Sleep Magic

By Victoria Pendragon

This is a spiritual book that enables you to use the time when you are asleep for reprogramming your brain and body to experience healing and to manifest your true self.

New Thought minister, Victoria Pendragon developed this program after being diagnosed with progressive systemic sclerosis–a painful, debilitating, disfiguring, and fatal illness. In the course of her illness, she developed her “SleepMagic” program that contributed to her healing and almost complete recovery from sclerosis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ozark Mountain Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005913618

Victoria Pendragon

Victoria Pendragon was born and raised in the vicinity of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is the oldest of eleven. Her life has been defined, as are most of ours perhaps, by conditions that would seem to have been beyond her control. Eighteen years of various sorts of abuse and two diseases that should have killed her rank among the most outstanding of those.Victoria Pendragon’s study of metaphysics began in early childhood as an attempt to validate the lessons she’d been learning from the earth and the trees whenever she left her body. She has been working as a professional in the field of spirituality since 1995, has read tarot since 1964 and created in 2007, Sacred Earth Seven Element Tarot, a tarot deck designed to bring the world community together.Victoria Pendragon began training in art when still a child, eventually acquiring a BFA from The Philadelphia College of Art. Her work hangs in numerous corporate and personal collections, among them The Children’s Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Moss Rehab and Bryn Mawr Hospital Rehab.Victoria Pendragon has two children by her first marriage, a son and a daughter, both of whom amaze her. She is currently married to her third husband, a man whose kind soul has created for her an atmosphere of clarity and creativity in which she dances, writes, creates art and helps when asked.

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Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1

America, the Land of Anything Can Happen

Chapter 2

The Ego Process

Chapter 3

Body, Mind, and Spirit Self

Chapter 4

What Can You Trust?

Chapter 5

Working with Your Body

Chapter 6

The Clues Your Life Provides

Chapter 7

Life Before Life

Chapter 8

Expanding Your Repertoire

Chapter 9

Looking for Clues

Chapter 10

A Brief Case Study

Chapter 11

Refining the Process

Chapter 12

The Self and Its Identities

Chapter 13

Cultivating the External Observer

Chapter 14

Making SleepMagic Work

Chapter 15

Refinement

Chapter 16

Wrap Up & Review

Preface

An Ancient Indian Parable

Once upon a time there was a baby tiger, orphaned when his mother died shortly after his birth. The infant tiger was left behind by his tribe and was soon discovered by a herd of goats among whom was a nursing mother. She took the foundling in and raised him along with her brood. The pup grew and imitated the behavior of his adopted family, grazing on leaves and grasses until one day he was spotted by a mature tiger who was stalking the herd.

The adult beast confronted him.

The pup was curiously unafraid and unaware that the rest of his herd had gone missing.

What’s this? What’s this? You eat grass like some ungulate? What do you think you are, a goat?

Why yes, he answered.

A goat? bellowed the big, beautiful beast. A goat? Follow me. He led the small tiger to a nearby creek where he gazed into the water at his own arresting visage briefly before instructing the younger cat to come up beside him.

Look into the water, he advised the pup, and see who you are.

The scrawny young tiger peered into the slow moving stream and to his great surprise saw, not a face like the ones that had surrounded him as he’d grown into adolescence, but a small, sad facsimile of the big cat beside him.

I’m…I’m…I’m a…tiger?

The older one turned to him, holding him in his formidable gaze, Eat some meat. Become who you really are.

Now this story could just as easily have gone the other way. A tiger is no better or worse than a goat. Different beings are just that, different. So while the tiger might have had a bad time of it eating grass, imagine the dilemma of a goat trying to attack another living creature.

An Ancient Indian Parable, Retold as an American Fable

Once upon a time there was a young woman who was born in the mountains of Nevada. Her mother was a high ranking corporate executive, and her father was the president of his own multi-billion dollar company. The girl had been loved and cared for, sent to excellent schools, and given the very best advice that her parents could offer. She was taught to set her goals high and pursue them relentlessly.

