I want to tell you about three dreams.
They came years apart, in different decades of my life, and on the surface they have nothing in common. One is set in a cabin in the woods. One is a parade of horror movie villains. One has a dragon in it.
But underneath them is the same lesson, and I only saw the lesson after I had lived all three.
The cabin
In my early thirties, my friend Anthea told me about a dream she had been unable to shake.
She was nursing her baby in a cabin in the woods when the door slammed open and a shadow of a man stood in the doorway. She knew, immediately and entirely, that he had come for the baby. She fought him.
That night I dreamed it too.
I was in the cabin. I was nursing my baby. The door slammed open. The shadow man stood in the doorway.
But what happened next was not what happened in Anthea’s dream.
I placed my baby gently back into the cradle. I stood up. I walked towards the shadow. I looked into his eyes and I said, I forgive you for what you are about to do. And then I leaned in, hugged him, and kissed him on the forehead.
He went ice still.
He stepped back from me as though I had burned him, though I had only loved him. And then he turned and walked away.
I woke up and I knew something had been answered. Not just for me — for Anthea too. The same dream had come to both of us, two nights apart, with two different responses, and the response was the whole teaching. The shadow could not hold his shape against forgiveness. He needed my fear to remain what he was.
I did not decide to forgive him. The forgiveness arrived faster than thought. Something in me already knew what to do.
The horror movie
On the 23rd of March, 2022, I had a dream where horror movie villains came one by one to terrify me.
Chucky came first. He pushed his face right up to mine.
I laughed.
Then the IT clown. Then vampires. Then a thinning procession of figures that were running out of menace as they arrived.
I said, out loud in the dream: Is this the best you can do?
And the dream dissolved.
I want to be clear that I did not feel brave. I did not feel anything heroic. The laugh came up the way a laugh comes up when something is genuinely absurd. There was a quality of come on in it, as though I were watching a show that had run out of ideas. The villains seemed to know it too. They lost their power the moment they were laughed at.
That evening, while I was preparing dinner, a weevil appeared about ten centimetres above the bench in front of my iPad. It dropped onto the surface from nowhere I could identify. There was no source above it, no crack in the ceiling, no pot of grain nearby. I looked everywhere and could not explain it.
I noted it down. Something had noticed me noticing.
The dragon
On the 1st of February, 2023, I dreamed I was in Camberwell with my husband, Sean, after a movie. We were walking back to the car when he said something I found dismissive, and I felt the familiar wish to put distance between us. I left him and walked alone.
The streets had been changed by maintenance. Most of the paths I knew were closed. I crossed a road and entered a corridor inside a building, looking for a way through. High up on my right, in an open doorway, my sister-in-law Sarah was looking after a set of bells. I called up to her to ask how I could reach her, and she pointed straight ahead.
At the moment she pointed, two dragons appeared in the place she was pointing to. One bronze and brown. One silver and white. She screamed and ran.
I started to run too. But I was too late. The brown dragon was on me. It had grown to half again its size by the time it reached me, and it clenched my right forearm in its jaws.
My first instinct was to pull away.
Then something turned over in me, and instead of pulling, I leaned in. I stepped towards the dragon. With my left hand I stroked the place between its eyes, slowly, the way you would stroke a frightened animal.
It softened. It leaned its head into me as though it had been waiting to be touched. And then both dragons — the one holding me and the one I had not yet met — simply disappeared.
A media crew came round the corner immediately, led by a reporter wanting to interview me about how I had subdued the dragons. I didn’t stop. I kept walking, looking for my car.
When I woke up, what struck me was not pride. It was the neutrality of my own response. I had felt the fear at the start — that’s why I had pulled away. But the moment I stopped pulling, the fear had nothing to feed on. The dragon stopped being a dragon when I stopped treating it like one.
The roar
In 2025 I spent a year studying with Matias de Stefano on the YoSoy Path, an immersive program that walks the soul through twelve archetypal energies over twelve months. I sat in countless hours of his guided meditations.
During one of them, on the energy of Scorpio, I was sitting in half-lotus with my eyes closed when Matias suddenly roared.
It was a real roar — out loud, into the microphone, into the room of meditators. And in that same instant I saw, internally, a demon’s face come nose to nose with mine. Eye contact. Fully present.
I felt my whole system wobble. Like a top that has been knocked off balance and is about to fall.
And then, a moment later, I righted.
I didn’t decide to right myself. I simply noticed I had. The system found its own centre again.
The next day Matias apologised. He said his guides had told him to do it, and he hadn’t quite known why, but he had trusted them. I understood. The roar wasn’t aimed at me personally. It was aimed at all of us, to see what we did when something unexpected reached for our balance.
What I learned, sitting on my cushion that day, was that the dreams hadn’t been preparing me for nothing. The thing I had practised, three times in my sleep, worked when I was awake.
In each of these dreams, the dark came at me wearing a different face. A shadow man. A parade of horror movie villains. A dragon. And in each one, I did not fight, and I did not run. I forgave. I laughed. I leaned in and touched the forehead. I loved them.
What if the dark is not the other. What if it is my own shadow — the parts of me I did not want to carry, that came back wearing frightening shapes because that was the only way they could ask to be seen. Fighting them is fighting myself. Loving them is the integration. When I took the shadow in my arms, it could stop performing the threat. It could rest. It could come home.
In Peter Pan, every kid is looking for their shadow. They cannot fly without it.
This is not something I had to learn. It is something I had to remember I knew.
The next piece is about the year the universe dismantled everything I had — and then handed me exactly what I needed, one impossible thing at a time.
The patterns I write about here can be read in your own chart too. If you’d like to explore your soul map, I offer galactic astrology readings at divinehealingx.com — including an Asteroid Deep Dive that explores the soul-level threads traditional astrology often misses.
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