Bed is my synagogue. Dreams are my bible. Waking up my goal. Waking up is the entire purpose of the spiritual life, and waking up is hard to do! I depend on my dreams like I depend on my friends.

One of the best things I've done for my dream life is to get myself a Zen Alarm Clock. The zen alarm clock is not actually a clock but a "musical instrument for progressive awakening". At the appointed hour the most beautiful chime dings once and then stops, giving you time to go through alpha brain wave state and actually finish your dreams and then remember them!

I mean what's the point of truncated unremembered dreaming. A waste of energy! The tone is based on Pythagorian Harmonics. The whole thing is very scientific! You wake up with a "powerful charging effect on your mind". Or at least that's what they say. I would say a "powerful charging effect on my life"! Three minutes and 48 seconds after the first chime it chimes again. And then at intervals according to the Golden Mean and you never have to press the snooze button!

You never have to hear news about something awful first thing in the AM. You fall asleep gradually (hopefully!) and that is how you should wake up as well. It totally changed my life. But don't get the digital one. After years of dependable use in a fit of over enthusiasm I back slapped zenny to a concrete floor. Woops. The nice people at Now and Zen offered to replace my clock for half price despite the fact that it was well past its warrentee. So I got the more aesthetically pleasing, better for traveling digital model. NG. Get the original model. You will thank me. We will meet in dreamland..

If you are a student of Judaism you probably believe that words are magic. If so: armed is an anagram for dream. (One anagram for Beth Lapides is: shlep it a bed! go ahead go do your own name you know you want to!) And in a sense when we are dreaming we're arming ourselves with the inner knowledge available only with symbolic revelation. Aming ourselves like one of those many armed gods, giving yourself a greater ability to accomlish. (If like me you are a workaholic who needs to defend dreaming!) Unless you get lost in a dream world. Sometimes I tell my students to forget the dream, and focus on the passion. It's so easy to get plugged into the dream machine, where we can't even tell if our dreams are our real dream or the manufactured dream, the fame and fortune and red carpets. Like that blonde chick in "I'm From Rolling Stone", her "dream" was keeping her from her dream. Although another anagram for dream is "rad me" and maybe she knows what she wants.

Don Juan tells Carlos Casteneda in "The Art of Dreaming": "...dreaming is perceiving more than what we believe it is possible to perceive." In these times of transition, shift and change, dreaming may be the best way. In a time when solving our problems seems too hard, dissolving them may be a better approach and sleeping and dreaming amazing tools for this dissolution.

This year on MLK Day I listened to his "I Have A Dream" speech. It's not "I had a dream", it's "I have a dream". Present tense. In the now. Might be a good listen as you get ready to celebrate freedom this Passover.

Is God in the details? If so maybe Anna Wintour is in search of God, and not the devil incarnate!

I just read that the famous for being devilish editor is looking for a new word for 'blog'. The item implied that this was just another thing that made Anna Wintour soo evil. "The word 'blog' is ugly", she reportedly said, and so she's ordered her staffers to come up with a new word ASAPest!

Personally I like the word blog. It is to writing what clogs are to other shoes. Something uniquely shaped. A shoe but not a shoe. Then again Ms. Wintour may also loathe clogs. I respect that. I loathe flats. Whenever I see a girl in ballet slippers I stare the way drivers stare at car wrecks. Please never let that happen to me!

But what I love about Anna Wintour's desire for a new word is that it reveals a love of language, a demand for precision about language. A love of detail. And after all isn't God in the details? I suggest the word cournal to Ms. Wintour. If you happen to know her please pass it along. Cournal is for: computer journal. Also for kernel, as in kernel of an idea. Which is what a good blog is. (I'm always tempted to go for the whole ear of corn.) But if you do tell it to her and she likes it and she uses it, please tell her it is from me and that I would really would like to meet her. Now more than ever.

Because I am still trying to figure out "The Devil Wears Prada". She didn't seem that evil. I began to worry maybe there was something wrong with me. According to the Kabbalah worry is the devil. But of course you shouldn't worry about it, or the devil wins. And in this case the devil did. For me the devil often does.

Is it me or is it being Jewish? Is it possible to be a Jew and not worry? I am an optimist and so I say yes. And I have spent most of my so-called adult life working at converting my worrier nature into warrior nature. Every now and then I feel I've gotten it. A triumph! And always when I am feeling truimphant I start to worry that I am feeling triumphant and I will lose it all, which means that I have lost it all and I must begin again. High heels can be emotionally as well as physically uplifting at this point.

