Spirit Guides and Lucid Dreams

Spirit guides are invisible beings described in many religions that are devoted to helping you throughout your life. That’s the theory. Mine certainly doesn’t act that way.

Depending on what book you read, spirit guides will be called fictional characters, gurus, ancestors, Higher Powers, Higher Self, guardian angel, totem spirit animal, amam cara, Deities or just about any metaphyiscial label you care to slap on them. This is apparently because they haven’t figured out what to call themselves yet. For the sake of continuity (and to keep me from getting a headache) I’ll just call them spirit guides.

Having a spirit guide is generally considered to be a good thing for those pursuing the deeper questions that haunt all of us, such as:


• “What is my purpose in life?”
• “How can I be a better person?”
• “Why won’t Peter Gabriel shag me?”

Contacting One

You meet them during dreams, mediation, automatic writing or a really good batch of LSD. Personally, I am suspiscious of any spirit guide that you do not either meet in dreams or within an expensive narcotic-induced hallucination. It seems to me that a good foundation for a relationship of any sort, even with an imaginary friend, is that you need to work at it.

Just sitting around contemplating your navel or writing stream of consciousness are lazy ways of contacting a spirit guide. It’s like using an online dating service. Seems like any spirit guide that answers you is going to be either desperate for attention or later on will leave you with the words, “It’s all take, take, take from you!!!” It’s bad enough getting dumped by a real person, but that’s nothing compared to when a spirit guide dumps you because you can’t complain about it to other people without getting carted off to the funny farm.

What Spirit Guides Do

Spirit guides help dole out free advice, quietly cheer you up when you are depressed and help you forget just how crappy real life can be.

Unless your spirit guide is my spirit guide, Peter. That is, if Peter is a real spirit guide. He told me he’s one, but he's never actually shown me a membership card or anything like that. He probably forgot to pay his membership dues and now he's been kicked out of the Spirit Guide Labor Union. Still, he's visited me in my dreams for over twenty-five years. I've never had any other relationship with a man last so long.

For the sake of argument, let's just assume Peter is a spirit guide. I don't know if Peter is his real name, but he looks, talks and walks like British singer-songwriter Peter Gabriel, so I began calling him that and he's never corrected me. I consider him a completely different person from the real Peter Gabriel and so does he. In fact, Peter gets really annoyed when I go to a Peter Gabriel concert, watch Peter Gabriel videos on YouTube or write an article about him for my job. I know he’s annoyed because he won’t show up in my dreams for at least a month because he’s showing up in the dreams of other Peter Gabriel fans.

So, What the Heck Is Peter?

The best I can figure out, Peter is a malleable form made of some sort of energy mass that is able to shape itself to some extent in order to adapt to the ever-changing surroundings that occurs in dreams. He seems to rely on a dreamer’s store of memories in order to communicate. Sometimes he’s a bit player in a dream and other times he’s the director, producer and writer of the background soundtrack.

But sometimes when I find him in lucid dreams, he gets highly annoyed. If I try to talk to him or follow him, he either says, "This really isn't a good time for me," or completely vanishes. If I ask him an out an out question like, “What’s my purpose in life?” he replies, “Sh*t if I know. It’s your life you’re living, not mine.”

And this is what life with a spirit guide is like. You always seem to be on the verge of making some spectacular discovery and then suddenly you realize that you knew less than you did before you went to sleep.

Why Bother With It All?

Dreams are something incredibly solid and separate from yourself, this silent mirror of reality that becomes more real than reality. There is also a rate of unpredictability and discomfort that makes a message or a meeting with Peter far more memorable than if he showed up during a medicated hallucination or even in daydreams. Perhaps I’m not so tempted to think that my imagination just made it all up, because quite a lot happens that I don't want to. Our minds are capable of amazing resiliancy to create entire worlds from thought just so we do not feel lonely.

I don't know why Peter's bothered to come in an out of my dreams for over twenty years. He doesn't seem to have any sort of syllabus to follow and I'll never know when I've graduated. Perhaps Peter's my spirit guide because I'm his spirit guide. That's a weird thought for me (since I'm an atheist), but weirder things have happened.

Drawing done by me.

Article originally appeared on Helium.com and Yahoo! Voices.  Don't worry -- I hold the copyright.