In a recent dream, I come back from lunch and tell my boss that I am sick (true, in the dream I had a heck of a cold) and that I’ll hang around to get some critical tasks done, but that I couldn’t work that night. The boss starts a verbal tirade, saying things like I wasn’t too sick to go to lunch. He launches into a whole list of things I hadn’t done, which was certainly what I didn’t want to hear at that time. After the boss spends his fuel, he walks away. I decide to go have a talk with his boss, but of course, that guy wasn’t in his office. In fact the office was shut up tight, with no prospect of his return.
It was one of those dreams where you’d swear you were actually there.
This is the kind of thing that happens when a planet, any planet, transits your twelfth house. Being the house ruled by nebulous Pisces, which is ruled by the planet Neptune, things are fuzzy and murky in the twelfth house. For many people this house is lit with a 20 watt bulb, just enough light to know there is something there, just not enough to make out what it is. Twelfth house issues are stuff of the subconscious mind, what we do not look at in the cold light of day yet have a habit of broad siding us.
Even the term “subconscious” is murky in its definitions. Wikipedia tells us:
The term subconscious is used in many different contexts and has no single or precise definition. . . In everyday speech and popular writing, however, the term is very commonly encountered as a layperson’s replacement for the unconscious mind, which in Freud’s opinion is a repository for socially unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of mind by the mechanism of psychological repression. However, the contents do not necessarily have to be solely negative. In the psychoanalytic view, the unconscious is a force that can only be recognized by its effects—it expresses itself in the symptom.
But wikipedia here only presents half the story. As it turns out recent studies show us a different dimension to the subconscious mind:
the new studies reveal a subconscious brain that is far more active, purposeful and independent than previously known. Goals, whether to eat, mate or devour an iced latte, are like neural software programs that can only be run one at a time, and the unconscious is perfectly capable of running the program it chooses.
John A. Bargh, a professor of psychology at Yale [says] “Well, we’re finding that we have these unconscious behavioral guidance systems that are continually furnishing suggestions through the day about what to do next, and the brain is considering and often acting on those, all before conscious awareness.”
These subconscious impulses are sparked by input from our senses, sight, sound and touch.
It is said that humans use on 20% of their brain, but perhaps this perception is not quite so true. Somewhere in the brain all that subconscious processing has to happen.
Dreams appear to come out of nowhere, but they are just the result of our subconscious processes. With the conscious mind powered down during sleep, subconscious symbolism rules. And this symbolism is not linear or rational. But these dreams appear real because they are an unfiltered part of how our mind thinks.
But daylight and the waking state don’t turn off our subconscious. Our conscious mind helps to filter and order the subconscious thoughts, but it seems even while awake the subconscious has a lot to say about what we do with our days. This is why the twelfth house is so important to understand.
When you have a period of intense dreams take a look at your twelfth house and see what is transiting there. At the very least the moon will run through the twelfth house for a few days in month. Keep a log of your dreams and check out your transits. You’ll be amazed at how the transits synch with the dreams that display your subconscious fears and desires. For me, the transiting moon hit my Mars in 12th, so of course, I dream of troublesome men. There’s more of course, but it is my twelfth house, after all.
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