An Astrologer Tells Us Why We Need to Take a Nap Right Now, And Start Dreaming

By Karrie Myers Taylor

“I just don’t know what I should be doing right now!”, one of my clients lamented recently.  “The world is so messed up, there’s so much I should be doing, but I don’t know what to do!”

“Get some sleep,” I said.

“Sleep? There’s literally a protest going on outside my window!”

“So, go join it. And when you get home, take a nap. Neptune is in Retrograde right now, which means all your illusions are being stripped away. Now, you have the space to dream big, without the limits of money, patriarchy, racism or age-ism. But you can’t dream if you don’t sleep.”

As an astrologer, I deal every day in the area of dreams. 

In the beginning, I thought becoming an astrologer meant I would be reading symbols that helped people discover their true, radical, unapologetic selves, so that they could stop trying to live the lives of others and fully embrace the life they were born to live. Astrology had helped me do that in my own life, and I wanted to help others do it, too.

And I was coasting along, thinking that’s what astrology was all about. Until I learned about Neptune and the importance of dreams.

Every sign in the zodiac represents a different energy that we can call upon and embody at different times throughout our lives, when we need it. Need to find the focus and drive to warrior through a project? Call on your Aries energy. Need to transform your life like a phoenix rising? Call on your Scorpio. But, when the outside world is crumbling all around you, and you need the space to think about what the new world will look like, that’s when you call upon your inner Pisces, otherwise known as Neptune.

When you sleep, your unconscious mind gives you the answers you’ve been looking for, to make your dreams a reality.

Each of us has a placement of Neptune on our astrological charts, an area of our lives  where we wear rose-colored glasses, live in comfortable delusion and are not seeing the full picture. Where we are asleep, basically. 

But Neptune is also the place where our deepest, seemingly impossible dreams lie. Because when we sleep, we dream, and when we’re dreaming, there is no limit to what we can do. The boundaries and constrictions of the real world fall away. And when we wake up, we have the tools to make those dreams into reality.

Again, Neptune is Pisces energy, and if you know a Pisces, you know they are prone to escapism through drugs, alcohol, daydreaming or simply sleeping. I live with a Pisces; his favorite thing to do is sleep. Neptune and Pisces energy is one of the most confusing energies we experience in the zodiac. Every other sign has a function, it seems. Every other sign has something to do. With Neptune, the only way out of the puzzle is to get more sleep. Sleep is imagination. Sleep is regeneration. Sleep is where we get the energy to bring our dreams into reality in the first place.

My client never did take a nap. But when we talked again, she told me she wished she had.

“I get what you’re saying now,” she said. If I don’t sleep, I’m stuck on the hamster wheel. If I get some sleep, I can dream up a way to get off of it.”

“Bingo.” 

So, now’s the time I should tell you, that this conversation with a client never happened in real life. It was a dream I had, just me talking to myself, trying to work something out in my head that I wouldn’t have been able to if I was awake and dealing with the distractions of my everyday life. But the moral of the story is, when you sleep, your unconscious mind gives you the answers you’ve been looking for, to make your dreams a reality.

I know what you’re thinking: “If all I’m supposed to do right now, amidst all this chaos, is sleep, why is it so hard to get some right now?”

Well, remember all of that illusion I told you Neptune brings? Right now, Neptune is in retrograde. A retrograde feels like being suspended in air, like watching the spokes of a bicycle seemingly spin backwards, as the bicycle moves forward. It means we are being called to rethink, review, and re-imagine our dreams and why we had certain dreams in the first place. In retrograde, the veil of Neptune has been lifted from our eyes for these next few months. This is the time where we can get real about who we are and what we actually wanted in life, before the restrictions of society, corporate advertising and market research told us what we wanted.

During this Retrograde, which began June 22 and ends November 28, you may be re-evaluating your career, your goals, even your partner, and wondering if something else would be a better fit… or maybe things are fine just as they are? You might use dreams, hypnosis, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), or flower essences to reveal ideas and information that have been sitting there in plain sight the whole time. You may be considering a new place to live, or a new way to live, that you had always dreamed about before, but never thought would be possible. You may be revisiting the past, looking over your present life before moving ahead into your new one.

But you’re also seeing the truth of your lifelong illusions. Turns out, your favorite celebrities are just regular, flawed people when the studio lights aren’t around. This is why we love movies and celebrities so much. Deep down, we know it’s not real, but we pay good money to escape from reality for a little while. Turns out, you kinda like life without so many rules. You may be experiencing nostalgia right now, for the way things used to be. But Neptune in Retrograde is showing you they never actually were that way. That was just Neptune, helping you escape in order to survive.

There’s a lot going on in your head, so it’s hard to get some sleep…but that’s exactly what you should be doing right now. 

Make time for dreaming. Turns out it is an action item, after all.

Originally Published August 4, 2020. Updated April 3, 2021.