She followed the advice that she’d received. Throughout high school she consulted with her parents on decisions about what clubs to join, what college to attend, and what she should be doing to prepare for life. She listened to her parents and she studied hard. It was important for her to live up to their expectations. It was not until she got to college that she ran into her first real challenge—picking a major. She’d grown up with two amazing role models in a beautifully extravagant house with a commanding view. She grew up rich. She had been set upon a path that was pointing towards her replicating the life her parents had so successfully embodied, so she signed up for business classes, marketing classes, and classes on becoming an entrepreneur. Just for fun, just for her, just because she’d always secretly journaled and written poetry, she also enrolled in a class in English Literature.

Because she was smart and had been raised to believe in herself, she did well in all her classes and graduated with an internship at a very large corporation, not unlike the one for which her mother worked. Within two years, she’d had her first promotion, closely followed by her first visit to a psychotherapist.

I don’t know why it is…I can’t put my finger on it…I should be happy…but I feel more like I’m missing a piece. I feel…kind of empty.

Is there anything in your life that makes you feel full? responded the therapist.

She thought for a while because there didn’t seem to be much. Then it struck her—she loved to write. Writing made her feel satisfied in a way that nothing else did. She went on to describe her perfect day: sleeping late, settling down with a cup of tea and a pad of paper, drifting and dreaming and turning her thoughts into iambic pentameter or essays. She’d seriously considered blogging but didn’t seem to have enough of a focus.

I’m curious, asked the therapist. Why did you not major in English in college?

I never gave it a thought, she said. We never discussed things like that at home, and at all those career day things in high school…it just never came up.

Why don’t you try going back to school? Just take a night class. See what happens. It might make you feel better.

The young woman took one class, and then another, following the musings of her mind and the yearnings of her heart. Eventually she turned her back on the world of business and became an English teacher, sharing her poetry on nights and weekends at local venues. She moved to a small apartment that overlooked a city park and became about as happy as a person can be.

We are not all tigers, and we are not all born to be entrepreneurs, but we all deserve to be content, to live lives that are fulfilling; however, if we do not have the essential information that we need to know who we really are and what we really want, then finding that fulfilling life can be a struggle. This is not made any easier when we live in a country where the word fierce has become a compliment.

It took a much longer time for the young woman to realize that she was not what she was raised to think she was than it took for the baby tiger to realize what he was. The message that you are powerful, that you are a tiger, that you have within you the power to rise to the top is seductive. The idea of having power dominates even at a conceptual level. Anything that fires up the blood, causes passion to rise, and makes the heart beat faster is difficult to deny.

Most of us, though we may in fact be the architects of our own destinies, have been sold an idea that destiny means being at the top, being the alpha male or female, being the tiger. If that were true, this would be a world in constant turmoil. As it is, there are more of us living in peace than not. The vast majority of us were designed to be empowered, not to have power over others. We were meant for graceful, comfortable lives. People like us have been made to feel insignificant by a society drowning in its own hype.

Introduction to the Work

The work to which this book will introduce you, a technique called SleepMagic, was a long time coming. Its conception lay in the first seven months of a disease process called progressive systemic sclerosis that I was privileged both to experience and to be challenged by beginning in April of 1988. Scleroderma, as this disease process is more commonly known, is a collagen vascular disease in the same family of autoimmune disorders as lupus. It is, when classified as progressive and systemic, generally considered to be both incurable and fatal.

In 1984, for reasons best known at that time only to my body, I had begun to devour all the material I could find on the mind/body connection, a concept that was just making its way into the media spotlight. I read books, clipped articles, and filed information as though someone had assigned me the task. No one had. I frequently questioned why I was doing it but was unable to resist the urge. There was something compelling me.

In April of 1988, when I found myself irretrievably exhausted, in pain, unable to endure sunlight, with fingers and toes that turned blue intermittently, I did not immediately think to check my files. I was distracted by misery. Within a week of exhibiting the first mysterious symptoms, I was almost entirely disabled. Within a month I had become even worse, my hands and feet swelling, my joints so sore that I could barely stand to move. My parents, both physicians, were distraught but respected my refusal to seek standard medical care because neither recognized the symptoms, and they agreed that there was a chance that it might clear on its own.