And so can yoga. Where I was yesterday. First, lots of warriors. Warrior 1, 2, reverse 2's. All good. Then I was laying in shavasana, corpse pose, (I consider it a great victory that I can even lay there and not worry about dying) and I noticed a great ball of worry. Despite my chanting to remove all negativity. Somehow I was able to really focus on it though. And my worry felt "fat". Hunh. I looked more closely and it was a fat old woman in a housedress. Wirey hair. Smoking. Her name was Bertha. I have always tried to be one of those people who name the parts of themselves. Never been able to. Well, ok. Results are not always immediate.

And here was big old fat Bertha. Literally sitting on my shoulder. Worrying. She was my devil. Wearing an awful shmata! My devil wears shamatas! I released her but like an ex-con committing crimes to get back in prison here she still is today. Maybe if I buy her some Prada she will behave.

I love Passover and I love the idea of the four questions but those particular four questions have never done much for me.

So this year I am working on my own four questions.

Does it make me a bad Jew if instead of looking for answers about why this night is different from every other night I ask how this night might be the same as every other night? Why all this focus on separation and difference? Isn't every night a good night to remember that we are free - if we are? And are we?

Why does the leavening in bread represent only the rising of pride and ego? Rising certainly in its worst light. Isn't rising also a great thing? Don't we want to rise and shine? Don't we want our spirits to rise? Especially in spring. Isn't spring all about the sap rising? When we unbound ourselves from slavery wasn't that a kind of up-rising?

Why do we not get to recline a lot more in life? Bed is so good! We are a nation of sleep deprived people! Isn't sleep the key to being truly awake? And isn't being awake what you need to dream? So, aren't dreaming and waking and sleeping all part of the same undifferentiated enlightened whole?! And when you do get a good nights sleep aren't you finally able to arise with grace?

Isn't it possible that Moses really did part the Red Sea? I always thought it was a metaphor but lately I've been thinking that we've turned everything magical into only the vaguely possible and now that I've learned about Dr. Emoto and his experiments with water's consciousness I am wondering if maybe Moses loved the Red Sea into parting? Apparently if you thank your water and love your water (two parts thank to one part love it's very scientific) the water forms beautiful crystals. But when you say Hitler to water it forms very ugly crystals so isn't it possible that water, being smart enough not to like Hitler, might have been smart enough to open itself up to freedom? And isn't it possible that the Age of Aquarius which has to do with unity consciousness is a time when asking what makes this night different is maybe not the best approach? And at this point isn't what makes us us and them maybe not be as important as that there is no us and them. And that water dividing itself into two halves seems so astounding because it should exist as one? And that we should come to see that the separation is dramatic and an absolute last resort?

OK. I know this is more than four questions, but things have gotten much more complicated!

Today, my angels have instructed me to blog about them. Yikes! Did I just write that sentence and not delete it!? I am shocked to discover that I believe in angels! That they are a part of my daily life. And maybe even more shocked that as a Jew, I am allowed to.

I was under the impression that Jews did not believe in angels. I never heard anything about angels growing up. Angels seemed even more Christian than Jesus. Jesus, after all, had at least started out as a Jew. I didn't mind not having angels though. All that bad art made them seem hokey. If angels had any power at all, I figured that their "approved likenesses" would be better.

Then I moved from New York to Los Angeles. City of the angels. I wasn't thinking of it that way. I was thinking of it as the city of movie deals where my husband had just signed with a good writing agent. I didn't notice that the words agent and angel were very close and possibly related.

Soon after I moved, a friend gave me a pack of angel cards. Fortune cookie-sized, they seemed about as reliable. Each one had a tiny ugly drawing and one word. Efficiency. Humor. Transcendence. Healing. Etc. But I never actually put them away and one night heading out the door to some hideous comedy club gig I pulled one out and it had some good advice. And I got in the habit of pulling a card on my way out.

Still I did not really think actual angels actually had anything to do with the cards. I figured it was "the universe" speaking through the angel cards. Then I found myself in the lobby of the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas interviewing world-famous angel healer Doreen Virtue (long story). Like most healers she preferred healing to talking about healing. I told her I had a chronic pain in my back. She told me I had a "huge psychic dagger" in my back and would I like her to remove it? Um, yes! Pause pause. Ok, it's out. I felt light headed. Not all there. Better!

CURED! I didn't sleep at all that night, afraid if I did when I woke up the pain, which I'd had for years, would be back. But it wasn't. People say it was the power of suggestion. Maybe, but you know who else had suggested that this pain would be gone? Two accupuncturists, three massueses, a chiropractor, four yoga teachers and my Mom. So I had to open my mind to angels.

