Tarot Lesson of the Day: Nine of Swords

Well, given that I’m posting this at four in the morning, it’s pretty clear what this card means to me – sleepless nights indeed! Beware of fretting or letting anxiety control you, but don’t allow yourself to become complacent, as there may be a storm coming. Try to find the happy medium of awareness and comfort, as difficult as that might be, and have faith in yourself and your ability to handle whatever may come. 

Dreams and Nightmares

Have you ever woken up from a dream and, for a moment, not been able to tell what was real and what wasn’t? It’s a feeling I get a lot. I’ve always had especially vivid dreams, and I sometimes remember them more clearly than I do reality. In fact, as a child I taught myself how to lucid dream as a form of relief, a way to let myself fight back against my nightmares by taking control.

Lucid dreaming is a fascinating phenomenon, where one engages the conscious mind while still in REM sleep – i.e., you ‘wake up’ within your dream. Many people may have experienced the partial versions of this (realizing you’re dreaming, changing things in a dream via willpower, or realizing the dream world doesn’t make sense), but most people can’t experience full clarity in a dream without making use of some simple techniques to make the process easier. Getting in the habit of regularly checking the time, for example. In dreams, watch or clock displays are often distorted, or time seems to pass at an abnormal rate. By checking the time regularly while awake, you get in a habit that will carry over when you’re dreaming, allowing you to pick up on the fact that you’re in a dream. Some other common techniques include checking text, noticing if you see someone from your past who you wouldn’t realistically see in your life, or memorizing common patterns in your dreams that can act as personal signals. I encourage you to do some research of your own and see if lucid dreaming might add something to your life; it’s certainly helped banish my nighttime fears.

Tarot And Rorschach

Something I encounter a lot is the attitude that tarot is a way to tell the future. Respectfully, I disagree. I see tarot as a way of learning about yourself and opening up to possibilities. Ultimately, the tarot is a collection of symbols, which we filter through our minds. Like a Rorshach test, the meaning isn’t in the cards themselves, it’s in how we interpret them – what connections we draw, and which portions of the traditional meanings hit home for us. I see a tarot reading as a transformational experience akin to viewing great art or reading a classical book. Logically, we see words on paper or pigment on canvas or cards on a table, but from a human perspective we see something reflective of life and ourselves. Ultimately, you yourself decide what it means and how it effects you, for it is an inherently subjective experience, but that does not mean it is without power.

Indeed, I feel this way about many areas of mysticism. Belief and ritual are important influences on our lives not because some outside forces are responding by changing the world, but because we’re changing ourselves. The existence of the placebo effect proves clearly that even in defiance of all common sense, the way you think about things changes your experience in measurable, repeatable ways. Religion, spiritualism, the occultist tradition; whatever you call it, it’s a way of using your basic impulses to change the way you think and act, ‘hacking’ the wetware of your mind with the powerful tools of ritual and belief. As Einstein famously said, “perception equals reality”. It’s time to stop treating with disdain, and start viewing it as what it truly is – art, in its purest form.