In February 1996 I had a lucid spiritual dream revealing that untouched place within and affirmed that not all of me had suffered at the hand of hate and harmful acts.  I was not completely wounded.  There was great light inside bursting through small openings.  The dream itself was an expression of that light, that fire.

The dream was about angels.  Dark ones. Not satanic as some folks believe Black Angels to be.  Yet, they were not like any other angels I had ever seen or heard of.  They were not the angels of a specific religion or tradition. They were not of this earth. They were free from intellectual meaning. They were dark, filled with light. They were a community of spirits, guiding light, in the darkness. They came from my dream world to awaken a deep connection in me to all living beings, to bring healing waters to the fire.

The world of dreams is as real as our waking lives, in which our lucid and astral lives come together. I do not interpret dreams in the psychological sense that all the people represent “me” in the dream, although there are such dreams.  I have experienced my lucid dreams as filled with healing, messages for the world and symbols from a place beyond imagination, beyond the “me” that walks the earth. I find this kind of dreaming as an open gate filled with prophecy. These dreams facilitate communication with the ancestors and ancestral spirits, and help me to access the high consciousness found in the dream states.

At the time of the angel dream I had been following the path of Buddha’s teachings for seven years in the Nichiren tradition.  Before that I led a devout Christian life filled with soul revival and hardly any attention to the notion of angels on my part.  So, angels were most unlikely to be a focus for my own healing (as I thought).  I spent nearly a month in Tamil Nadu India before the arrival of the gift.  In India I prayed in ancient temples honoring the sages of old.  I buried my feet in the red dirt roads. Upon my return to the states, for six days straight, I had lucid dreams of reconciliation with each one my family members.  I had to reconcile all that was disturbing me in my life before I could receive the gift. On the sixth day the gift of the Black Angels came to me in the form of the angel dream as I called it.

Here’s what I recall of the dream experience:

It was 4:00 a.m I sat straight up in my bed listening for the rude intruder and attempting to look for the presence I could feel in the room.  But my eyelids refused to release each other.  My sleep had been fitful, so my body felt tossed and played with.  I was breathing the deep, hard breath of a sought after, chased, and then caught person.  I was in shock.  I sensed the dew’s thin, frosted coat waiting outside at the edge of my windows, even though the blinds were closed.  I just knew it was there waiting and anticipating the lukewarm breath of day.  I hung the weight of my legs over the side of my bed searching for a reason to be awakened.  In fact, I was angry because I had been literally thrown from my dream into a confused state of morality.  At that moment, I would have sworn that someone was jerking me around.  Yet the silence surrounding me and the fullness of my head led me to believe that I was experiencing something out of the ordinary.  My body lightened itself so that I could stand up and walk.  My eyes still refused to help see in the dark.  I needed to move.  My feet gripped for sureness and steadiness as I made my way several steps down the wooden floor of the hallway.  The moment I reached the bathroom, I knew something had happened to the core of my being.  My stomach tensed up for the unknown as I searched my body, soul, and mind for answers.  All I could muster up were the words, “black angels, black angels.”

I returned to my bed feeling robbed of sleep.  I didn’t want to be in the world at that moment.  Then the presence I felt made itself known as I remembered her in my dream.  She was much too tall to be among people, but there she was in the middle of the room at a gathering I was attending.  Everyone seemed to not notice her gigantic being.  She was twelve feet tall.  The thick, dark, strength of her hair stood as sculpture in the air.  Her face had kind, dark secrets in the crevices of her mouth and eyes.  She did not fit at the party any more than I did.  As she spoke to me, I glanced at the others to see if they could hear.  Their body posture and look of “party as usual” clued me that they could neither hear nor see her.  I knew immediately this was a spiritual being who had a message for me and for me only.  She continued to speak of black angels, but I was not picking up all of the words.  I could only feel a sense of what she was saying.  I woke up feeling full.

I went my desk in the living room at 4:10 a.m. and begin writing down the words, such as black angel, drummer, medicine woman, warrior, etc.  I got tired writing after taking down 36 names.  I could feel there were more…maybe hundreds.  But I was too sleepy to continue.  Around 8:00 am I was back at my desk writing messages that were connected to the names.  The messages were not in complete sentences and appeared as “know this and know that.”  I wrote all of this down without having a clue as to what it all meant. I called a friend who knew many of the healing tools in the world and asked her, “Do you know where I can get the Black Angel Cards?”  She promptly said, “They don’t exist.”  There was a long pause. I hung up and paced the floor for hours.  Something I had seen in the  movies had actually happened to me.  I was afraid to tell anyone that I had been touched and filled with messages.

I spent the next two weeks locked in my house without speaking to anyone.  I wanted to crawl under the coffee table and live there.  Instead, I began honing the messages coming through, writing day and night for hours.  Luckily, I had food in the house because leaving would have broken the flow of the energy coming through me.   After a while I realized there were dream symbols coning through and I did not consider myself an artists.  I considered trying to find someone to do the artwork but I knew they would be unable to retrieve from my mind what I saw.  This meant I had to create the symbols on my own.  I did.  And the symbols you see with this gift are how I came to express what I saw.

I had only $60.00 in my bank account.  And yet I refused an interview with the J. Paul Getty Museum who were very interested in me and probably would have hired me for a six figure salary.  My friend said, “You have to do the Black Angel Cards.  And if you can’t do it for yourself, do it for the children.”  So, I did do it for the children and for myself, without knowing what would become of me.