Unlocking Dream Sorcery w/Nikki Wardwell Sleath

What if the eight hours you spend sleeping each night could become your most powerful magical laboratory? In this enchanting conversation, Granddaughter Crow welcomes Nikki Wardwell Sleath—occultist, author, and direct descendant of Samuel Wardwell who was executed during the Salem Witch Trials—to explore the transformative practice of dream sorcery.

Nikki unveils the true meaning of occultism as the study of hidden mysteries, challenging negative stereotypes and emphasizing how this knowledge can be practically applied in our daily lives. She explains why building authentic relationships with deities and energies is essential for effective magical practice—comparing it to developing friendships rather than making transactional demands of strangers.

The heart of their discussion centers around dreams as gateways to expanded consciousness. Nikki challenges conventional scientific perspectives that view dreams merely as brain processing, instead revealing how dreamscapes transcend time, connect us with spirits, and allow us to practice magic without physical limitations. She shares remarkable experiences of precognitive dreaming and collective dream divination that demonstrate the transpersonal nature of dream consciousness.

Listeners will discover the revolutionary concept of creating "magical neural pathways" through lucid dreaming—becoming fully aware while dreaming—which enhances magical abilities even in waking life. Nikki provides insights into how anyone, regardless of their spiritual tradition, can begin working with dreams as powerful tools for healing, shadow work, and accelerating magical development.
What hidden treasures await you in the dreamscape tonight?

Nikki Wardwell Sleath

Nikki is also directly descended from Samuel Wardwell, one of the hanged in the Salem witch trials. Nikki Wardwell Sleath is an occult teacher, author, and the founder of the Society of Witchcraft and Old Magick. She’s formally trained in American Witchcraft,is a dream and shamanic energy healing facilitator and holds a Master’s degree in Integrative Health and Healing. Nikki is the author of several books with more forthcoming and can be found at www.nikkiwardwellsleath.com.

www.nikkiwardwellsleath.com
 https://www.facebook.com/nikkisnature
 https://www.instagram.com/nikki_wardwell_sleath/

Chapters

• 0:00 Meeting Nikki Wardwell-Sleeth
• 2:30 Defining Occultism Beyond Stigma
• 8:42 Building Real Relationships With Deities
• 16:12 The Goddess Seals Grimoire
• 28:11 Dream Sorcery vs Scientific Perspective
• 36:20 Becoming Lucid in Dreamscapes
• 45:48 Creating Magical Neural Pathways
• 51:06 Returning to a Dreaming Society

Transcript

Granddaughter Crow : 0:01

Welcome to Belief, being and Beyond with your host, Granddaughter Crow. Hi everyone, granddaughter Crow here, welcome to yet another episode of Belief, Being and Beyond, and this time we're going to dash in a little bit of occult yes, and talk about dreams. I am so excited to have my special guest on today. It's Nikki Wardwell Sleath. Really quick, before I bring on Nikki, Nikki is a direct descendant of Samuel Wardwell, which actually was hung in the Salem Witch Trials, so that, like I talk about ancestors all the time and that is a stance, and I just really wanted to highlight that. Also an occult teacher, author and founder of the Society of Witchcraft and Old Magic. She's formally trained in American witchcraft and also dreams shamanic energy healing facilitator and also holds a master's degree in integrative health and healing. You can always find Nikki and all of her books and everything that's coming up at wwwnikkiwardwellsleithcom. So hi, nikki, thank you for being on the show, welcome.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 1:33

Hi, oh my gosh, thanks so much for having me. I loved meeting you through Llewellyn Con and when you mentioned your podcast to me I was like this is going to be energetically amazing.

Granddaughter Crow : 1:47

Oh, thank you, I really appreciate you taking the time. And the first thing that I want to know I've watched a lot of your interviews to include Llewellyn Khan 2025. People go check that out. Amazing All of the authors there. But one thing that you say and identify as is an occultist, and I love that because I don't think that it's talked about enough. You know, many people go to the generic I'm a witch, da-da-da-da-da, but why occultist? And could you tell us what an occultist?