As it turns out Jews do believe in angels. But in Jewish writing the angels are fiery and masculine, not these mamby-pamby, de-sexualized Christian puff-balls. Half water, half fire. I love that!

The Hebrew word for angel, malakh, means messenger. And I am so much more open now to receiving their messages. One way I like to do it is to talk with my angels by using a pendulum. If you have never tried using a pendulum, it is really worth turning off your TV for. Even if you are not willing to go to angels, even if you think it is "your higher power". Even if you think it is "bio-feedback". Even if you think it is "bull shit". It can still help to understand what your questions are.

From what I understand about Jewish angels they are the "elohim". Elohim is also the third word in the Bible. Elohim also happen to be, according to some a race of aliens. Aliens, angels, angles of light. All messengers.

One other angel point. There is a new theory that our DNA code actually corresponds to the Hebrew alphabet, essentially spelling out "G-d within". If that is true, and angels are messengers of G-d, is it possible that we are all angels, and that to be an angel is to connect to the part of yourself that is a messenger from G-d, possibly one telling yourself to believe in angels?!

I'm going to ask the angels.

New moon yesterday. Auspicious time to start something new. Plant seeds. (Also wreaks havoc on moods - moon/mood not much difference!)

But this new moon had slipped my mind because sometimes I don't look at the actual calendar, a sad by-product of my mac calendar widget. So I was thrilled that I had "coincidentally" added a new element to my practice on the new moon. Maybe all this "tuning in" is actually starting to work.

What I added into my practice is a new mantra. One with the ability to "remove all negativity"!

Now it's not that I'm so negative. (Although notice I used not negative, instead of pretty positive.) This haiku from my book "Did I Wake You?" says it in a nutshell:

"You're so negative
for a positive person," he said.
"No, I'm not!"

I feel like my negativity is a kind of psychic "last ten pounds". Yes I can live with it, but I'd rather not. And I worry about being negative because worry is my favorite kind of negativity. Of course worrying about my negativity just creates more negativity. And the kabbalah says that worry is the devil. But what is worry? Worry is an inner monolouge that goes "maybe not, no, I don't think, shouldn't have, what if I don't, not sure, what if this is no good, what if something bad happens, no good can come of this..."

But what can I can I do to stop it? I tried telling myself 'don't be negative!' But it didn't work. It never works when you tell yourself not to do something. Your brain only hears the something. Not the don't. 'Don't eat!' Sounds like, 'Eat!' That's why sometimes when you go on a diet you gain weight. At least that's what I tell myself.

You can't even tell yourself not to tell yourself not to do things. You have to do something else so that there is not room in the time/space continuum for the thing you don't want to do. You can't just not be afraid, you have to love more, etc.

So when I came across the CD with a mantra to remove all negativity I ordered it immediatly. (Mantra, by the way, comes from man=mind and tra=tool, so mind tool, instrument of thought!)

It arrived on Friday. I was on the road all weekend and last night I came home, took it out and did it and I do not have one negative thing to say about it! It is fantastic!

Here was the first transformation that happened.

All weekend I had been seeing a billboard for some new car, maybe the Element, which asked: DOES THIS MAKE ME LOOK PHAT? I had so much negativity around that billboard. "That's so hacky, that's so old, what a waste of a pun, I hate cars, why do we have to have billborads they are so horrible, but it's also kind of clever. Why do clever people have to be in advertising..." This train of thought didn't take much time. It happened instantaneously. And it didn't linger but there it was, repeatedly. All weekend, despite the fact that I try not to pay attention to billboards because I feel when I 'pay attention" I am actually paying. And retail at that!

And then I get home and I put in the CD that is going to help me chant to remove all negativity. And what is the first line? "Om Kem Kam PHAT!" Capitals, and exclamation point, his! The word Phat appears three times in this chant which is altogther sixteen words. One fifth of the words in this chant to remove negativity is a word that I have been feeling negative about all weekend!

So of course I am desperate to know the translation of the word. It is not clear from Sri Siva's explanation. He tells the general meaning. Explains that these seed sounds have "nuclear power" (yikes!) to destroy negativity. So I go on line and look it up in an online sanskrit dictionary and find that PHAT! is "a mystical syllable used in incantation"!

Which is kind of the same meaning as Phat has here. Wow, cool, beyond words. A mystical syllable used in rap (incantation). Which kind of blew my mind. The connections between cultures, between us as individuals. Seperation is such an illusion, the ultimate negative idea, and I'm so over it!

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Related in Jewcy: Allow us to introduce Beth, this week's Faithhacker guest blogger.