All life is cyclical and during our lives we walk with death and destruction as a constant companion and counterpart to creation and renewal. We simply do not appear to be able to have one without the other. Just like the positive and negative charge of a battery there are times when we attract or repel certain energies or even events.

Inner deaths occur when we “let go” of fears, anger etc. by feeling the grief of past trauma, pain, habits or even beliefs we have long held on to. External deaths occur with the passing of loved ones, or when long standing friendships or even occupations, fall by the wayside, all of which have an internal resonance. Our environment is also constantly changing and undergoing this natural cyclic occurrence of destruction and death, so the new can emerge.

So what does this all have to do with dreams? Plenty!

I was recently undergoing such a cycle whereby I finally was able to put a longstanding situation to rest which had been creating feelings of sadness and a certain lack of peace for well over three decades. The Universe conspired to bring me precisely what I needed about three or four years ago to help me heal and move on from this deep wound and over a period of time the realisations and healing which occurred fully enabled me to move on with my life.

When the final realisation hit and the last fragment of emotional energy that had been holding me back, which presented itself as an excruciating pain in my left foot, released itself, around the same time another situation arose which was linked in with that healing and moving forward process. The result was the pain released itself from my foot in a very timely fashion as the death of a couple of longstanding friendships occurred, simply because there was nothing in me that was resonating with those people any longer. It happens, as our energy shifts and changes, that which was familiar is no more, in order to make space for new to come into our lives. If we hang onto the old there simply is no space for anything else.

Whilst this inner death/release was occurring, along came a dream in which I was standing on some type of platform overlooking the ocean towards the East. (East for me is the direction of new beginnings.) Quite suddenly there were navy vessels, rescue boats and planes, along with helicopters moving from the north to the south. I felt quite safe where I was even though I could clearly see a very dark energy, like a massive storm cloud, black as ink, moving from south to north. It wasn’t what I would call a nice or even pleasant energy. For want of a better word, it felt rather “evil”. I became aware in the dreaming experience that all these rescue vessels and aircraft were heading south on a mission to help people because “Sydney had been decimated” by some type of apocalyptic event. I emerged from the experience thinking that it was all somehow linked in with my longstanding ties to the Southlands and the ending of friendships from childhood which was occurring. It all made perfect sense to me, confirmation if you like that I was out of harms way and about to start a new life cycle. That I had finally released the toxicity of a deeply wounding past experience.

Fast forward a wee while and the fires which were of an apocalyptic nature this Summer here in Australia erupted in northern NSW, the Blue Mountains, the South Coast of NSW, then Victoria. There were also fires in Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia but NSW appears to have borne the brunt of them, with air quality in Sydney, which at one point was surrounded by fires, falling to a dangerous level.

What was meant to be a time when I was to have my first decent holiday in years in the Southlands was stopped in it’s tracks by a state of emergency being declared in NSW. Roads and rail were cut and so my “holiday” became a non-event.

I took solace in participating in some very full on voluntary work to assist our native wildlife and also visited some friends up the coast. There was little I could do about any of it and clearly I wasn’t meant to be anywhere near where I had planned to visit. I was safe and yes I felt protected both in the dreaming experience and this reality, as if I had of left a couple of days earlier than I had planned to, I would have been in the midst of the fires and chaos.

One morning, whilst up the coast I was standing on a wooden platform/lookout overlooking the ocean when two F1 11s went screaming past, heading from North to South. The dream came back in a flash! Excuse the pun. Life was indeed moving in and out of my “dream”. Then an interesting realisation came when I was reading something Xavier Rudd had shared on Instagram. He’d laid the fire sites map over the recorded massacre sites map of First Nations People here in Australia and they matched. I instantly remembered encountering an extremely black as ink, insidious, vile, menacing and malicious energy when visiting an old museum in the town of 1770. It was so intense I could not even walk through the door of the museum. Inside were shackles, chains, whips and other horrors the invaders of Australia had used to torture and capture our First Nations people with. I’d asked my son at the time, “How on earth do you cleanse energy that horrific” his instant reply was that it could only be done with fire.

Next there came on the news that a Navy vessel had been commanded to rescue people stranded on the South Coast of NSW and immediately the Navy vessels from my dream came to mind.

As you can see from this story dreams have so many layers and they are never as they first appear to be. Sometimes it can take days, weeks or even months before the ahh haa moment hits in relation to what a dreaming scenario was really telling you. I have found time and time again it pays to not only write about our dreams and work with them, but to also have the patience to wait and see what life brings our way which connects our dreaming realities to this physical reality. Was nature cleansing millions of acres of Australian land of the past, so we can all move together into a better future where Indigenous knowledge is valued when it comes to managing Country, particularly concerning fire management? Only time will tell.