Night Sweats and Enlightenment

I am serving as a Dream Mentor for Denise Linn's Gateway Dreaming Certification Course that is currently being offered through Hay House. I noticed that a lot of students start the course ready to get dreaming only to find they are in a "dry spell" in Dreamland. And as I woke up this morning, suddenly too hot, then freezing a moment later, it occurred to me that sometimes what looks like a dry spell is really menopause!

One of the biggest challenges to women who are seeking enlightenment and self-understanding—and who isn't?—through dream work is the dream interruption that comes from menopausal symptoms. Think about it: your bladder won't hold what it used to so you will wake more frequently. This could help some dreamers because you will be awakened in the middle of a dream, but if you start writing the dream down, you may not be able to fall back to sleep. Or, you will have a hot flash, or night sweats every other minute, and never get back into REM sleep, the stage of sleep were we dream (for the most part). Blanket on, blanket off, blanket on, blanket off . . . By then you've caught the cat's attention and then you're up and that's the end of dream catching. So what may look like you're not catching any dreams may be a result of your stage of life.

I'm past all this, but the post-menopausal gift that keeps on giving has left me with an erratic inner thermostat. So while I'm sitting here feeling sorry about my pitiful dreams, I got a "flash" (couldn't resist) of the perk that comes from all this discomfort and dream loss.

Menopausal women's brains morph at this stage and we come into our power and our truth. Doctors Christiane Northrup and Mona Lisa Schulz have both written extensively on the topic. Women of this age use both left and right brains more fully and easily than when they were younger. They no longer worry quite so much about what other people think of them and they're less willing to please.

So for seekers who are tracking their dreams, what used to be an unbelievable dream life is now an unbelievable waking life. At this stage, we are dreaming awake! The synchronicities increase, the intuition is clear and unambiguous. We don't have to fall asleep to bypass our ego and hear the messages of our soul—we get them through our waking intuition. I think that menopause turns us inside out so that if we do it right, give voice to our truth, stop being everything everyone else wants us to be, and follow our bliss, then we don't actually need to have super-duper, fantastic dreams. We'll be in our dreams awake. And as we step into our role as elders, wise women in our family and our community, we begin to have dreams for all of society.

Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it!