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 2:30

is yeah, well, I feel I like reclaiming words that don't need to have negative connotations to them, but that do because of terrible periods of history. Terrible periods of history. So I feel like the word occult causes people to bristle a little bit because they instantly think that it's like a dark demonology, you know, dredging up things that are shadowy. And that's not. It really just means hidden. Occult just means like the mystery. So being an occultist just means that. You know, I consider myself a student of all manner of combinations of energy and consciousness, and I always say to my students, because that's all there is, every single thing you can experience, conceive of, encounter is some combination of energy and intelligence or conscious awareness, and that's it. And so those are things, though, that we can't see with the naked eye, and science has very little explanation for a lot of these things. You know, these things that we can experience energetically, things in spirit, and so I like that term because it has a few sort of insinuations that witch does not have, even though I am a formally trained witch. I'm a formally trained Reiki master teacher and a formally trained teacher and facilitator of active dreaming, which is a shamanic style of dreaming created by Robert Moss. I have these titles, but witch tends to be used in so many ways now that people don't necessarily know what you mean, and witch can just be someone who kind of identifies with a earth-based spiritual lifestyle.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 4:20

Occultist implies more of the application of an academic and studious vantage point upon your study of the mysteries and of the unseen, and that there's no sort of limit to it. You know so, and I'm all about the development of actual skill in the body, what I call sorcery skills or mage skills, and these are things that studying the occult, like the old grimoires, the philosophers of antiquity, and then bringing those teachings to the forefront of today so that my students and the public can still benefit from them. You know, this requires a lot of digging, a lot of intellectual application. So occultist is more accurate for me in terms of that very studious approach which is also practical. It's studious so that we can have an effect on the practical, but I like it to be broad. So that is why I use that title, because I also sort of, you know, have my feet in a lot of different waters.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 5:38

I'm not only a witch, you know, I am also a healer, you know, I am also a dream teacher, among many other things, half of which I forget half the time because there's so many. You know I couldn't just, but it works for me. Yeah well, I am a formally trained witch and, as you mentioned, directly descended from one of the hanged in Salem, samuel Samuel Wardwell, my eight times great grandfather. I do think we need to destigmatize that word as well, and I did write a book about that, called you Might Be a Witch. That was back in 2017. But you know so again, which has come to the forefront and has so many people now identifying that I'm going deeper and identifying as an occultist and trying to help people.

Granddaughter Crow : 6:39

Not be afraid to do that as well, I love it because when I first hear it I think student, teacher, resourcer, you know, researcher, sorceress, magician, constant, continuous learning, constant, continuous curiosity of things that are esoteric and or hidden from the naked eye. And I 100% am all in the classes that I teach. I'm like all is energy, people. That's not a philosophy, that's science. Check it out, albert Einstein. All is energy, be it past, present, future, da, da, da, da da. And really what we're doing is working in the energy and we can do this so many different ways and I love that You're saying the same thing. Yeah, yeah it is.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 7:36

It's the same thing. It's quite universal. Started to go deeply into their exploration of magic and spirits and the mysteries has is going to come to that same conclusion. So, no matter what your tradition, no matter what you know background you came from, if you're going deeply enough, it's all energy and consciousness in all different, extremely unique and amazingly beautiful combinations you know, and that's what we're studying.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 8:06

So I don't think the occult, you know, should be. Scary Dreams are of the occult, you know ceremonial magic is of the occult. The intelligence of you know your favorite crystal is of the occult. It's all it all is. So I love that Not to be feared Not to be feared, you know.

Granddaughter Crow : 8:30

that also brings me to another thing that I love about. When I was looking at the things that you do and the books that you write, you know, and just kind of getting a summation of what you're bringing to the world, and one of the things that really popped out as a theme for me is that you are not just bringing concepts, you're bringing concepts with application, which I think is important. Which I think is important. It's very, very important because, like you said, we can sit here and go oh yeah, I went down to the witchy shop and I bought a deck of tarot cards and a pendulum and I am now a witch and you put it on, you know, in your wherever, and you never really utilize it. And then you call on a deity every now and again and you're like hey, could you please do this? I'll, I'll give you a gift and you take it to. Oh honey, no, this is not.

Granddaughter Crow : 9:38

Yes, you can do that, but you need to build relationships, you need to have practice. You need to build relationships, you need to have practice, you need to have discipline. You need to actually, because another book and I, we are definitely going to get into the dream book and all of that, but the one that you did before, that about. You know the the goddess seals yes, even though I don't have a copy at my disposal right now, I was like wait, this really is a yes, the goddess seals, let's go ahead and take.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 10:16

Yep, yeah this is a really gorgeous book, you know, and it's it is. It is full of directly applicable magical symbols. It's actually modeled after the key of Solomon the King, because I was acclimated to that work as a neophyte in my own formal witchcraft training and those are old angelic seals that King Solomon was said to have, you know, created through channeling the intelligences of the angels he was speaking to, organized them into planetary categories so that the magician could understand the vibrations and then use them as it's like a bat signal. So, you know, a seal is like a VIP calling card. It's like having the phone number of someone directly rather than flinging through the yellow pages when you're looking for a contact you know or a resource. It's like you know already you're, they're pre-recommended. Basically, it's like you want to get a roof on your house. Well, do you want to just go like eeny, meeny, miny, moe, you know, online and pick somebody, and then you're like, ooh, don't know. Or do you want the friends who know you to recommend someone that they already know is great at this and that you can trust and that you know they're going to be safe for you to interact with? So the God.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 11:48

