Hi Friends,
Today begins the last moon cycle of winter. Underneath the frozen ground, seeds are dreaming, being cracked open by the cold, remade into something new. Something like that is happening to us, too.
There’s a feeling going around like low-grade vertigo. A feeling that what is happening cannot actually be happening. And everywhere, disoriented memes about “the darkest timeline”, “the global nightmare”.
The feeling has been deepening as we collectively pour through the Epstein files and learn the horrors of a machine designed by powerful people to use and discard human beings. Among the 3.5 million files released is a teenage girl’s journal, written in code between collaged clippings from 90s Vogue and Vanity Fair. Her decoded words are one corner of this nightmare, narrated.1
Reading it, my vertigo deepened. I recognize this girl. We are exactly the same age. We both mapped our realities in collage and coded journals (mine was in Pig Latin). We both had an acquired nausea for lecherous grown men. We both played piano. And I think this is what’s happening around the world: we are starting to recognize each other, like beings in a dream, realizing we have all been asleep in different corners of the same nightmare.
The collective rage that’s building these last few years is getting brighter and fiercer. You feel it, too? Good. Don’t skip that part. These are not feelings we should be in a hurry to psychologize away. There is intelligence in your fury, and it needs to burn clean.
But there is a next step.
As Indigenous leader Sherri Mitchell said on our Mind Bod Pod episode, How to Dream a Better World:
“If all we’re doing is artfully describing the water that we’re drowning in, we’re going to continue to drown. We need to actively be looking at the solid ground that we want to be standing upon, and building that.”
And she’s right. Dreaming is not passive. It is the most creative act a human being can perform. MLK's 'I have a dream' was a conjuring: a fierce act of imagination that insisted on a specific reality and demanded that the world reorganize around it. The world we are currently living in was also dreamed, with extraordinary specificity, by powerful people who wanted it exactly this way. Epstein and his gruesome ilk have conjured it across decades.
Dreaming works.
The question: Are we ready to dream with the same relentless vividness as they have been, but from a completely different place?
In the practices of lucid dreaming and dream yoga there’s a recognition that nightmares can be the best triggers for lucidity. When a dream gets intense enough, unbearable enough, absurd and horrific enough, something in the dreamer cracks open. The narrative can no longer hold.
The lucid dreamer sees the monsters for what they are and stops running. They can command their tormentor to show its real face, or turn it into a frog with a beam of compassion, or chop its head off with a flaying knife. The practice of lucid dreaming is to understand the medium you’ve been swimming in, and recognize that it cannot bind you.
That’s happening now. The surreal intensity of the news cycle is stirring people into audacity. Audacity of collective action, of creativity, of expression, of clear thinking. If you find yourself posting things online that previously would have scared you, or attending a march you would have watched from your phone, it’s happening to you too. Audacity is a rejection of the dream narrative. It’s a full-throated laugh in the monster’s face.
That pervasive sense of unreality we keep describing to each other is not dissociation. You are not going crazy. The beginning of lucidity is always disorienting. But once you are lucid, you get to ask some questions that weren’t available to you before, like:
“What do I want to dream into being?”
“What quality of heart am I dreaming from?”
That second question is essential. Conjuring without love is sociopathy.
And that’s why genuine practice matters right now. Practice that still has its rough edges, that hasn’t been bleached and repackaged and sold to us by the very predators we hope to dream into extinction.
So THIS: Find the practices, teachers, and communities that show you how wild and open your heart really is. Find them and practice like heck.
Deep in the ground, this is what the seed is doing now, in these last days of winter. It is twisting in the cold, uncomfortable, cracking open. The ground around it cannot hold. It is becoming something it has never been.
This nightmare we’re in is not an obstacle to our becoming, my friends. It is the cracking open. We are waking up.
We’re practicing with dreaming, in sleep and in waking life.
Share in the comments: the practices, teachers, communities and resources that are helping you wake up and dream from a clear heart.
Then join me at the Moonlit Sit. Deets below.
❤️ Lama Tasha
DATE: Tuesday, March 3, 2026
TIME: 8-9pm EST
LOCATION: Online (Zoom link emailed on registration)
TOPIC: Dreaming From the Fierce Heart
This month’s moonlit sit is a 3-part practice for our times. We start with what’s actually here – the joy, grief and weight of this moment – and give it room to be. Then we work with the dream-like quality of experience itself, loosening the grip of what feels solid and immutable. And from that lucid, wide-open ground, we dream. Actively, specifically, fiercely. All are welcome.
DANA: This session is open to all on a PWYC basis. If you’d like to support this work, you can donate during registration or become a paid subscriber on Substack.
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