My parents were both pathologists and had seen enough of medical practice to respect that sometimes it is just as effective to wait awhile—giving the body a chance to heal on its own. Finally though, my mother insisted that I see a physician. The visit was so discouraging, so disappointing that I refused to try again for another five months. I had been told that I was probably just getting old. My impression of the visit had been that the doctor thought that I was exaggerating my symptoms since at the time I had seen her, I looked about as normal as a person in pain and suffering from a lack of sleep can look. I explained to her that my model for getting old didn’t include any of the symptoms I was experiencing. My parents were both in fabulous shape. I expected to age similarly. The doctor’s condescension had been palpable. It turned me away.

When I finally gave in to parental pressure and submitted to another exam at the hands of one of my mother’s former students, things went much better. Better, that is, if you consider getting a diagnosis of having a fatal, incurable disease a step up from being talked down to. I went home from the exam, pulled out my trusty medical encyclopedia, looked up scleroderma and identified that it sure did read a lot like what I had except that there were about four or five symptoms I didn’t have. The additional symptoms I read about were horrifying to me in light of the fact that I was already feeling devastated.

Inside of a month, I had every symptom I’d read about. Most of my hair had fallen out. My skin had become as tough as tree bark. I had begun to lose weight, and my skin itched all over, that is, when it didn’t feel as if it was on fire.

It was then that I remembered all the things I’d read about the mind/body connection. I cursed myself quietly. I was pretty darned sure that had I not fed myself that information fueled by the fear I felt when I was reading it, I’d not necessarily have acquired the new symptoms. I truly felt as though I’d done it to myself. I may not have. It’s all a moot point now as I sit here typing twenty some years later. The good news is that having so rapidly displayed all the symptomology I’d read about, I became convinced of the power of my mind over my body and equally convinced that I could undo what I’d done.

I know. It was a leap. But it was a leap I took with ease and grace because I asked myself, Why else would I have taken in four years of information on how to heal? I’d had no need for it at all at the time. No one I knew had any need for it…until I did. I figured that it was meant to be. My only issue was that there was no model for scleroderma. Most of the work I’d read was about cancer patients. I was on my own. So I took another leap. I trusted my body.

I was slowly and painfully turning into scar tissue from the inside out. I was unable to sustain any really lengthy periods of sleep because of the pain, refusing pain killers for fear of becoming addicted. I allowed myself only one pill every three days. Despite the fact that I seemed to be physically deteriorating, quite often I would awaken from the sleep I did get in states of joy that were undeniable. I had dreams that were inexplicably hopeful. I found a place of peace that allowed me to enter into an amazing relationship with life. I began to pay close attention to everything. Colors became more vivid. The smallest creatures captivated my focus for endless minutes as they crept about, ate crumbs or each other, or flew from one destination to another. Somehow pain took me to a place of beauty and fascination. I lived there, believing in the joy my sleep seemed to promise me.

And it worked. I spent one year and about three months spiraling towards death; then I was accepted into an experimental medical program at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. The treatment I received was one used with great success in the treatment of T-cell lymphoma. Physicians were guessing that it might work to cure or at least arrest scleroderma. While it did not work for most of those in the study, within one month the condition of my body reversed itself faster than anything the doctors had ever seen. In another six months, my body tested free of the disease. It was still bent and hardened by what had happened, and I was told that it would stay that way—but it didn’t. Today the only visible hint that I ever had the disease is in my somewhat crippled hands. As far as I know, there are no invisible hints. In fact, internally I function better now than I did before I contracted progressive systemic sclerosis.

So I did it. So, great! But how? During the worst of my illness, the time spent in the experimental program and in the years after, I worked with many alternative healers, as well as with medical doctors. Over and over I heard from them that I had something to offer others. I was reluctant to believe them, but somehow people just knew and began approaching me for assistance. So I started small, with hands-on healing. My practice grew rapidly but so, too, did my frustration. What I wanted for all these wonderful people who were seeing me as a healer was for them to be able to help themselves. I wanted them to become as empowered by their conditions as I had been by mine. But I had no way to transmit to them the means to the mindset that had somehow simply come to me all on its own.