So basically, I learned how to use the seals from the key of Solomon in that way for magic, and I saw how powerful it was. And but for years I'm going okay, this is great, this makes me more effective, this gives me resources and deeper skill. However, I'm not really one who feels called to the angels. I was looking for these seals for the goddesses for years, especially the Morrigan and Hekate, some of these beings that I felt really called to their teachings and their magical skill sets, and for ages I'd be searching and not finding it. And so finally I said, well, if I need this, if I want this, there must be other people that do too. So I started going into sacred space with the goddesses that I felt called to do the most magic with, and creating these seals and consecrating them ceremonially and then setting up all of the instructions that I had channeled, the magical words, all of the things, so that other people could use them too. So, yeah, the Miskatonic books did an amazing job.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 12:58

This is the regular hardcover edition. And then there's also a fancy, fancy leather bound one that comes in like a clamshell case where you lift it out and there's a secret compartment for like a metal, like if you're an occult library person that's. But this one, I mean, it's actually pretty reasonably priced for what it is and it is a grimoire. All my original art is in there on all of the seals. They did a really nice job, but then for each they also included a graphic design version of all of the seals as well, so you can use them in different ways.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 13:37

But, yeah, I think it's important that people have tools and I think it's important that we have grimoires that are accessible to serious magicians now, because a lot of people are intimidated by the old grimoires because the language is archaic. Sometimes the instructions say things like thou must don the linen vestments that were spun by a virgin in the hour of Mercury, on like the first dark moon of the season after the vernal equinox, and then you have to build a three by three altar of solid gold and then you have to, you know, meditate for 12 hours a day and we're like, hey, in our world, how are we going to do stuff like that? So we need real tools and instructions that work now. Yes, we can take inspiration from those concepts and the ancient philosophers and the mages of yore, but we need to find a way to do the magic here and now, because this is the world we're living in.

Granddaughter Crow : 14:39

That's exactly right. I absolutely love that and I can't wait to check out that book. It just it's. I love seals because it's pictorial, it's a symbol and I know, as we get into the dream book, you do have a lot of symbols in there and activating symbols.

Granddaughter Crow : 14:59

So, but you're absolutely right, being able to make it in real life, real time and do the work behind what all of that energy is, instead of just going well, I'm just going to you know, call Hecate, and not truly understand what you're doing or how to respect, honor and be with and build that relationship with. I often say that you know, this isn't, this isn't like a grocery store or a supermarket. This is something where you literally build relationships with the energy right, the conscious energy in the forms that it's revealing itself to you, and I really find that that's extremely important. And I want to hear your thoughts on what is the difference between being just doing it conceptually and then really getting in and activating it, and why would we want to really dig in and activate you know our magic, instead of just hold it conceptually?

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 16:14

Well, I mean when you dig in and get invested and build relationships with other intelligences, that naturally generates way more energy that is flowing between you. So when you just do things conceptually, that means literally, you know, in the meaning of those words, means that what you're doing exists on the mental plane. Conceptualizing is on the mental plane of existence, but we have a physical plane. That is part of our existence here and that's generally where people want manifestation results is on the physical plane. You know, when people do abundance magic or creative magic or, you know, advance their career or find love or enhance their communications, but no matter what you're doing, whether it's healing, you usually want to see and feel the results here so that you can enjoy them in this physical reality in which we are currently mostly anchored. You know, that's how I look at it Like we're in a physical body right now, in a dense existence that has gravity and all kinds of laws of physics and stuff, and this is where our lives are playing out. This is our group consciousness that we are currently sharing and we want to see results here. So you don't want to keep your magic only in the mental plane. That would be like saying you know you're only okay with experiencing things in visualization and in imagination, but not drawing that here. So how do you draw things from the mental plane? So how do you draw things from the mental plane to the physical plane, energy and so, yeah, you know I do. I talk about that in both the goddess seals and in dream sorcery, about when you're working with spirits and magic. You need to lay some good groundwork. You know, in both books I give ideas for meditation techniques, offerings and things that can help you grow that, that vested, cyclical connection that exists between you and another being.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 18:26

You know, think about how you meet and befriend other people. You know you don't just walk into a party and meet. Your friend says like, oh, meet this house builder. And you say, oh, my God, it's so nice to meet you. Can you come over and reside my house real quick? Like, you know, I'll pay you. You don't like, that's not how it works. You know you, you're meeting them at a party. This is a social thing. You're both individual people having your own lives. You would be like, oh, really nice to meet you. That's interesting.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 18:59

