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Thursday, May 10, 2007

“Life is a Dance; It is Not a Treadmill:” An Interview with Dream Interpreter Amy George

“Life is a Dance; It is Not a Treadmill:”
An Interview with Dream Interpreter Amy George

Apr 29th, 2007 by cadeveo

Waking the Midnight Sun link

Awhile back, I wrote about a very significant dream I had, which led me to seek out some dream interpretation. That, in turn, led me to discover, Amy George. Amy interprets dreams on a daily basis as part of her column for the Cape Cod Times. On top of that, she is a transgendered woman who has had quite a spiritual transformation experience, culminating with her becoming a vessel for the manifestation of a consciousness she calls The Queen of Heaven. And while I could spin all sorts of speculation, I prefer to let Amy speak for herself.

Below, you’ll find a recent e-mail interview I conducted with Amy, where she talks about her life, dream work, spiritual experiences, and more.

When did you first realize you had a spiritual calling?

In college, in the late 1980s, while working through long-term problems with depression & anxiety, I started dreaming. My dreams then introduced me to my calling, but I wasn’t fully initiated into it till 1998.

Before ’98, my dreams were unusually cosmic, and odd phenomena happened in the night such as awaking to presences in the room, awaking paralyzed, and being attacked by “demons” in my sleep. I knew something novel was happening underneath the surface of ordinary life, and had little inkling that it would lead where it did.

The two most pivotal events in my calling were my encounter with Satan in 1982 and my encounter with Christ in 1998. Regarding my calling, there was no turning back after the latter event.

You mention on your site that in 1998 a “spiritual quest” led to an apocalyptic shift in your identity. What were the different devotional processes or rituals that you experimented with when this happened, if any? And what do you feel triggered the shift?

In 1998 I was (and still am today) participating in a global shift in consciousness. The global shift is a macrocosm of a microcosmic shift taking-place within individuals. I see the trigger for these shifts as ultimately a cosmic one. The point of the shift is to initiate a global transition to a higher state of consciousness which will eventually allow the eternal spirit of Creation to dwell within humanity, making the flesh inorganic and immortal, “in the image of God.” The shift is an existential one toward the reunion of male & female, time & eternity, spirit & matter, Heaven & Earth and so on for the sake of the cultivation of the New Kingdom.

In ’98, the most essential things I did differently to assume my role in the personal/collective/global/cosmic shift were to turn away from social, romantic and monetary/employment distractions to attend to my inner-world through meditation, prayer and my dreams. I would pray, meditate, work with my dreams and contemplate every day. Meditation was typical, seated, focused on being. When I prayed, it was as a supplicant.

The universe responded to my receptivity. I answered back, it replied, and so on it went like a dance. Eternity danced itself into my mind and body because my receptivity enabled it to. This occurred while on a ten-week, somewhat Aboriginal walkabout in California.

Another side of the personal level of the shift was that it happened because my male identity had run its course. By this, I primarily mean that I had become incapable of feeling anything as the man I was. I was too spiritually/emotionally wounded to go on. Dreams often likened me to a cripple. I needed my inner-woman because my ability to relate as a man to waking-life women was moribund.

Unlike most transsexual women, I was not born with the sense that I was in the wrong body. Rather various people and events emasculated me. I responded by becoming more clown than man. Had I not answered my calling, dreams and other experience have suggested that I would have gone into rather wretched decline, which was already beginning in 1998, but was curtailed as I began dancing with the shift.

From the brief detail you give of your experience on your FAQ about your spiritual transformation, it sounds like what has sometimes been referred to as a kundalini awakening or perhaps a dark night of the soul which you successfully passed through. How would you describe your transformation experience and what helped you make it through to the other side successfully?


The transformation experience was like death. Maybe it was death. I’m not sure that I did not actually die. Now I am reconstructing myself under the premise that the mind/body I presently inhabit might not physically die, but keep evolving. (I don’t mention this glibly. It’s a burden.) Even if I am to physically die, being reborn into a new life appears immanent. Remembering so much of my previous life, I sense that I have already subverted death once with consciousness.

The pinnacle of my transformation, in this life, was losing my male name and becoming a collection of selves dialoging to put me back together. This went on for a few weeks, in the midst of full-blown psychosis. The psychosis was at its most intense for a year and a half. During this time there was not much continuity to my identity, except what I could arrange from images coming from visions and dreams, and through my writing, journaling, art, music & dance.

