And Now, the Rest of the Story…

Ever wonder what, exactly, your dreams are? Are they just subconscious trash getting sorted and pushed to the ‘out bin’? Are they random firings of neurons that sometimes make disturbing or entertaining stories to keep us company through the night? Or, are they possibly something with purpose with which we can actually interact?

It’s the third choice – dreams are the language of our experiencing. They come from you so they are you. I think of it as a conversation between the self (your conscious, thinking you) and the Self (the deeper, experiential You).
So, all day long while we’re busy thinking about what to have for lunch, whether we’ll go to the gym and if so and so texted us back, another part of us is busy experiencing. While you are thinking about the conversation you just had with your boss, your dreaming self is telling you how you feel about it. Mostly, though, we’re so busy swimming in the thinking part of our brain that we miss the experiencing/dreaming part – it isn’t until we sleep, which is to say quiet our thinking mind, that our experiencing self gets a chance to ‘talk’. With practice, though, we can learn to be present to our experiencing in our waking time.

Am I sure dreams make sense? Absolutely. The ‘talking to us’ that dreams do is through image. It’s a different language, but it’s our first language, so learning it is to be taught how to remember. The Dream Opening that I do is exactly that – opening up the images of the dreams in order to understand their deeper messages.

Here’s an example: I once co-owned a building restoration company. I loved my work! It engaged me in the community, introduced me to neighborhood development projects and involved me in a beautiful and creative pursuit. It was also very prosperous. On paper, and to my thinking brain, it was a no-brainer thing for me to be doing. However, deep inside I had another driving passion, begun with a question and resulting mission at age three: to understand my dreams and help people through them. Every time I glanced at that my thinking mind put it down: dreaming, really? Then I began to have a recurrent nightmare…

In my nightmare I was late to meet Oprah to write our book because I was staying too long in a meeting with Donald Trump. I kept trying to leave the meeting, but something kept snagging me and so I was always late and missed Oprah, even though I didn’t want to meet with Donald, what I really wanted to do was meet Oprah!

Here’s a quick opening for this dream: As I dream this dream, in my deepest self I know I need to continue to pursue my passion to help people through my own way, which is dreaming (Oprah is someone who, for me, has carved a path unique to herself for helping people). My building company is prosperous (Trump) but I was done there, and in fact had stayed too long. This is how I dream this dream.

So, while my thinking self was accurate that, on paper, the building company was working, inside my experiencing self was a whole other story.

In this moment when the dream becomes clear we have a choice – we can heed the dream’s message and follow our truest inner movements, or we can sit back and let our thinking mind conduct the train. The fact that the dream was a nightmare was to wake me up, literally – to get my attention to what I really needed to do. And because I didn’t pay attention to it right away, it became repetitive. Once I made the decision to follow my dreams toward my dream passion I stopped having this nightmare.

Here’s a little video on the rest of the story that dreams provide. Also, on the dream above I could have worked with it using the Waking Dream method, which I explain in detail here.

Happy dreaming!