How did you get into that? What do you specialize in? Like, how's the business going? Do you want to do more of this work. You know, you kind of get to know somebody what do they care about? And then get to know a little bit about you and that you are, you know, empathetic. In that way, you build a connection where you can just activate the seal and be like hecate. I love what. I guess what we should do.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 19:27

Yeah, it's like when you call your friend, you know, and you're like we should go down to the park this weekend and pick up some garbage together and then we'll go for a hike and maybe have a picnic and have some fun together.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 19:43

You know like I want to have fun and understand my friends, my colleagues, my collaborators, my deities, my spirits, and do stuff that we're both vested in doing. So that stuff is so important and I'm really glad you asked about that, because we were talking about this too just before we began. I think the idea that so many people are really inspired about magic and spirituality and doing this kind of work and we have so many amazing books and stuff available to us nowadays and people will get excited and they'll read that book and read the whole book, sometimes without actually, you know, activating the steps or doing like, hey, maybe I should record myself in my phone reading this meditation from this book aloud and then sit down in sacred space with some offerings, with the door shut and the ringer off, and do it full out like take the time, make the work sacred, but you have to bring the work to to your physical life and the physical plane in order for it to grow yeah, I love, I am digging exactly what you're saying.

Granddaughter Crow : 20:53

It's almost like from my position as a practitioner. I am like, honestly, why would the gods and goddesses or the energy that be, or Mother Earth, or all that I deify and find sacred, if I can't show up for them, why would I ask them to show up for me? This isn't. This is a relationship. This, you know. I'm like, if I am going to ask you to show up for me, first I am going to figure out who you are, how we can build a relationship. I'm going to be offering my time, I'm going to be offering my energy, in whatever form they find it, because that makes me go. I mean, at that point I'm like, and they offer, I feel like, okay, I earned this gift, instead of, oh well, I can't take that, or you know, and disrespect it. It's it's receptacle.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 22:07

Totally and you want to feel good about it too. You know, no one likes to be in a friendship where the other person is constantly like can you do this for me? Oh, can you do this for me the next day? Oh, can you do this? Can you lend me this? Can we do it? It has to be a two-way street, and so that's why I do put myself in service of the gods that I work with in a lot of ways. I mean even in the act of co-running.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 22:34

I'm a co-facilitator now of the facilitator of the Morgan's Call Retreat, and that is, you know, we don't get paid. We work on that all year long. You know, I write rituals, I help train people in their oracular speech and the things that we offer. You know, it takes all year to put that event together and I teach classes at it, and we don't get paid for any of that stuff. I just do it because the Morrigan is awesome. The Morrigan is awesome.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 23:02

This is me telling you guys that. But when you have someone that you really respect and that you love working with in your life, who is a spiritual being, you know that's a way of being in service sharing with other people that, their stories, their energy, that they then get to have a foothold here, you know, in this reality where they probably don't have a physical body like we do. So by us doing things like that making offerings, sharing their poetry, sharing their stories those are ways that you can feel good about giving them something energetically that benefits them and then, in turn, you can feel good about whatever gifts happen. When you call in, you know, to involve them in your magic.

Granddaughter Crow : 23:48

I absolutely love that. I love that I could do a whole podcast just on that. I love that I could do a whole podcast just on that. Totally, you just had another book that released in May 2025 called Dream Sorcery the Ritual and Magic of Lucid Dreaming, and I love that you say that it's the ritual, because what we were just talking about really helps us to kind of understand the approach of the book, meaning this is not just a dream interpretation book, this is not just, you know, one of those oh, I saw a spider in my dream, you know da-da-da-da-da it's. It comes from a very activeistic, occultist point of view to be able to put this in practice. Because I I was watching you one time and you said something about we spend one third of our life dreaming. Why don't we do something magical with that? And I was just like yes.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 24:53

Yes, yeah, the ritual means you're exactly right and it's a great segue from the conversation we were just having Doing active things in your life to predispose you to be able to do more magic in your dreams. And how you can do this purposefully is by training yourself to become lucid in your dreams more often. When you are lucid, that means you suddenly become 100% aware that you are sleeping and dreaming. There are various stages of that, but full lucidity means you remember who you are, where you are, when you are, and you would remember anything that you had intended to do in dreaming while you were awake next time that you became lucid. So if you become lucid, you'll go. Oh, my God, that's right.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 25:45

