Cowboy Clairvoyant is a members-only newsletter and series by Autumn Fourkiller featuring dream interpretation, tarot answers, and more ventures into the Beyond. Today, Cowboy Clairvoyant interprets two dreams and also provides a short guide to pulling three tarot cards for yourself.
Dear Dreamers,
Howdy. It has been a minute! Never to fear, though, as I have emerged (however briefly) from my writing cave to spy with my little oracle eye. Aside from writing, I’ve had many delicious breakfasts with my beloved friend Felix, watched way too many hours of 90 Day Fiance: Before the 90 Days, and had approximately nine vanilla lattes, each one better than the last. It’s hot and muggy here in Oklahoma, but I’ve still found time to be outside, sometimes unwillingly, and that has helped my body and mind, too. It always does, being close to the land, especially as close as we are to the summer solstice.
In the long foothills summers of my youth, I took for granted the natural beauty surrounding me, the way the mornings were so still, only alive with bird song. The way the fog rested gently, draping over the places where the Ozarks extended their fingers. But look at me, getting nostalgic. I suppose that is part of the job, but still, I can soliloquize another time, we have dreams to dig into.
Sending you your own nostalgic soliloquies,
Cowboy
Dream Interpretation: Car Dreams and Virtual Reality Dreams
ok, so i don’t remember the first part of the dream — i was helping two friends with something, and then I was returning to my car. I was walking down the street and saw my car, and realized as I was walking that I was in a two-hour zone but my car, a white compact SUV, had been sitting there for multiple days.
Parallel to my car, a cop car had pulled over, and there was also a semi-truck (an R+L truck. which is the kind of truck my (now dead) grandpa drove when he was a truck driver.)
The cop had just finished leaving a ticket on my car (it was like, coral-colored for some reason) and I was like “oh god, please no, I’m right here,” but she said it was too late. Then there were these three men there who were like, “this accident wasn’t your fault.” I walked over to them and looked at the semi-truck and saw the whole side of the front cabin was dented and cracked. I was like, “oh shit I didn’t even realize I’d done this to my semi-truck.”
They told me this was a lawsuit, but it was part of a larger problem with the truck company and if I could come with them, they could talk me through how they were going to gather evidence and fight back against any financial penalties that might be incurred against me for damaging my semi-truck. But they needed an upfront payment and I wasn’t sure what to do.
Then I was with my wife Gretchen explaining to her what had happened and she was like, “wait how much was your parking ticket?” And I was like “oh shit I never looked at the ticket, I don’t know how much it was.”
Then she was like, “you don’t have a semi-truck, that wasn’t your truck.” I was so stressed out about the potential that I’d damaged my semi-truck and it might become a huge legal issue and expense that I hadn’t realized that it wasn’t even my semi-truck and I wasn’t a trucker. Meanwhile, my car was still illegally parked on the street with a ticket I hadn’t looked at let alone paid.
Then I woke myself up because the scenario had reached a level of stress so high that I had to wake myself up to remember it wasn’t real!
– Riese
Hi Riese,
Thank you for the gift of your dream. What is it about car dreams that immediately send one’s heart rate up to a thousand? I distinctly remember one of my first real nightmares, which involved me, age five or so, sitting in the driver’s seat of my mother’s car while it rolled down a dirt road, and me being unable to stop it.
You say you had to wake yourself up in order to remember that the level of stress you were experiencing wasn’t real, which makes sense. Not everyone can wake themselves up from a dream! But what I am more interested in is the way that the stress is present — and echoes in your waking life. Because this, without a doubt, is a stress dream. Which is to say it is a dream you are having to process the stresses you’re already dealing with, though the dream heaps imaginary stressors upon you. For you are not a truck driver, even though you were almost convinced you were, but you are the manager of a variety of stressors, both familial (evidenced by your truck being the same type as your grandfather’s) and otherwise.
Stressors are not always easily dealt with, that’s true. Especially if they are yoked to responsibility, such as work. That said, the truck not ACTUALLY being your truck, and covering up the real and pertinent issues, such as, in the dream, your illegally parked car and parking ticket, tell me that you are, very possibly, taking on stressors that you shouldn’t, and that are not yours to bear. For all of us, I think, we should sort through the minor and major threads of our stress. Some of them may be a cleaner kind of release than we think.
