If you enter a room to get something only to forget why you went in; if you discover mid-sentence that you’ve lost your train of thought entirely; if you lost yet another several hours or days doing…(yes, what exactly were you doing?) it’s probably not early dementia –it’s Neptune. 

Popular astrological opinion says if we aren’t honoring the Gods in our life, they vie for our consciousness in a disruptive way. With Neptune, we may lose our keys, get lost on the way to a simple errand, lose our motivation for goals, worldly pursuits. We esteem Neptune by consciously developing a relationship to our imagination, dreamtime, the psyche, its images; we honor Neptune in our life through surrendering to a Source bigger than us. Neptune requires an unhurried way of being, but we cannot grasp the beauty, reverie, vastness of Neptune if we’re caught up in the culture of doing.

As such, Neptune rules situations (incarceration, hospitalization, retirement) and circumstances (illness) where you are removed from the world and given plenty of time to navel gaze. Daily, we learn the art of surrender and removal through sleep. I’ve been doing a lot less sleeping during my Neptune square Neptune years. I developed insomnia. I am certain this is an (unwanted) Neptunian visitation, yet when I am in this groggy state, neither dreaming nor fully awake, time moves very slowly and I enter a contemplative state that I otherwise wouldn’t.  It’s spiritually revealing that this fuzzy, cotton-filled state of consciousness arrived on the heels of a very stress-filled busy time when I told myself there wasn’t enough time to daydream, procrastinate or goof off.  Now I do this a lot. I take what Martha Beck calls “flake breaks” – breaking up a time-consuming focused task with… whatever. Yesterday I rearranged my art in my office for far too long; often it’s cat videos. Apparently this is what everyone else has been doing, anyhow.

My bedroom, a place of sleep and sleepless contemplation, is now Neptune’s temple. At 9 PM, I replace artificial light with a single candle. I’ve a new bed and cool white linen sheets. With only quiet and calm allowed here, it has become an ancient dreaming, or dreamless, temple. Before bedtime: I say a prayer, do a guided visualization, read a spiritual passage, poetry, hoping the God will be appeased. I am building a temple to the God oppressing me, trying to reverse the dark enchantment of sleepless slumber.

You can build a temple to Neptune in a garden, a bath tub, or an art studio. Anytime you surrender to Presence, anywhere you spend time outside of time, you dignify the God. So if you find your self falling asleep, or not sleeping at all, becoming unfocused, disoriented, getting no traction in life, ie, symptoms of not enough Neptune, the invitation has been sent. Answer the call by surrendering to it.