I wanted to summon Isis in my lucid dream, so then you could stand there in your dream body and say I want to speak to the great goddess Isis, and then you release expectation and watch and wait in the dream scene to see what happens. And this is like one tiny example of so many ideas that I present in dream sorcery for ways that you can have amazing magical experiences. And, by the way, the experiences that you have in lucid dreaming they change you. You come forth from those experiences knowing you've sort of been rewired by them. You can get downloads and things and divinations that are so much more organic than what we can do while we're awake because of the density of these physics. Here we don't have those limitations in lucidity. So we can do all kinds of stuff, including practice like ceremonial magical techniques. You know, if there's something that you, for example, like to chant or do or say or like a prayerful gesture, Trying those things out in lucid dreaming shows you literally what the energetic output of that thing is. So, for example, I've got there's a chant that myself and a lot of the Morrigan folks use at retreat and during ritual, which is part of her ancient peace prophecy. That's written in Old Irish in the myths and the first few words of it are shidh ko nev nev ko dovin, and it means peace to the sky, sky to the earth. This is from the ancient Irish stuff and so sometimes, you know, we've used this a lot in waking to like draw this sort of connecting earth and sky energy down through our central column so that we can be balanced and centered, you know, um, by honoring her, but also by using these old ways, and we chant it, and so I've been able to go into lucid dreaming. Remember that I wanted to see what happens when I intone these chants there, and then you get to literally see and feel what that energy does upon the landscape, upon the other dream characters that are there, and it'll blow your mind, Like any magic that you do. It doesn't matter what it is.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 28:11

You know I talk about activating runes, doing invoking and banishing pentagrams, shape-shifting. I've gotten to feel firsthand what it feels like to be a raven. You know you can't. You can't do that physically here, except for in the mental plane or the journey scape, you know. But, like in lucid dreaming, you can do it literally and you know it's interesting. I was talking to someone the other day about this. So when we dream, the cortex fires just as though we were doing those actual actions physically. So, for example, if you have a dream and you're running your motor, cortex fires the same way it does when you're running in physical life, except that we are in sleep paralysis mode. So luckily, most of us aren't, unless we have a sleep disorder or something. But my question instantly is then well, what the heck pathways are firing when I'm flying in a dream?

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 29:16

Because I don't have physical wings. What neural pathways are firing when I shoot fire out of my palms in a dream, because I can't do that here. Where are the neural grooves for this? We have them. We do. So I believe we activate these new magical pathways because a lot of times if you do that in a lucid dream and then you wake up, you can still feel the energy of it for a long time after you're awake. Then I know it's doing something. It has helped me to increase the effectiveness of my mage skills, meaning the magic I can just project off the body on the fly in the moment. It has really catapulted those things. It's like that alchemical lab that lets you witness the mysteries in a hastened way that we can't, otherwise wouldn't be able to do because our finite bodies are only here for a short time.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 30:17

So, we want to make the most out of this particular dense physical life experience that we're having, and we really should, because this is magical, like I, kind of. I have a personal belief that we came here for a reason like to experience this. You know what I mean. Like all the sensation that comes with being here in this plane is rich. It's like you know, it blows your mind if you really get into it and think about it. But we should try to make the most of this reality. And I think, think about it. But we should try to make the most of this reality and I think getting those magical downloads from the expansiveness of all the other unlimited realities accessible to us in dreams and bringing it here into our physical life is a way to really evolve and deepen what you know to be true. I love that. So just I'm like you know, I want people to go for it.

Granddaughter Crow : 31:12

I love that because I often do talk about our neural pathways are kind of like different, like okay, if I want to go to work, I take this road, like literally in the physical realm. The same is in the brain. If I want to get this object done or this task done, I go through this same roadway. But if one were to build straighter roadways or bridges or I could fly there and open up the mind, like you said. There and open up the mind, like you said, literally your brain is kind of building these new I love it new magical neural pathways. Then your creative space and more of your own divine divinity and connection to divinity, your magus, your alchemist inside, your magician within, then that comes in and creates. It's just mind-blowing, it's mind-blowing, it is.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 32:20

It's as though those magical neural pathways, when opened and stimulated by these experiences, connect you more deeply and more plugged in to this enchanted worldview.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 32:34

You know to the ability to live in the magic that is here all around us but which is hard oftentimes for us to tap into, especially in this day and age where we've been raised in a more scientifically based society, you know, a society that has historically prized science over spirituality and minimized things like dreams, imagination, psychic experiences, spirit experiences. We need to bring that back up, you know. We need to become again like the society that really values dreams and enchantment and intuition and empathy and all of that. We need that. It's interesting I heard once this was so many years ago, I think this must have been back when I was doing my master's Someone talked about the Earth and the hemispheres of the Earth, like parts of the earth, will be on a different part of their trajectory.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 33:56

So what we had for a long time was here in the West we were going way high up the curve on the science end of things, and in the East they were still more in the science end of things, and in the East they were still more in the spiritual end of things.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 34:11

And then we are now starting to have some resurgence of going back into the spiritual end of things and the East is getting very scientific and they always say that like the best points in history and I think we've already just passed it, by the way. So now we're going to be in probably another crappy point. But the best points are when the wave of the West and the wave of the East intersect in the middle, when they're both in the mid-range of experiencing something new, but then they'll go to extremes, and that's as long as my arms are. But you know, so the the um, those intersections, and I think you know we've been growing up here in the west in a time where, yeah, we, we've been told as kids, at least like in my spiritually bereft upbringing yeah, we've been told, oh, it's just your imagination or it's just dreams, and I'm like, right, I don't know. I think it's more and it's time for us to actively, you know, engage it.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 35:20

We can only improve how things are going by engaging this stuff on the personal level. Loads of us.

