When you’re lying in bed dreaming you can be taken almost anywhere. You’re, in a sense, two different places at one time. You can go somewhere you’ve been, or somewhere you’re headed in the future. You can go somewhere you’ve never been. Better yet, you can fly and breathe underwater and do all kinds of other things impossible in your waking life. You can even look in a mirror and be many years younger.
Because you’re human, like the rest of us, you tend to focus on the parts of the dream that stick out to you. I’m not saying this is bad, this is an important way to figure out what the dream’s telling you, after all. But it’s easy to forget the fullness of the dream experience when you get hung up on why you’re grandparents are alive again, or that you’re back in high school again and getting all the attention as the star player on the football team.
Dreams have surprising power to allow us to time travel and be two different places at once. But there’s also this other power they have, an extraordinary ability that can keep the dream going through our minds the next day. That power is the ability to imprint themselves on the deepest parts of us, our hearts.
In past posts, I’ve touched on the idea that we often perceive dreams as shallow, sometimes even meaningless, but when the mystery of the dream is unraveled through an interpretation, we are blown away by just how deep the dream really is. The dream has touched our heart in some way and we didn’t even know it. At most, we have a sense the dream is important but we don’t know why.
So I’d suggest this. When you lay down tonight to fall asleep, forget everything that went on throughout the day and focus on the idea of enjoying your dream; feel the feelings, embrace the experience. Who knows, you may finally find yourself in your dream job, or back in the most enjoyable time of your childhood. Then, when you wake up, relive those experiences by recording your dream so the deep things of your encounter can be extracted and have an impact on your waking life. Follow your heart out of the dream and explore just how incredible your waking life experience can be because of it.