During the year and a half, my nerves were shot. I was jittery and disoriented most of the time. For awhile moving cars frightened me.

For four years I spent the good part of every day lying down. I was dazed most of the time. The external environment overloaded me with stimuli and I would reflexively withdraw into myself. Eventually, I stopped assuming I was going to magically turn into a girl and set about getting hormones and an orchiectomy.

I am certain both “kundalini awakening” and “dark night of the soul” apply to my experience. The number one thing that helped me get through was maintaining an observing ego. Because of my work with dreams, and contemplative nature, my ego was extremely pliant. It could integrate any experience, no matter how over-the-top. My ego constantly got more and more strongly elastic, while not getting “big.”

I was often lost in self-created dramas, but whenever they receded my ego would step forth and arrange my experience in accordance with the library of existential information housed in my body.

The kundalini awakening I had in 2000 virtually annihilated me. It has taken years to bring enough balance to it that I am comfortable. The past year has been my best since 1996.

Balancing the kundalini with dance feels very healthy. I let the kundalini move through me when I dance.

The Queen of Heaven is a title that has been attributed to various female deities or aspects of the divine throughout human history, including the Virgin Mary and the ancient Middle-Eastern goddess Ishtar. How do you perceive the Queen of Heaven with whom you’ve spiritually bonded?


The FAQ in my website answers this question best.

In brief, I regard the Queen of Heaven as a state of being that impresses itself on human consciousness when called for, channeling through various personae in different eras. This state of being is a personification of the feminine side of God. She is like Eve before the Fall, only the Queen of Heaven is eminently self-aware.

The Queen of Heaven has required history in order to become self-aware. She has been becoming, and seemingly will continue to become, self-aware through my mind & body—and other peoples’, too, in varying degrees.

I surmise—and have experienced in dreams and visions—that at some point in my evolution I will become as perfect, whole, aware, and perhaps as deathless as Her.

There is a tradition of yoga called bhakti, wherein a devotee chooses a god/goddess form–perhaps Krishna or some other deity–who becomes the sole focus of hir devotion. Through intense concentration and constant remembrance of hir chosen deity (isht-deva), the devotee eventually becomes transformed so that hir essence and spirit becomes one with hir deity. Has the role you describe for yourself as an avatar of The Queen of Heaven resulted from a process like bhakti? Or was it more that She chose you?

I would say that it resulted from both, but I definitely didn’t choose her. It was more like there was a path to her that I was unwittingly led down. My role in relation to the Queen of Heaven is to participate in it, to dance with it. In 1997, months before the onset of my calling, I had the following dream that elaborated the process of relating to the unconscious, of which she is the crown:

I’m in a dentist’s office getting prepared for oral surgery by a woman dental assistant. She is rubbing painkiller into the back of my skull, so I figure it’s supposed to seep through to my mouth. As she does this she instructs the dentist on spiritual matters. He is aware that a great spiritual shift is taking place. He is both wary and curious about it. She talks about the spiritual shift’s relation to us. When the Ego is gone the Self can live, and what the Ego calls impossible can happen, for example levitation or flight. She instructs him in being both open and judicious in approaching it. Everything she’s saying is in Hungarian, except when she says, “It is something that experiences everyone.” I correct her saying, “Everyone experiences.” She accepts my correction. As she speaks I shut my eyes and raise my feet in the direction of the ceiling so that I’m standing on the back of my neck and head in some kind of yogic position. Energy is coming to me.

Does God experience us or do we experience God? The answer is both, only most people are not as called as me to be God’s puppet. God is not my puppet, but puppeteers me by leading me into experience.

Our culture seems to have a bit of difficulty in figuring out how to conceive of, much less what to do with, spirituality for folks that have sexualities or gender-identities outside the usual male/female heterosexual box. Yet, that has not been the case in other cultures I’ve read about where, folks that in our society would be considered queer or gay, bi or transgendered would be the prime candidates to receive the call to spiritual work or shamanism. How do you see that changing both within the mainstream culture and also within gay/bi/transgender communities?

I don’t perceive any shift in the mainstream toward regarding LGBTQ people as particularly spiritual. In general, the mainstream seems to be giving greater interest and a fairer shake to the LGBTQ community—not that there is not a long way to go.

