The Head vs. The Heart

Dreams have this uncanny ability to capture our wildest imaginations.  We can catch ourselves rolling around a dream scene in our imagination for the better part of the day mumbling to ourselves trying to make sense of our bizarre experience the night before.

Then there are those dreams that mess with our heart strings.  They can lift us up on top of the world or take us to the depths of despair.

 I’ve had both kinds of dreams and I’m certain you have as well.  I’ve noticed dreams that stimulate my overactive imagination are sometimes difficult to work through because I can easily get caught up in trying to decipher intriguing symbols instead of looking at the dream as a whole.  Dreams that capture my heart are typically the ones I remember the longest.  They’re filled with lots of emotion, people I care about and, at times, concerning situations.

 So over the last couple of years, I’ve gotten my mom interested in exploring her dreams.  She’s interested to the point that a couple times a week she’ll call me and tell me a dream she’s had.  Many of her dreams lately have included people in our family who has passed on.  Sometime around the fifth time, she told me yet another dream about her favorite sister who passed on, I got the impression in my heart that she’s having these kinds of dreams more regularly because her time to pass on is drawing near.   I don’t know if that’s true or not, but they affected my heart even though they were not my dreams.

 It’s a widely held belief that dreams originate in the subconscious but in my experience, I’ve found that dreams are, by nature, connected to the heart; even the wildly imaginative ones.

Especially the wildly imaginative ones.

Dreams often go deeper than we give them credit for.  In nearly every dream I’ve had a hand at interpreting, I’ve found meaning on the surface as well as many layers beneath the surface.  Many of these deeper layers touch on issues that have importance and relevance to the current state of the dreamer’s life.

I’m reminded of a childhood dream someone told me at one of the conferences I frequent.  The dreamer was in a haunted house with some of their friends.  They were running away from something that was chasing them and the floor opened up in front of them and a huge snake came out of the floor and devoured them.  The dream’s meaning is quite simple: the dreamer and his friends are devoured by lies as they try to escape something that’s chasing them.  In the layers beneath the surface lies the big lie that devoured the dreamer and his friends. The lie is not clear without the dreamer’s input but based on how the dream depicts the lie (enormous enough to devour the dreamer and his friends) it’s not your average little white lie — it’s quite a whopper.  What the dream does say is that the dreamer is believing a lie that is very significant. One that might possibly affect the dreamer’s heart and soul.  Again, it’s hard to know this unless we explore it with the dreamer.  I so wish that I would have had the time to do so with this dreamer, but unfortunately, we had very little time together.

So the next time you have a dream that you remember I’d encourage you to take a little deeper look at it.  Seach for the meaning, yes, but go a step further and investigate the layer of meaning below the surface meaning.  You just may find something tugging on your heart strings.

EB

Photo credit: Foter.com