Conversation With the High Priestess

Conversation With the High Priestess by Natalia Lakes

Tarot, at its most potent, is not about fortune-telling. It is a language of symbols that speaks directly to your subconscious, your soul’s native tongue. When approached with reverence, the cards do not merely reveal—they converse.

I had such a conversation.

One night, I followed a quiet ritual. No spreads. No rules. I held the cards in my hands and breathed slowly, allowing my mind to relax. I shuffled—not to mix paper—but to awaken symbols. After a few minutes, something subtle nodded within me. I drew a single card.

The High Priestess.

There she was—arresting, otherworldly. Eyes gleaming with amused knowing. A cathedral city rose behind her, suspended in candlelight and alchemical dusk. And upon her crown, with the poise of an emperor, sat a white cat.

What’s he doing up there?

“Why is the cat in my crown? Ah. Why does the moon command the tides?” she responded, lips curving. “Some things perch precisely where they belong. He believes he’s a reincarnated Lemurian deity.”

“You wish to know,” she continues, “if what you see in those otherworldly, hyper-real dreams are glimpses of your former selves...”

“Yes… The scenes unfold with such cinematic clarity—perfect lighting, sepia shadows, different eras, streets that never existed in waking life…”

She listened.

I described one of them:

The air feels thick, syrupy. The sun filters through the leaves of chestnut trees, casting patterns on the stones of the boulevard. The scent of roasted hazelnuts from a corner vendor’s cart carries across the square. I also smell the river, not far off—cold stone, wet iron. A violin plays behind me. Carriages clatter over cobblestones. Their wheels splash through the puddles and a flower seller adjusts her basket. Nobody sees me. The petals of a white camellia fall, one by one, at my feet.

The High Priestess nodded. “You are not imagining these places,” she said. “These are encoded impressions—some from your personal soul memory, others from the great sea of ancestral and archetypal experience. From the perspective of the psyche, your soul stores its lives in a deep, symbolic archive: the collective unconscious Carl Jung spoke of. They are interwoven with your own karmic thread. When your mind is lucid, you step outside the Newtonian world—of mass and force, of gravity holding everything in place… You see, souls are waveforms—vibrations within the quantum field. When you dream consciously, you shift into resonance with those frequencies.”

Artist: You mean, my soul leaves my body and travels through time while I sleep?

Priestess: No. When you travel in dreams, you are not escaping your body. You are tuning the dial of consciousness to a different frequency—one that quantum physics calls coherence. This is not fantasy—it is frequency modulation.

Artist: Then lucid dreaming is just a shift in vibrational state?

Priestess: Just? No. But yes. Shift your awareness, and the geometry of space-time changes. Paths loop. Distances vanish. You do not move through space. Space moves through you. And this—this—is the threshold of the lucid dream. Not an escape from reality, but a deeper entry into its fabric.

Artist: And when I get there—how do I know where to go?

Priestess: The field knows you. Just as an electron “knows” how to leap to a higher energy state when struck by light, your soul will find its way by intention. All you must do… is surrender to the curve.

Lucid dreaming is a neurological liminal state—a bridge between REM sleep and conscious awareness. In this state, the default mode network (DMN), which governs the ego and narrative self, is quieted. This opens pathways to both the subconscious and what transpersonal psychologists call the superconscious.

Within this aperture, time folds. If your intention is strong, your guides—often veiled as figures in your dreams—can bring forward meaningful scenes to support your current evolution.

Artist: But how do I know what to trust?

Priestess: (smiles) Your emotions are the compass. Not the dramatic ones—but the subtle shifts. Reverence. Grief without origin. The scent of recognition. You are remembering, because your present self is ready to reintegrate a lesson learned long ago.

Each dream of another century contains an echo—either a wound or wisdom. Neither should be idolized. Your work is not to prove the past, but to metabolize it into spiritual maturity.

She leans forward, cat purring.

Dream deliberately. Speak to the night as if it listens—because it does. You saw me in a dream because dreams are the only mirrors polished enough to reflect the unseen. When you close your eyes, you step into the true gallery—there, I posed for you willingly.

Me: I remember.

Priestess: So keep painting. And keep dreaming. You are good at both.