I have sensed a little shift toward spirituality and shamanism within LGBTQ circles, but I don’t think it is any different than what is happening in the mainstream. I think that, in our culture, LGBTQ people tend to be spiritualized not because of their unique perspectives, but because of their suffering, which is a spiritualizer. In the LGBTQ community, more attention is given to protecting rights than spirituality. First things first.

I regard LGBTQ shamanism and spirituality in traditional societies as certainly paralleling my personal role in today’s mainstream culture. In contrast, I am a marginal figure engaging the spiritual life of the mainstream through the backdoor, using “Ask the Dream Queen.” I think that my role has come about due to the schism between the collective conscious and the collective unconscious becoming quite narrow.

What have you learned, not only about yourself, but about other people through your work as a dream interpreter?


I try to interpret a dream a day. I always learn something new from this. It is often like adding a new book to my library of dreams and related existential information

In everyday life I haven’t had a social relationship of any depth for ten years. During this time, I have evolved to a degree that is alienating. If the soul cannot be part of my relation to others, I am alienated. The blog lets me go straight to the place where I am most at home with others. I feel close to dreamers, like we form a soul family that is assisted in becoming aware of itself by working with dreams.

The blog also gives me a platform to express ideas that have stewing for years.

How did you connect with the Cape Cod Times?


One of my brothers works there as a graphics designer. I submitted the blog to approximately 150 other publications, and was rejected by all. It goes to show the value of contacts.

Aside from dream interpretation, what other spiritual work do you do with others?

On my website, I offer free spiritual counseling. No one has actually contacted me for this because of the website. Mostly, all I do personally with others is offer perspectives to lighten things weighing on them. More than anyone else, my brothers refer to me for guidance. Once a woman contacted me after reading my thoughts on synchronicity in an ”Ask the Dream Queen” posting. I was able to help her make sense of the incapacitating synchronicities she was experiencing.

You’ve described your purpose as one of bringing balance. I’d like you to go into some more detail about that.

There is no greater need on the planet than balance, but most people are incapable of understanding balance because imbalance is so deeply enculturated. I see all woe–tragedies, atrocities, sickness, injury and death–as expressions of balance, incurred because of imbalance.

Where I identify imbalance, others often see power. People think that they are powerful when they exert force, and then, over time, they come to exert force reflexively, causing imbalance. At this point come accidents, tragedies and so forth. They happen because there is only force behind them, and no power.

Power is the potential to exert force just as much as it is the potential not to exert force. Only from balance can unassailable power arise. From such power comes irresistible force.

As an extension of these notions, I believe that the potential to exert great force due to the practice of repetitive actions is illusory. Life is dance. It is not a treadmill.

Balance is feminine. Power is masculine, but balance & power precede man & woman. They are that fundamental.

To empower woman and balance man is the end of the old world.

Assuming, for a moment, that the events so far in the U.S., make up the components of one collective dream–how might you interpret it and what do we need to work on, purify or transform in ourselves?

There is no doubt that waking-life dramas are projections most directly addressed by attendance to the Self. Because of the Tao, enough energy is invested into environmentalism, peacemaking and other areas that curb the momentum of ignorance in the external world. Given this, those who have spiritual and creative callings do best to ignore ignorance (“events in the US”) altogether, at least until its excesses demand compassion.

No greater gift can be given to the world than for the individual to answer the call of the Self. In return, the individual becomes a home for the ethos of eternity—the ethos that ultimately dooms ignorance. The contributions of such individuals to the collective will transform it. As a result of the transformation, even the collective’s nay-sayers will wake one day to realize that they have been asleep at the wheel of reality.

As a new era approaches, the Tao will purify the collective of ignorance, and its souls will be recycled like so many aluminum cans.

I view history as a gestalt that parallels the development of a single individual. If there is a point to this, it is that historical time and individual time converge as individuals consciously harmonize with eternity.

Do you have any other thoughts or insights you’d like to share with us?

Many thousands, but I’ll hold off except to mention some news: I landed an agent! She has been in the business of selling books to big publishing houses for thirty years. Soon, she will be going to NYC to try to sell my memoirs, collectively titled Evolution of the Peacock. The first book to be published will likely be one called “The Stooge.”

***

Thanks to Amy George for the opportunity to conduct this interview. If you have dreams of significance that you’d like interpreted, check out her column, send her an e-mail and be ready for her helpful insights.

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