On September 11, 2001, I lost my will to help. Something inside me crumbled. I felt that I could not continue to offer support to anyone else when I seemed to have none for myself. As if I had asked for it, people stopped coming, but everything felt wrong, so I did what many people do when they feel that they have come to the end of their rope. I threw up my hands and begged the Universe for help. I asked it to please send me someone who could show me what I didn’t know, someone who could help me access whatever had been inside me in 1988 that had spun me back into life, someone who could allow me to be useful again.

And of course, the universe did. It sent me a man named Louis Caracciola, a scientist, a winemaker, and a visionary whose impassioned words were the catalyst I needed to surface the subconscious knowingness of how I had healed. I listened to him speak one evening, went home afterwards, set an intention for healing, fell asleep, and woke up the next day with a partial vision of how I had come to survive a disease that almost no one survives.

It took me about three years to codify the material you will learn in this book and three years to allow me to begin to present to the public what my body so generously presented to me—a chance to surrender to a wisdom greater than my own, that of my body.

Since then many people have done SleepMagic under my tuition as I strived to bring the information to a place where it could reach out on a much larger scale. I thank all of my students, those that completed the work and those that didn’t, for teaching me the best ways to share this information. I thank Lynne Paradise for all her help in the preparation of this manuscript. I thank Dodd Pendragon who was my partner during my illness, my healing, and the development of the SleepMagic technique. Without his support it is likely that I might not even be here. I thank my brother, Dan, for supporting me financially when I was so ill and for helping me to learn how to play. And I thank Louis Caracciollo for taking my blinders off and for being kind and generous and inspired.

Chapter 1

America, the Land of Anything Can Happen

Don’t be ridiculous; everybody wants to be us.

Miranda Ryan

The Devil Wears Prada

Some years ago, a movie called The Secret—See the movie! Buy the book! Own the DVD!—ushered into the spotlight that which had not been a secret for at least a thousand years, maybe more. But to many Americans, limited by a society which has gloried in itself and in its own achievements, much like the metaphorical 2-year-old it is in global terms, this so-called secret was something wonderful and new. Books on the Laws of Attraction, such as The Secret, have long been on the self-help shelves of bookstores, but now, post-Secret, they entertain an even larger audience and the proliferation of their genre. Workshops on making dreams come true, once attended only by more alternative types, are springing up in adult night schools.

It was bound to happen. We live in the land of anything-can-happen-if-you-work-hard-enough, but there is a huge discrepancy here. We are raised, in America, to believe that we can have it all. Are we supposed to have it all? Does that not smack seriously of greed?

The fact is that most of us live modest lives filled with everyday achievements, joys, distractions, and distresses. Most of us do not own billion-dollar businesses. Most of us are not celebrities. Most of us do not own four houses, a private jet, and a garage full of antique cars. Yet this is what we, as Americans, tend to equate with success. Consequently, most of us think of ourselves as not being successful; The Secret that was not really a secret fell on fertile ground—promising, promising, promising.

There is no information in The Secret that cannot be found in Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich written about a hundred years before or for that matter in the works of James Allen, author of As a Man Thinketh and many other older, less flashy tomes. The bottom line in all these books is always persistence and a positive, focused attitude, and if that worked for everyone as well as it worked for the people about whom these books have been written, then a whole lot more of us should be perfect pictures of the American success story. There is a reason that there are countless books on achieving success in this quintessentially American way, and that is because the same type of people keep buying the books—well-meaning people hoping for the bigger and better life. These books are all variations on a theme and the theme itself is, for the most part, a myth. This myth is handed down from generation to generation.

These days the buzzword for this myth is manifestation. You have an idea for something that you want to have happen, something that in today’s parlance you want to manifest. You flesh out your idea, maybe throw out a few thousand affirmations, plot a course of action, and viola! Or not. Maybe all that happens is that you learn what not to do the next time, and that can be valuable. So, you go out and buy another book, ramp up your motivation, add a few more tools to your kit, and start

Reviews for Sleep Magic

[Marilyn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is a life saver.
It is changing my life and in ways I never ever thought possible.
What a way to heal deep and severe trauma.
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge Victoria. My body and I am forever grateful!