A Week of New Dreams
Image | Leo Bayard
January 26 - February 8, 2026
Lunar-Solar Atmosphere | First Quarter Moon Week & The Leo Full Moon
I am covering a two-week chunk in this post as I won’t be available to write next Monday.
We feel more clarity, assertion, and growth around our liberating directions this week. Cracking the whip on what needs to be shattered that’s oppressing us and assertively shining our light in its most original, weird, free, exciteable way.
Through Tuesday Afternoon: Assert the worth of your wild voice and reorient material values
Tuesday Afternoon - Friday Afternoon: Discover new values through connecting sensitively and affectionately with others.
Friday Afternoon - Saturday Night: Find depth and care in your communities. Create new pathways of care in your local life.
As the moon moves into Leo on Saturday night (MT), and to full on Sunday at 3:09 pm MT, we turn more inward to find ground, depth, and inner care around our heart, light, and playful spirit. A respite from so much collective work. At the same time, Luna will oppose each planet in the Aaquarius stellium: Pluto, Mars, Sun, Venus, and Mercury, creating a tug-of-war between inner heart needs and outer collective needs. Fill your cup first with this lunar signature before giving too much. Giving from an empty tank doesn’t result in much, but of course, sometimes we have to step up and do what needs to be done, even on empty.
From Tuesday, February 3 - 6, we finish out a full moon week, about maturing and growing what is fruitful about the season. Figure out what makes your originality, collaborative spirit, and experimental side shine, and feel joyful and purposeful. Be of service, but also lead and take command of group efforts. Organize the cause. Make the collective spirit feel joyful and creative.
On Saturday, the 7th, we move to the last quarter moon energy, with more cooperative tones needing to be found. Ease tensions with diplomacy. Find empathy and put yourself in an antagonist's shoes. Sunday morning brings the potent time of the last quarter moon, and in Scorpio, a lot of trust will need to be found in interesting entanglements.
In our current Capricorn Lunar Journey, we are remembering what structures feel good to us. What societies we want to build, that our bones remember, even if we’ve not experienced it in this life. Even if we don’t have a step-by-step guide yet, the first step is to re-member, to get back in alignment with what feels right. The actionable directives will follow. Ever since the Capricorn New Moon on January 18th, I’ve been keyed into the Village and community skill-sharing ideals with Matriarchal principles woven in. I am feeling in my bones what life and society I want to build. I don’t yet know how this will take shape, but I am remembering something in the ancient depth of my DNA, a rightness of what I want, like I’ve never felt before, in terms of societal vision and where I belong (or create belonging) in society.
I’m curious, is this the same for some of you? I see it in my IG feed, but it could be an algorithm siloing around my recent interests. What are you re-mebering and feeling about what you want to build in the structures of society? (link in the next section to review the current lunar journey)
Journey With the Moon | Remember Who You Are
While moon phases help us tap into the ebb and flow of the solar season, the Moon—outside its ties to the Sun—has its own reflective cycle about recognition. To tap more deeply into memory, feeling, and intuition—how we anchor an embodied knowing of the zodiac into us—head over to the current Lunar Journey (The Memoirist's Journey). We started the Capricorn lunar journey on January 18th. A journey where memory and mood feel their way through authority, planning, and focus: New Moon Journeys
Headline Transits
We’ve had a couple of weeks of mass planetary conjunctions and oppositions. We come to the tail end of that trend this week. It’s been a pivotal time because of this, with conjunctions bringing fractures that call new journeys into action and oppositions calling for us to stand on our own feet and up to undue authority. It’s been a lot, but I also look at shadows, repressed chains, and contrasts around where and what clashes have been about, how they align with the planetary journeys currently in motion, and what it all represents. It’s been powerful work.
With Venus in an Aries journey, women have been claiming their rage and warrior spirit, while embodying the feminine sense of empathy—learning that one does not negate the other. With Mars in a Cancer journey, our warrior spirit has been taking on the role of caring protector. Literally, these two archetypes are embodied in the two Minneapolis protectors who have been murdered, Nicole Renee Good and Alex Pretti. I thank them for their lives and spirits. Their example and the symbols they leave for us to embody. Mercury, our Trickster, in a Scoprio journey, has been tricking the underworld of power, pulling at illusions of power games, unwilling to leave the Epstein Files on the cutting room floor. Jupiter is just starting a new Cancer-themed journey, but already, its exploration of feminine philosophies has me shooting for very different horizons, wisdoms, and stories. (Dive into the planetary Archetypal Journeys HERE)
This week, a huge shift arrives that starts a chain of reorientations in the coming month. Neptune moves to Aries, followed by Saturn in mid-February and then their once-in-39-year conjunction days after, completely changing the directionality of constructs. In Aries, the first sign of the zodiac, it is dissolving one world’s walls so we can dream a totally new construct into being.