See you on the Other Side,
CC
I’m hanging out with my partner and my close friend/coworker working on something about Tom Cruise for Autostraddle. My friend says she’s going to finish the last two hours of The Last Samurai and since my partner and I haven’t seen the beginning we decide to go in another room and start working on something else for the project. We end up putting on these immersive VR headsets for the game version of Edge of Tomorrow, the Tom Cruise action movie that’s like action Groundhog Day where he keeps getting killed by aliens and starting over. We die multiple times and each time feels so real and scary rather than like a video game. We also realize we need to get to the end of the game to escape rather than being able to quit out. My partner suggests we stop trying to play the game properly and just steal some random men’s clothes and sneak past the levels that way to get to the end. They manage to do it but when I try to take one of these video game men’s clothes he catches me and starts hitting me and it felt even scarier than the dying.
– Drew
Hi Drew,
Thank you for the gift of your dream, though it is terrifying, and I am sorry that it was painful. The beginning, though, is very fun, as I did laugh thinking of Tom Cruise somehow being a part of Autostraddle in any way.
What I would like to focus on, though, is when the dream comes into a clearer state of being, that is to say when your friend leaves you and your partner alone. This dream, to me, is about your relationship, the one the two of you make together, and also your relationship with yourself. So we begin with something a little silly, a VR headset, and quickly transition into something painful, the real living and dying peril. Though it is taken to an extensive degree, a dramatic one, I believe this part of your dream is about conversations, even fights, that you and your partner have had that keep recurring, again and again, always painful and fraught just like the first time.
There is no judgement here — relationships often move in circles, and, if those circles are not good for either person (or people) then we must reevaluate, and find ourselves out of the places that loop and loop, onto safer ground.
I do believe this is possible here, but I do want to caution you, and anyone else stuck in a loop, never to sacrifice something innate in yourself in the service of smoothing things over, of exiting the loop just because it is easier than staying in it until a new path emerges, or pulling yourself from it entirely. This is evidenced to me by the way you, a woman, must mask yourself in the clothes of a man, a man who punishes you for it. There are layers here, vulnerable ones, but gender, and the way you express this to yourself, and others, even when it might be dangerous, is important. Don’t punish yourself in the service of escaping an argument, a situation, a rough patch. Though it seems terrifying, a clear path will present itself.
See you on the Other Side,
Cowboy
A Short Guide To Pulling Three Tarot Cards for Yourself
Whether or not you have an experience with the Tarot, and whether or not you tie a spiritual significance to the cards you pull (Jungian analysis, anyone?), sometimes it can be difficult to ascertain what exactly you need to ask. Plus, while there are a variety of useful spreads in books and on the Internet, they can get complicated for beginners, or, for those with experience, a little too time-consuming to do every day or when something arises. Hence, this guide. I’m using my favorite three-card pull “Start / Stop / Continue” but “Past / Present / Future” is also a super helpful and easy read, and follows the same steps with different questions.
1. Warm up your deck. Bless it, light a candle over it, speak to it. Move it through your fingers and give it a few short shuffles. Thank it for being willing to answer your questions.
2. Shuffle. Everyone shuffles differently, and lots of folks are more active in their approach, but for this reading you should shuffle the deck until it feels right. Divide the cards, do it messily, really mix everything up, then divide the deck into three stacks, it doesn’t matter if they are even or not.
3. Name your approach. With the fingers of your dominant hand, touch each stack while saying aloud what you will pull from the stack. For example, touch the first stack and say Start. Touch the second stack and say Stop. Touch the third stack and say Continue.
4. Pull your cards. Pull a card from each stack, as slowly or as quickly as you like, and lay them in a row in front of you.
5. Read your cards. Listen to what they are telling you. Sometimes the symbols leap out in front of you and you know EXACTLY what they mean, like a subtweet from the Universe, and other times, and there is absolutely no shame in this, you need to look something up. My suggestion here is to keep a journal while you are learning. Write down the cards you’ve received, in order, and the spread you are using. Having your thoughts on paper will be useful in understanding what you should take away from the reading.
6. End in gratitude. Say thank you. To the cards, if you’re so inclined, but also for the opportunity to learn more about yourself. Take what wisdom was offered and apply it, you’d be surprised how relevant it might become.
