yourself driving well, and add in all the positive emotions you associate with achieving your goal. Doing the dream alchemy practice – the visualisation – undoes the block and reprograms the associated unconscious belief in alignment with your conscious intention. (Do a dream alchemy visualisation 20 times a day for a week, ten times a day for the second week and twice a day for the next month.)

So tune into your dreams to tune those unconscious negative vibes that you are beaming out 24/7 into positive vibes that ensure that the Law of Attraction fulfils your conscious desires.

[Copyright Jane Teresa Anderson, April 2009. First published in longer version as a Dream Sight article.]

[You can listen to this article in episode 33 The Dream Show.]

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Episode 53 The Dream Show: Apples for apples

Posted on April 23, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

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A new podcast every Friday. Listen here or subscribe on iTunes.

Episode 53 of our free weekly podcast, THE DREAM SHOW, is now up.

Is there a right interpretation to every dream? If you’re interpreting your own dreams, might you sometimes interpret according to what you want to believe about yourself and your life?

Are you a stickler for seeing things the same way, doing things the same way, and is this seeing and doing taking you where you want to be? Where do you want to be? How tough does life have to get before you look for a new way forward?

Today’s show offers some universal truths, insights and inspirations to get you moving ahead with ease when things seem a bit too tough. And plenty of dream interpretation tips as always, of course.

You can listen here (Episode 53) or subscribe to the whole series – a new free episode every week – at iTunes.

If you’d like to be a guest on the show and have a dream interpreted, please contact me to book yourself in! It’s free, of course!

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Back seat driver

Posted on April 15, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

He was driving the bus from a back seat

Some dreams are just meant to be shared, and here’s one with a universal message. One of my regular clients brought this dream to me for interpretation and alchemy, and kindly offered it to share with you all on this blog.

He dreamed he was a passenger on a gigantic bus, sitting near the back with his feet perched on a heavy metal bar. Suddenly he realised he wasn’t a passenger at all, he was the driver, driving the bus by pushing down on the bar with his feet. The mechanism was cumbersome, and he had to put a lot of pressure on the bar to keep the bus moving. He was too far back from the windscreen to see where he was heading, but he felt comfortably in control of the huge vehicle and knew he was driving safely. But to where?

Here’s the bottom line:

A dream with a universal message

The bar in the dream represented an obstacle (bar) in his life, and that obstacle had become the driving force of his life. He had lost touch with his vision, his plan for where he was heading (he was too far from the windscreen in the dream). Instead of making decisions based on his vision, he was making decisions based on the obstacle. By paying attention to the obstacle, applying pressure, keeping it under control, he ensured his safety and was able to keep things trundling along in a comfortable, if cumbersome, way.

But to where? We agreed he needed to get back in touch with his vision, otherwise he’d end up wherever ‘staying safe and in control’ was taking him.

Of course, we dug a little deeper. Everything in a dream represents something about the dreamer, so that bar represented a belief manifesting as an obstacle, and we did the work to explore and transform that belief. See? The way to deal effectively with what seems like an obstacle in life is to understand it, get new perspective on it, and transform it into a more helpful belief.

Are you being driven by what you see as the obstacles in your life, or are you driven by a vision of where you want to be?

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Dream catching

Posted on November 30, 2009 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

Prehnite: Deep rememberings

Today I was honoured to receive the first ‘dream catcher wristlet’, a signature piece, designed by Wendy Dugan of Sanctus Stones, to enhance dream recall.

One of the stones featured in the piece is prehnite, a pale green crystal with darker green streaks suspended below the surface, like seaweed. Nested amongst seed pearls, amethysts and other gems and stones, the prehnite has kept drawing me in all day.

Staring into its depths reminded me of a childhood dream, and that got me scuttling back to the first Dream Sight article I wrote on 11/11, 1998 – 11 years ago! You’ll see why when you read it (below)!

I have to smile, because I had forgotten that prehnite is the Stone for Dreaming and Remembering, so that dream catcher wristlet is already working its magic.

Here it is:

“I was intrigued by the team of white-coated people who arrived at our Infant School one week, calling on each class in turn to line up outside the Head’s Office and read letters from a chart propped against the wall. Special children came away with envelopes addressed to their parents. I was five years old, and I hoped I would be special enough to take home one of the envelopes. As the days passed I heard that the visitors had come to test our eyesight and that the letters were for those singled out to wear glasses. My wish escalated: oh, wouldn’t I be really special if Mum and Dad had to take me to choose glasses!

I guess I must have wished pretty hard for a five year old, because by the time I got to the front of the line I couldn’t see the big letter at the top of the chart and I’ve worn glasses or contact lenses ever since.

It was a revelation to me a few weeks after taking home the precious envelope to discover that houses were made of bricks all the way up to their roofs, rather than being brick near the ground and then a kind of reddish smudge the rest of the way up. Trees grew leaves to replace the green clouds that had floated around them, and the night sky was neatly scattered with precise pin-point designs instead of huge, glaring, intermingling white blurs.

I wonder if it was then that my dreams opened stunning new vistas – worlds beyond worlds and worlds within worlds? My previous babyhood dreams of being threatened by wolves or finding myself waist deep in snake pits gave way to a recurring dream of mirrored lakes which, if I laid on the ground and looked sideways in a special way, revealed their hidden depths teeming with tropical fish. In those dreams I used to plead with everyone to look at the water in my special way, to take my sideways look at the magnificence that thrived below the surface of an English lake where the presence of tropical fish, to the uninitiated, was merely a ridiculous fantasy. No-one ever looked.