Do you not feel it?
We are already inside the threshold of a dissolving framework. Those in abject fear hide behind masks, trying to will the world into something that feels safe to them. But building on fear is like building on sand. We all have our place in the ecosystem of death; those cloaked in fear and fascism are the hungry mouths that destroy that which the dreamers of new worlds may not have been willing to tear apart. I do believe in free will, and we all have to step into our part to take the reins and build a more beautiful world. We can fall into fear and not stand up and end up like Nazi Germany, just going along out of fear. Or, we can fight the dragons and get hold of the reins early on. It’s up to us to save ourselves. These lifecycles give us the chance to grow, mature, and develop, but we have to be courageous and accept that seasons and cycles can turn what was once up, down, and vice versa. Gripping onto what was or what your normal has been will only hurt more in the end. Allow change to come and step up where your heart leads you to do so.
Neptune in Aries, Monday, January 26th (10:34 am MT)
It’s time to trade your high heels, sparkles, and high fashion accessories for combat boots and utilitarian garb. It’s time to switch the art on your walls from soft dreams to raw or blurred reality. Neptune, the planet that rules what we glamorize, shifts from the fantasy realm of Pisces, since 2011, to Aries, until 2039.
From the end of the zodiac and a 165-year cycle to the rebirth of a new 165-year cycle. What illusions and shadows have we fully seen? What distortions of reality and media have we waded through? What have we let go of glamorizing that’s been glamorized for our lives, our parents' lives, and our grandparents' entire lives? It’s time to rebirth what it is we glamorize. In Aries, there will be impulsiveness, a want for new order, and a militant style of glamorizing. But at its root, Neptune wants a new order of spirituality, of fashion, of art, of dreams and fantasies. It wants to wipe the slate clean, which comes with a bit of a bulldozer to dreams already lost but cluttering the field.
The double-edged sword is the spiritual crusaders, wanting everyone to fall in line with the same spiritual dream, versus those willing to dream fully new dreams and a new spiritual centering that is alive, vital, and bright. Idently (of self, nation, world) becomes blurred with Neptune in Aries, which can have us projecting identity in order to understand it. Like film projected onto a screen, we might project the light and shadow of self onto things in the world as a subconscious way of interacting with identity, heroism, and centering.
The first motion picture technology came last time Neptune was in Aries, and in a previous Neptune in Aries transit, the printing press came. Mass media is a Neptune specialty, and Aries is the pioneer. Get ready for radically different ways of connecting through mass media in the coming years.
Read more about Neptune in Aries, this moment of Saturn and Uransu sextile for quite some time, and the coming Saturn-Neptune conjunction in the “Highlights of Winter 2026”.
Mars conjunct Pluto in Aquarius, Tuesday, January 27th (4:01 pm MT)
The warrior and the lord of the underworld make a new agreement based on uprooting and clarifying what humanity needs to feel direction and empowerment. This initial meeting can be a bit ferocious. Mars and Pluto can both be violent, and something in reality is cracking when they meet that can force them to work together. But it can take a force of nature to get them on the same page. Their interactions can be obsessive, triggering, and bring boiling points. There can be a need to prove dominance between them. It can be a war trigger. These two met on February 14, 2024, in Aquarius and brought deadly clashes between Israel/Hamas, Ukraine/Russia, in Myanmar, and around Taiwan. The US House of Representatives voted to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (maybe we can do that again with Noem?). I would imagine some flare-ups to arrive this time around as well.
Mercury square Uranus in Aquarius, Thursday, February 5th (5:13 am MT)
Mental breakthroughs are the signature between these two planets. In an approaching square, radical ideas or learning you’ve been toying with over the past 9 or so months may finally find their resonance, like the pieces of a quirky or original puzzle are starting to fit. Don’t be afraid to shatter mental constructs to find the beauty and value of ideas more alive and exciting.