There is a running joke among my
friends that I am too Capricorn to sleep. The fact is I have always resented
needing to sleep, but then again, this ritual ingredient would not exist unless
I was interested in making those many unconscious hours productive in some way.
When I was a teenager in Philadelphia, there was a queer elder we called our
New Age Queen named Peppy, the first transwoman that I ever knew, and she was a
one-transwoman healing force. Peppy taught me to read tarot, but also shared
with me the uses of crystals in industry and science, and how we can push that
ancient technology for healing our lives. She told me once, "Crystals breathe
one breath a century, fifty years inhaling, fifty years exhaling. If we are
patient, we can hear whether they are on the inhale stage or the exhale."
The day I began taking Peppy's advice about forging connections with crystals,
was the day I truly started my conscious relationship with the living planet
Earth.
There are bottled waters on the market prized for their crystal,
or silica content, just read their labels to see what I mean. There are many
problems with these waters though, the first being that they are sold in
plastic, and I hope that everyone reading this does not need me to tell them
how harmful plastics are to the future health of our species and all of the
other species alive on our home planet. There is also the grotesque fossil fuel
waste of transporting the water across oceans and continents. In other words,
please infuse your water at home with crystals, and it is easy, and I will tell
you how to do it now.
Clear quartz is the main crystal, and I generally have three small
pieces. Clear quartz is a connecting web between worlds, between waking and
sleeping, between physical and spiritual, and between our bodies and the planet
itself where we find all of the nutrients to keep us alive. I also add a piece
of rose quartz and one blue lace agate. Rose quartz cleans and opens the heart
chakra, and any amount of cleansing and opening of the heart is a good thing,
even when we are referring to our sleeping bodies. Blue lace agate opens the
throat chakra, something very beneficial for a poet. Lapis lazuli is also an
excellent choice for opening and maintaining a robust and healthy voice.
Clean the crystals by laying them on a small bed of dry sea salt
overnight. Flush the salt down the toilet when waking and wash the crystals.
Then place them in a clear glass pitcher. Use filtered water when filling the
pitcher. Let it sit all day near your bed while you go about your day, allowing
the water to cook in the vibratory pulses of the crystals thoroughly.
Now, please use a clear pint glass to fill from the pitcher. I
have tried cups of ceramic, metal, plastic, but a clear pint glass is the best
choice, and I will explain why I believe that to be true later. Fill a clear
pint glass with the water, sit on the edge of your bed, look down onto the
surface of the water and say three times, "Please help me remember my
dreams." Then drink half the glass of water, and set the remaining half
glass near your head on a nightstand. When you wake, sit on the edge of the bed
and repeat saying three times to the water, "Please help me remember my
dreams." Drink the remaining half glass of water. Missing parts of the
dreams come flooding back to me, it is just amazing, and I hope you have the
same results. In workshops, some students have reported having no results for a
couple of nights. Many people see results from the start, but if not, please
keep trying as it merely needs time to build its process in some of us. I like
to have a digital recorder nearby to preserve the dreams. Then I write in my notebook as fast as I can, using this unique opportunity to get inside the
ritual of the dream therapy for language to be used in my poems. 
My theory about how the Crystal Dream Therapy works is that the
water is connected through the crystal infusion. After we drink half the glass,
the other half glass of water is still in communication with the water now
inside us as it moves through our blood and into our brains. Throughout the
night, the water we drank shares details of the dreams with the water left
behind in the glass. When we drink the remaining water, it acts as a backup
file, showing us what we had forgotten when reentering the waking world. I
believe the reason the clear pint glass works better than ceramic, metal or
plastic, is that the molecules of the glass allow the conversation the crystal
water is having to penetrate with better ease throughout the night. Over the
years, I have experimented not only with different containers and crystals, but
also distance, sometimes keeping the remaining half glass on the other side of
the room, or even in a separate room. When the glass is kept near my sleeping
body is when the dream recall is sharpest and strongest. The use of clear
quartz not only enhances the water, but it also upgrades the qualities of the
rose quartz and blue lace agate.
NOTE: Astral projection was
something I was very skeptical of for years until a good friend proved it to me
by visiting me three times one month. After a workshop and reading a book and a
half about it, I was still unable to do it, and gave it up, thinking it was
just not for me. After more than a year of saturating myself with the
crystal-infused water while working with the Crystal Dream Therapy, I found
myself on the ceiling looking down on my sleeping body in the middle of the
night. It was terrifying. I had not anticipated terror, but it was real,
especially when I would see myself reenter myself. The next morning I would
wake aching and spend the day exhausted. Eventually, I started traveling
outside the apartment and would find ways of proving to myself that I was not
dreaming. One evening I saw a drunken man walking on the sidewalk after buying
a hoagie from the all-night sandwich shop and was yelling, "I told him I
didn't want any tomatoes!" He threw the tomatoes onto the
sidewalk. The next morning I ran down the stairs and outside to find those
tomato slices just where I saw them land the night before while floating above
the angry drunk.
The Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania
commissioned half a dozen other poets and me to write about our neighborhoods
in Philadelphia. The project was titled "Poetry, Politics, and
Proximity." My poems were composed through these astral saunters, floating
above the trees and building tops. I decided to plainly and clearly explain the
process at the microphone during the project's event, regardless of who was in the
audience. And of course, some older male poets scoffed, but I have been used to
such poet behavior for decades, never to worry myself about it. I told them how
every morning after waking from an astral trip, I would hammer out a solid
block of text, like plasma thrown against the wall. It was never coherent,
ever, at least not at first. I would carry these blocks with me and chip away
at the words to reveal the poems hidden inside, and those were what I read at
the event. I am very proud to say that my first astral projection poems were
commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania, despite the fact it is where
President Trump, Ivanka Trump, and Donald Trump Jr. all went to college. Is
there any amount of poetry or poetry-making that can be the antidote to that
level of psychic filth? We poets are constantly amending the constitution, and
one day we will be heard! Poets should also be given money for talking to
ghosts or flying around town at night, acting as the ghosts.