Granddaughter Crow : 35:28

Yes, you know, I often think of it that, in this dimension that we are existing in in human form, the law of duality, that there are the polarities, and having the polarities is really about helping us to understand where center is, is really about helping us to understand where center is. You know, and there was one time in my life that I was going through, you know, divorce and just difficult times, and I felt the polarities, I felt the duality within my own system, within my own life, within my own heart, within my own life, within my own heart, within my own head, and I began to go. I am the point at which two opposites cross. I am the point at which two opposites cross what you're saying, the intersection between the dualistic, whether it's science versus, you know, the East versus West or all of that, the intersection is where the beauty is and taking the ride on the whole, you know, roller coaster that it is.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 36:44

Right, yeah, because, like you said a lot of times, we don't know what else there is unless we have the perspective.

Granddaughter Crow : 36:52

So, how.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 36:53

You know. People are always like oh, why is there despair? You know, why is there suffering? Why is there grief? You know people Well, because maybe we wouldn't know what bliss and joy and union were if we didn't understand the other side of things. Yep, you know. So, yeah, I mean, in the laws of hermetics they talk about this and there's like the pendulum mechanic where you know that if you experience this point of amazing bliss, by the laws of the universe things will swing over into the point of despair, the equal and opposite.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 37:35

You know the energy exchange the cycles that are natural and inherent in everything what keeps going around and around. But when you understand that the pendulum is going to keep cycling, you can kind of step off and watch the despair and understand it from the vantage point of bliss, until it swings back over there again. Then you can jump back in and engage. It helps your own, your mage skills are like largely that of emotional regulation.

Granddaughter Crow : 38:05

Yes, so I, based on that that's a really good segue to like thinking what you just said in the scientific mind and how it's all downplayed in childhood. Oh, that's just your imagination, it's just a dream and kind of coming into more of what would be getting back to a world that can dream. And so, based on that and I know that you've got a lot of thoughts I can see you just like getting thoughts. First question what is the difference between how you, as an occultist, understand dreams versus how science lays out dreams?

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 38:53

This is why I wrote the book. So because science and Western psychology tend to present us with the idea of dreams as being the crap the brain does to regulate itself after a day, and they look at dreams, and even some people who do a really good job looking at dreams present it as everything inside of the dream relates only to you and your mind and everything in the dream represents you or a part of yourself. I, as an occultist, do not believe this, because I have had all these psychic experiences that have taken me in dreams and other places outside of time and outside of myself. So I'm writing this book on lucid dreaming for the magically minded person who believes that we can be having real spirit experiences and contact with other beings in our dreams, who has noticed that a lot of our dreams are precognitive, meaning that we are transcending time. I have so much documentation in my dream journal of precognitive dreams. This is my proof. It'll happen exactly a lot of times. Sometimes it's metaphorical or sometimes it's another form of pre-rehearsal, but precognitive dreaming happens in a decent percentage of dreams for everyone. You wouldn't know it unless you were documenting and being very diligent about that and cultivating good recall and all of that stuff which my book can help you do. That too, you know, and all of that stuff which my book can help you do that too. I have stuff in there for that.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 40:30

But when we are going ahead in time, that shows us that our conscious awareness is not staying just tethered to the body in the here and now. It is trans-temporal. And all these people I know loads of people who have had spirits, beloved spirits of the dead, the ancestors come and tell them things that they couldn't have known, that saved their lives, you know, or that healed them, which they couldn't have done without, like these are real spirit contacts. It's not just you making stuff up in your mind. So I believe that dreams are transpersonal.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 41:03

I just led a huge workshop at Mystic South last weekend down in Atlanta, having a group of about 75 people do active dream work together, and then I had them write their impressions of their dreams on an index card and hand them all into me and everyone asked divination questions of their own in their own notebooks, not sharing. And then I shuffled all the cards and handed them back out and do you know what happened? The dreams that everyone had legit directly answered the divination questions of whoever randomly got that card. Because our dreams are so transpersonal and so interconnective, like that is a thought responsive place where all of our intelligences can go and intersect and learn from each other, why are we not making use of this alchemical classroom, this spiritually evolutionary place that we all have access to as our magical birthright, as conscious beings? We all have it. Yeah, you know. Anyone who says they're not dreaming they're just not remembering that we're dreaming. We are all dreaming every second, that we're sleeping, not just in REM sleep either, all the time, I mean there's so much we can do.

