Time, Apocalyptic Dreams and Dec. 21, 2012

Recently, I've been hearing two phrases from friends and colleagues more than I can remember: "Time is flying so fast," and "Everything feels so intense lately."

I am feeling the intensity and speed of time as well. These days (or nights, as it were), even my dreams have seemed more intense, filled with strange, "warlike" images I don't normally experience.

I have a friend, Dr. Michael Lennox, who not only has a Ph.D. in psychology but is also an expert in dream analysis. During a recent conversation we had about the dreams I've been having, he told me something interesting.

"On my website [about dreams], there are a handful of dream symbol pages. The one that is getting the most traffic right now is 'What do apocalyptic dreams mean?' It's visited more than any other page according to my statistics. It's no easy find either. You have to be rather deep into my website to get to it. So, that tells me people are thinking about the end of the world."

I asked if he felt it had anything to do with Dec. 21, 2012.

"To me, there is no question," he said. "The idea of the world coming to an end, and affixing a date to it, has a great deal of power for some people, especially those who are feeling scared because of how dangerous the world looks. What they're looking for [at my site] is comfort. Something to tell them that these dreams don't have to be literal."

We, as a global society, appear to have a fascination with doomsday scenarios. As I was growing up, the year 2000 was the first major "end of time" marker I can remember, commercialized with Prince's song "1999." Then, when the year 1999 was about to come to a close, there was the projected Y2K crisis, which ultimately amounted to nothing.

In the last six or seven years, the most high profile date for the end of the world has popped up as Dec. 21, 2012, otherwise known as "the end of the Mayan calendar." I asked Dr. Lennox if anything about Dec. 21 could be a possible explanation for how fast everything feels lately.

"Think of it this way," Dr. Lennox said. "Our solar system is this tiny little piece of real estate in the boondocks of a very large galaxy. At the center of the galaxy is, maybe, a black hole. Our solar system rotates around that center."

"At this moment in time, we are coming into an alignment between where we are and where the center is. This happens every 26,000 years. That's what the Mayans were tracking. After Dec. 21, we begin a 26,000 year journey back around again."

There are those who subscribe to the mythical and spiritual implications of the upcoming date, and others dismiss all of it as a bunch of "woo-woo" or nonsense. Based on my studies to become a licensed spiritual practitioner of Science of Mind (also known as New Thought), I personally feel the scientific fact of this galactic alignment has an effect not only on the physical state of the world but also personal and global consciousness.

Dr. Lennox agrees. "The energy of what's happening causes a shift, which makes everything feel accelerated. There is not only an acceleration of time, but an acceleration of enlightenment and awareness ... If you connect that to the dreams people share with me, the common thread is aloneness or being the last person alive. In my work, the idea of being the last person on earth is actually a powerful symbol of spiritual, unity consciousness. The spiritual truth is that we are all one; we are all connected. So, perhaps what the Mayans saw was not the end of the physical world, but the death of the idea that we are separate."

When the world doesn't spontaneously combust on Dec. 21, 2012, it will be interesting to see if someone digs into other ancient ideas in order to affix a new date for the end of the world.

"There are likely to be a lot of disappointed people when something catastrophic or cataclysmic doesn't happen on Dec. 21," says Dr. Lennox. "There may be disappointment over the lack of some big, dramatic, and immediate 'reveal.' I expect that nothing is coming to an end, but that we're about to enter a new beginning."

For more information on Dr. Michael Lennox, visit his website or click here to purchase his excellent and definitive book on interpreting dreams, Dream Sight.