Every night, as your waking mind tucks itself in, Neptune arrives, drifting through with dreams in tow. They’re not nonsense. They’re draped in symbolism. A clock with no hands? Perhaps your fear of time slipping through your fingers. A house with endless rooms? Maybe a hint that you’ve more of yourself to discover. Sleep, then, is a spiritual passage. This planet is the gatekeeper to the unconscious, which is less a place and more a living force, a vast inner ocean of memory, desire, and myth. And when you dream, you are communing with something wordless. The psyche reshapes itself behind your closed lids. The dreams may seem chaotic, but within their unreason lies the most personal kind of reality. For what is more honest than the symbols your soul chooses in its unguarded hours?

Through this nightly journey, things you’ve forgotten, deliberately or by accident, come calling. Lost moments bob to the surface. In this world, everything submerged eventually returns, reborn in dream, waiting to be noticed, or at least acknowledged. There’s a particular strangeness to this process. It’s haunting because it is you, but not the ‘you’ you wear in the daytime. It’s the soul-you, the dreamer-you, the chaotic and contradictory mosaic of selves you try to wrangle into a coherent story but never quite can. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe dreams aren’t meant to be neatly understood but rather experienced, like art or love or grief.

Ruling the 12th house in astrology, Neptune isn’t interested in the surface layer of consciousness where we keep our our rationalizations. This planet resides in the house of endings and eternities, of karma and collective memory. Certain memories, certain feelings—too much, too vast, too unfinished—are tucked away in suspension. They wait there, submerged beneath the ripples of the mind, until the conditions are right: a dream, a smell, a piece of music that sends shivers up your spine. And suddenly there it is—the lost thing, returned through emotional osmosis.

Here we are  perched on the edge of perception. In his realm, logic is gently folded away. The rational mind, with its sharp edges and linear insistence, simply cannot swim here. It would sink like a stone. So it steps aside, and the dreamer—the deeper self—emerges, weightless and wordless. In this liminal space, the language is no longer spoken but felt. It comes in symbols—a blackbird flying backwards, a staircase leading to a lake, a lover’s face morphing into your own. These are experiences to be absorbed. Neptune tunes into a different frequency. One where the boundaries between self and other, past and future, awake and asleep, begin to blur.

To enter this terrain is to relinquish the tidy comforts of the literal. You’re dealing with something more akin to a surrealist painting—startling, evocative, and sometimes a bit mad. A tree growing in your kitchen isn’t a plumbing issue; it’s your psyche trying to show you that growth is taking root where you least expect it. But this meaning isn’t stamped on the image like a label on a tin, it has to be felt, coaxed out, lived with. The dream language is a dialect of the soul, spoken in color, feeling, archetype. It’s intuitive, slippery, and refuses to sit still. This is the great challenge of Neptune’s realm: just as you think you’ve grasped it, it transforms. Just as you believe you’ve named the thing, it laughs and becomes something else.

To dream is to let go of the idea that everything must be known, categorized, or pinned like a butterfly to the corkboard of reason. In Neptune’s world, butterflies remain elusive, fluttering out of reach—beautiful, maddening, and entirely uninterested in being caught. In surrendering to this realm, we allow the boundaries that normally fence off our identities to soften, to melt. And suddenly, we are the dream. We become the sea and the swimmer, the hunter and the hunted, the question and the answer.

During hard Neptune transits, the seabed of the soul gets kicked up, releasing old ghosts into the otherwise placid bay of conscious life. You find yourself awash in emotion that has no clear origin, no obvious reason. It’s grief without a story, love without an object, fear without form.  The usual defenses—the little dams we build around ourselves begin to leak. What was repressed or neatly compartmentalized doesn’t stay put. It might be shadow. It might be ecstasy. It might be a pain you didn’t know you were carrying. Under this influence, you might have visions, dreams that feel more real than waking life, synchronicities that make your rational mind twitch.  Neptune is trying to dissolve you. Dissolve the illusions of control, ego, separateness. And what’s left when the salt clears from your eyes? The interconnected self. The part of you that knows the world dreaming itself through you.

To fall in love under Neptune’s influence is to dissolve—to feel your edges blur and melt into another, to sense their soul. There’s a merging, a melting, a becoming-something-else. It’s divine. You don’t love the person—you love what they represent: an ideal, a mirror of your own unspoken longing, your thirst for the eternal dressed in a human form. And yet, the ideal is never fully incarnate. The fantasy cannot hold itself in flesh. The dream cannot survive in the dust of dishes and disagreements. What was once divine becomes… domestic. And for the Neptunian soul, this can feel like a fall from grace—like heaven slipping through your fingers. One moment you were soaring, the next you’re scrubbing toothpaste off the sink wondering where the magic went.

This is the danger, the bittersweet blade of Neptune’s realm. It gives you visions so vivid they feel like home, then leaves you craving their return when reality reasserts itself. Some try to stay in that Neptunian dreamscape—through art, or through love, but sometimes also through substances, through fantasy, through escape. The bottle, the page, the lover—they all become vessels of transcendence.

For many under Neptune’s sway, intoxication is a brief passage to a gentler place. A kingdom where pain dissolves, where boundaries blur, where one can float unbound by identity or expectation. And yet… this kingdom is never permanent. The tide always pulls back. The morning always comes. And what was once transcendent becomes a trap. Neptune gives freely, but it does not give without cost. It demands discernment to save them from drowning in their own illusions. There’s always the danger of staying too long in the dream, forgetting how to function outside it. For the Neptunian spirit, reality often feels like a pale reflection of what could be.