Granddaughter Crow : 42:20

Yeah, I love that Because the concept that I think kind of almost delineates or explains that, the delineation between you know, the you know having my own dreams, and I've heard the science scientists say, oh, your brain is pooping out everything you know or whatever. You know all that and I'm like fine with that, that's fine If my brain needs to do that. But the beauty is is that and I'm just going to go here the word psyche. A lot of times we understand the word psyche to be an individual phenomenon.

Granddaughter Crow : 43:00

When I have seen and experienced the word psyche as a collective exchange without words, whether it's telepathy or in the experience that you just talked about, it's an interactive, external, and the best way I explain this is like I don't hold a psyche inside of me as much as only I am like a fish swimming in a pool of water and that water being the psyche. So that's kind of the different, the leap between oh, I dreamt that because I saw an orange on a commercial to wait a second, I actually need some vitamin C because da, da, da, da, da and putting a little bit more thought and extracting the interpretation and meaning around it instead of sloughing it off, and I believe that magic is happening all the time. But if we don't see it, we don't see it. But when we do occultist studying, we began to recognize what is always there.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 44:13

I know that was a mouthful, so yeah, you're so right, we're really just going deeper, you know, and that doesn't mean that we don't have dreams that have symbolic and emotional significance to us. We absolutely can. And it doesn't mean that you won't have dreams that pertain to the stuff you were thinking about in waking. You know, if you watch, if you're going to binge 10 episodes of the Walking Dead before you go, if you're going to binge 10 episodes of the Walking Dead before you go to sleep, you're going to have some zombie apocalypse dreams. Okay, and that that doesn't mean your dreams are only based on what you're thinking about. It just means that dreams are a thought responsive environment, so the things that you're thinking about can lead you down those paths of experience. But then your consciousness really gets to experience the zombie apocalypse firsthand through your dreams, because all of your dreams are real experiences that you're having. Actually, you know your mind is getting to experience all these things that we don't necessarily get here to help us learn and understand more. So, yeah, it is really interesting to think about that.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 45:20

I think it's important, especially for those who already have either like an earth-based spiritual practice or other enchanted worldview type practices where you are seeking that which lies beyond the naked eye, that which connects you to something greater, but maybe not in a structured religious way. The dream time is the, maybe the best way to explore this, because it is so universal. It does not have to adhere to dogma. You know dogma, you know it is the. It's the best place to explore consciousness that there is, because you get to do anything that you could fathom here, but without the limitations of the physical world. So it is like raw intelligence, you know it is like being a raw, intelligent, supernatural spirit that can move around and do whatever you want, because you know your dream body can't get hurt so you can do all the experiments. And to look at dreaming as an encapsulated thing that is just within this bony cranium, it's really really kind of, you know, ripping us off, really kind of you know, ripping us off.

Granddaughter Crow : 46:38

Yeah, I agree. And another beautiful point that you make in your work and in your book is, well, that I that I extracted from it is it doesn't matter necessarily what magical path, you don't have to say I'm an occultist, I'm a witch, I'm a shaman, so I can work with this book. You can be whomever and work with this skill set that maybe we have forgotten called dream time, with dreamscapes and dream abilities that we weren't encouraged to do. And now, if given the permission, I'm like, oh, you mean I have permission, because sometimes I'm in a dream and I'm like, oh, this is the part when I run and that never works out.

Granddaughter Crow : 47:33

Maybe I'll try flying this time. I mean, I do that kind of stuff all the time and then I'm like think up and I start flying, you know, and so I play a lot in my dreams. But the beauty is that this work that you're doing will enhance any spiritual path and any relationship with the divine as it reveals itself to that individual. And also, it sounds like you can do healing. You can do. I mean I was almost like wait, this is ketamine therapy, you know. I mean this is, like, you know, trauma resolution, like there's, it's endless, whatever you can do so much, so much.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 48:15

You can do direct healing, shadow work, ancestral healing, time travel. You name really poised to take off with some of this material quite easily. Like I think you know, it won't take a lot for you to be. You're like one hair below, being lucid more often, I believe. The second thing is that you were alluding to yeah, actually anyone who is looking to expand their footprint in the dream realms and do more with it will benefit from this. You don't have to be a witch. I give enough basics that anyone can engage the material.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 49:10

I do have a lot of stuff in there for the witches and the occultists. The last whole part of the book is about what is some of the magic you can do at your altar. You know, or like in your waking life that feeds this cycle. So waking magic to help predispose you to becoming lucid, so that you can do more magic in lucidity, so that you become a better magician, so that you can. So it's a virtuous cycle and it really does fuel, fuel itself like that, if you take this attitude.

