When I was eighteen, I went to work in a hotel in France for the summer, with the aim of improving my French. While I was there, I had the strangest dream I’d ever had. This is what happened:

I was in Paris, outside a locked car which was parked in the street. Inside the car was an African baby. There was no air, water or food in the car and the baby was dying. There were many people around the car, some who wanted to rescue the baby, some were just observing. There was a sad, inevitable atmosphere in the dream - we were waiting for the baby to die and we could not prevent his death.

In the night, I woke up, feeling quite disturbed and haunted by the dream. When I went back to sleep, I dreamt of the same thing. It was so awful that I kept waking up. I tried to sleep a couple more times but each time, I returned to the same dream. And the very last time that I fell asleep, the baby was out of the car and someone was holding him. He died in their arms. After that, I gave up trying to sleep as I did not want to dream about it again.

I went into work really tired that morning and the radio was on, as usual. Literally the very first piece of news that I heard was that a baby of African origin had been found dead in a locked car in Paris, they thought he had been left there overnight and died of dehydration. Of course, when I heard that a shiver ran down my spine, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I got goosebumps (Ok, maybe not all at the same time, but suffice to say that I was freaked out!)

And I thought about the experience a lot over the next few days. I wondered what this experience was. Was it just a dream - a ‘coincidence’? Or was I actually there in Spirit?

If I was of a more skeptical mindset, I would probably have attributed my dream to a coincidence (that word that skeptics love so much). But instead I concluded that my dream was somehow linked to the actual event. I felt haunted by the dream, in a way that a dream had not haunted me before. I felt some sort of connection to the baby.

Prior to that experience, I had never really thought too much about dreams - I had lots of weird dreams, sure, but I did not pay so much attention to the meaning of them or think they were ‘real’.

Later on, when I did my training in spiritual healing, I learned that our dreams are real experiences, which take place on the astral planes. Some of them we have because we need to learn something from them. Others we don’t need to remember as much.

Here are three common activities that we do when we’re asleep:

1. Learning through Role-playing

Have you ever had a dream that taught you a real lesson? Some of our dream experiences happen because there is a lesson contained within them, that we are meant to remember and take on board.

Here’s an example: if you’re someone who is very giving, to a fault, in your daily life, and you need to learn to balance giving with receiving, you could be in a dream situation where you experience direct negative consequences as a result of giving too much to others. And when you wake up, you realize that it doesn’t serve you to be the one who’s always giving and never receiving.

Sometimes your guides and teachers can be involved in your role-playing, to help you to learn these lessons and at other times, you may see souls in your dreams whom you do not recognize. These souls are undoubtedly ‘Dream masters’ - souls who serve you by playing parts in your dreams, to help you to learn something. You could be a Dream master yourself - especially if you have lots of dreams that don’t make sense or have any lessons for you in them.

2. Consulting with guides, angels and spiritual teachers

Some people aren’t skilled at connecting with their guides because they’re too afraid to open up. The most un-scary way that your guides can pass on a message to you is in a dream, and they often do this, but not all of them are always remembered by the conscious mind. Sometimes guides can show you metaphors, sometimes you have conversations with them. Mine have even played songs to me to give me a certain message. If there is something which I am missing about any aspect of my life that I really ought to be seeing, I know that my guides will come to me in a dream and let me know about it.

The last time they did this was last year, when I heard from an old school friend of mine that our high school Spanish teacher, Mr Owen, had passed away. I was sad and sorry for his family - he wasn’t even that old. But then shortly after hearing the news, I had a dream in which one of my guides informed me that Mr Owen wasn’t dead and that it was just a rumour.

I wanted to check, so I wrote to my old German teacher to ask her if she’d heard the same news. She replied to say that she rang Mr Owen and he was alive and well - so, it was a rumour, nothing more. Now I always pay attention when I remember having spoken to my guides about something in a dream!

If you don’t really make use of your guides or are looking to develop your psychic abilities, it helps to intend to speak with your guides in your dreams. I say that firstly because it’s so easy for your guides to reach you when you‘re asleep. They may even have some tips or instructions for you to contact them in your waking hours.

3. Helping other souls to cross over (Third Order work)

The Third Order is the spiritual order (group of spirits) which comes for you when you die, to help you to cross over to the other side. Some of us have worked in the Third Order in between our physical incarnations and if so, we bring our Third Order skills into the physical with us.

Obviously, when you’re in a physical body, you can’t work as a member of the Third Order. But I have read for quite a lot of people who belong to this spiritual order and a few of them have told me that they dream of helping spirits who are earthbound to cross over or of helping souls who are otherwise ‘stuck’ to set themselves free.

This could have been what I was doing in my dream about the African baby. Lately I often dream I’m helping stuck or earthbound souls. The souls that I dream about are very real to me. Maybe I should start demanding astral payment!

So, voila - three ways in which dreams can be very, very meaningful. Contrary to what you may have heard, dreams are not always about our subconscious mind talking to us - they are actually part of our connection to Source. And there’s no reason why we would not want to remember dreams, except of course, if we have unpleasant dreams. If this is the case, you could be travelling to the negative astrals.

The negative astrals are a pretty unpleasant place to visit and you will have nightmares and nasty dreams if you go there. If you’re often having disturbing dreams or nightmares, you could have a portal way open in your subconscious to the negative astrals.

To close the portal way, light a candle, sit quietly and focus on your breath for a few minutes, to slow down your vibration, then read the following prayer:

“Creator of all beings, Divine Archangels, my Astral Guide, my own personal team of Guides, Teachers and Angels, please close the portal way in my subconscious, that leads to the negative astrals, for all time, so that it may never be re-opened. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Please leave a comment if you have something to relate about your astral experiences!