Now I can see, with or without the aid of my glasses, that in the same moment that I was a child needing to feel special and loved for who I was beyond the surface, I needed to learn that the world did indeed have depth of meaning. My short sight became a blessing enabling me to experience a different view, to see different perspectives and to have faith that what may seem confusing one day can leap into clear focus the next. Through short sight I learned INsight – I learned to see within. ”

[Copyright Jane Teresa Anderson, Nov 1998. First published as a Dream Sight article titled 'I Sight'.]

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Psychedelic sunglasses

Posted on November 11, 2009 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 5 Comments

Once upon a view, back in 1972

“Will dream interpretation involve digging up my past?” asked Adrian. “I want my nightmares to stop, but I don’t want to go opening up any old cans of worms.”

It’s a common concern. Many people have invested years into burying and forgetting uncomfortable experiences, preferring to look ahead to a bright future, unhampered by unsettling memories. It’s an ideal, and it’s achievable, but it only works when you first make peace with your past. When you are at peace with your past, you can focus freely on today and tomorrow. When you are not at peace with your past, it distorts your vision of the future and affects how you respond to the world.

You don’t get peace by burying discomfort. You don’t get peace by denying your past experiences. Burial and denial simply move your discomfort from your conscious mind into your unconscious mind, where the experiences live on in a more subtle form, powerfully influencing the way you automatically (unconsciously) respond in your every day life, while you go about your life under the illusion that you’re in conscious control.

Think of it this way.

Imagine you were born in 1964. Now imagine opening a cupboard filled with sunglasses. There’s a pair for every year of your life, starting from 1964. Each pair has a label identifying the year, and each pair reflects the fashion of the time. There are huge aviator glasses, tiny John Lennon spectacles, diamante-swept frames, wraparounds – a veritable history of sunshade eyewear. Pick a pair, any pair. 1974, perhaps. Since we’re imagining you were born in 1964, you would have been ten years old in 1974. Imagine looking through your 1974 glasses. Let’s call them Tardis sunshades. Time travel glasses. When you wear your 1974 sunglasses, you see today’s world through the eyes of the ten-year-old you were back in 1974.

What you might see? How much did you understand about life when you were ten? As that ten-year-old looking at your life today, how much would you understand? How much would you misinterpret? How would the attitudes of your ten-year-old self affect the way you see your life today?

Let’s be really simple here. Imagine that, at age ten, you were a shy child, afraid to speak up for yourself because your parents always reprimanded you for expressing an opinion. You learned to keep quiet, fearing the consequences. Now fast-forward to today, and here you are, looking at your life today through those 1974 eyes. How are you going to respond to life? Quietly and shyly, for fear of being hurt if you express yourself.

If you have grown since 1974 to understand where your parents were coming from when they reprimanded you for speaking up, you may have reached a sense of peace about your upbringing. At peace with your past, today you speak up without fear of being hurt in return.

If you have not had the opportunity to look back and understand, you carry that fear into your life today. You may still be quiet and shy, or you may tackle your fears head-on every day, ploughing ahead, speaking up, but somehow always expecting people to respond negatively. You may cope with this by building defence into your speaking up, delivering watertight arguments, or developing a thick skin to repel the barbs you expect to receive in return. This is what happens when you are not at peace with your past, when you bury or ignore your childhood experiences, erasing them from your conscious mind but succumbing to their power through your unconscious actions and attitudes.

Imagine popping on sunglasses from other years. Pop on your pink 1985s to view your life today. It’s like time travelling from 1985 into the future – today – and trying to understand what you see. Your only experience is the sum total of your life until 1985, so you interpret everything you see today in 1985 terms. If 1985 was the year that your fiancé left you and you vowed never to trust a woman again, you will see your wife of today with distrust through those pink 1985s.

In reality, most people handle their painful past experiences in several ways. They may find peace with some experiences, keep others alive by retelling the pain, and bury or ignore others they would prefer not to face.

Imagine picking up last year’s Tardis sunglasses to view this year. In reality, some areas of those lenses will be unchanged since 1974 if you have not updated your views since then. Other areas will be recently updated reflecting shifts in your perspective or new experiences. Still other areas will be strange blends between 1974 and 1985, perhaps, an outcome of experiences blended from those two years. All in all, last year’s specs provide a time trippy psychedelic perspective on your world today.

Now imagine taking off today’s sunglasses. What? You didn’t realise you were wearing sunglasses? Of course you are. The world you think you know today may be quite different from the one you experience through your psychedelic lenses.

This is where dream interpretation comes in. Your dreams reveal the make-up of those sunglasses you wear today. Your dreams, once interpreted, show you the difference between the way life is and the way you see it. Your dreams pinpoint experiences from your past that affect the way you experience your life today, especially highlighting those experiences you thought you had successfully buried. Your dreams, once interpreted, help you to remove your sunglasses so you can understand your past, and, in understanding, find peace.

In this way, dreams are the route to peace through understanding, and that route may include opening and examining a can of worms or two to clear your vision. Fortunately, when you look closely at those worms through ever-clearer lenses, you finally see them for what they always were – angels in disguise. And that’s where nightmares stop, and beautiful dreams begin.

[Copyright Jane Teresa Anderson, Aug 2007. First published as a Dream Sight article.]

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Tag Archives: vision

And it bloomed …

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One small adjustment

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Watch my lips

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Dream vibrations and the LOA

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Episode 53 The Dream Show: Apples for apples

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Back seat driver

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Dream catching

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Psychedelic sunglasses

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