Granddaughter Crow : 50:02

You said quote we need to come back to being a dreaming society again, end quote.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 50:09

What does that mean? Well, you know my mentor in active dreaming. That is Robert Moss. So I did years of in-person, 24-7 retreats with him and he is a teacher of shamanic dreaming. He calls it the Robert Moss School of Active Dreaming, because active meaning that we're not only dreaming when we're sleeping, dreaming right now. We need to wake the up to this waking dream that we are in if we're really going to engage it and be present and do our best.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 50:46

And so his mission that I've been hearing, you know, year after year after year of many years of training as one of his dream facilitators is that we desperately need to return to becoming a dreaming society again, because in doing this we find the threads that connect us all, not those that divide. We find that this is, it's a connective, unifying place. You know, the dream realms are that which connects everything. It's that which connects us to the greater intelligences of the universe and which alert us to the realities of this dream in a deeper way. So that is. He taught me that goal and that motto, but I'm trying to do my best to spread it because I do believe deep within the marrow of my bones that it is incredibly important and that it only happens one at a time, but that we need to.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 51:45

We need this domino effect. We need to go back to being a dreaming society once again, I love that, I absolutely love that.

Granddaughter Crow : 51:56

I I could, I could just sit here and think about what that would actually look like. I think that it would look like we would get less surprised, or maybe we would. We would just be like, oh okay, yep, there it is, you know. And being able to not only activate that scientific, left, logical aspect of our mind, our consciousness, that is so upholden in the Western society at this point, and to be able to also have that creativity that you know beauty, the dreaming, the music, all of that and kind of balance it all out, so that the expression it's almost like we forgot half of our intelligence. You know, and if not more I can't, you know, there's no scale, but we forgot a, a very huge part of our intelligence and so we can only get so far. We need to be able to activate the other part of us that is given to us and move forward yeah, we really do.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 53:14

we really do. We really do, I mean, and it's it's super important. You know Robert talks about all. He has studied and researched this his whole life and has written numerous books on dreaming that have inspired me to do the work I'm doing now. But he talks about indigenous cultures where the tradition was to wake up each morning and nothing happens before. Everyone shared dreams and then those dreams would be used to understand what was happening in the community at that time or to make decisions. That would be for the best good of everyone.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 53:56

And I believe that if we can return more towards being a dreaming society, that we draw forth more of the juice of empathy, of humanity, of connectivity and things that truly lead us in a heart-centered way, because we understand who we are connected to much more. Also, understanding and being a dreaming society means having a better relationship with death, and that fear is something that burdens our society because we have a very unhealthy relationship with it. That which happens in the night, in magic, is equated to death, and that which happens in the day is equated to life light and dark, night and day, life and death the cycles that all relate to each other in parallel. So bringing forth the magic of dreams into day-to-day life is to bring the understanding of death and the cycles of interconnectivity of us all to the forefront.

Granddaughter Crow : 54:55

Well said, well said my newfound soul sister, nikki. I love you.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 55:02

Granddaughter Crow. I really really do. I feel like our energies are really like flowing on the same current.

Granddaughter Crow : 55:10

Yeah, they absolutely are, and you guys pick up are and you guys pick up, follow, follow Nikki.

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 55:23

What is your handle on Instagram? Yeah, it's Nikki Wardwell Sleeth, all over the place. So I'm Nikki Wardwell Sleeth on you know, just like it's, just like it is right here Two Ks on Instagram, on same on facebook and same with my website, which is just nicki wardwell sleethcom. So there's links to the social media there and, you know, to the books there and stuff. But, uh, yeah, I welcome, you know, uh, people who want to follow me, to have more contacts, to share dream material with and ask questions. Uh, for, you know, as well as for bringing in the spirits, you know, of our ancestors and the deities and our higher selves, um, more directly into our day-to-day lives. Um, I'm here for it we're here for it.

Granddaughter Crow : 56:14

We're here for it. Is there any? Is there anything else that we didn't cover or that you feel inspired to say to the, to the listeners and to the viewers?

Nikki Wardwell Sleath: 56:26

no, I just want to say thank you to you, granddaughter crow, for having such a great show and for being inspired to bring this kind of material to people, because we really, really need it. So I would just say that I wish everyone bright and inspiring dreams, and especially in this, our shared waking dream.

Granddaughter Crow : 56:47

Well said, well said, well said Well. Thank you guys for paying attention to yet another episode of Belief being and Beyond. I am your host, Granddaughter Crow. Like, subscribe, share with those that you're like. I bet Aunt Sally would like this. I bet whoever you think is going to most benefit from this information, and if you're listening to this on a podcast, you can text the show comment below. And anyway, I love you guys, I love you, I love you, I love you and we will see you on the flippity flip.