Rather unusually, man’s great rationer of time ripped me away from my fantasy world this morning. In an instant, I went from standing on the beach at Cape May to staring at my bedroom wall. I don’t think that anybody likes the incessant buzzing of the alarm clock, but one has to admit that it is effective. Luckily for me, I normally wake up before the darn thing goes off (and every morning that this happens I look at it and think to myself, “you lose!”). As I got up to turn off the alarm clock, I couldn’t help but think about the dream that I was plucked from. It was a good one. Generally, I like dreaming. I see them as a chance to experiment with your being without any real consequence.
My dreams are usually realistic. The amount of realism in my dreams varies from night to night. For instance, the other night I dreamed that I went back to visit my previous employer. I walked around and talked to all of my old friends and acquaintances. I even wound up speaking to my old boss about interest in a position back with the company. I’ve had dreams like this that were so realistic that a few weeks later I had to really think to distinguish dreams from reality. Our dreams are trying to tell us something. There is a lesson to be learned in everything and dreams aren’t any different. In my uninhibited dream state, I am looking for more career fulfillment. Therefore, I should really examine my position now and see if I want something else.
I’ll have the occasional dream where the world is totally different than reality. I’ve had my share of flying dreams and others of that sort. It’s funny how you never realize you’re in a dream at the time. Whenever I wake up from such a dream I think to myself, “self, how could you not realize that was a dream?” I’ve done a little bit of reading on lucid dreaming, and it seems that these are the types of dreams where it is most applicable. The wild dreams offer us more clues that we are in a dream world. Once we realize that we are the architect of the dream, we should be able to provide real time updates and paint the world around us. There are drawbacks to this, however. Once we realize that we are the architect of the dream, we begin to create the world as we want it, not as we unconsciously believe it to be. When this happens, my previous statement about using our dreams to test our being becomes weakened (or totally voided).
We also all experience nightmares – ghosts, goblins, and things that go bump in the night. I’ve had my fill of nights spent running away from Michael Myers. Nightmares are the release of anxiety and other negative feelings that our subconscious holds. Like I said, we are the architect of our dreams. If our day is filled with fear and anxiety, it will flow over into our dreams. Luckily, I have these terror style nightmares very infrequently. I guess I am pretty calm before I go to bed. I also don’t want a lot of horror movies. That being said, I do find myself waking up in a panic quite often. Here we have a nightmare of a different kind.
As the architect of our dreams, our subconscious paints our dream world as we think the real world should be. Often times, our ideal world, and our reality are different. This can come from a variety of factors: external influences from society, decisions that we’ve made, loss…etc. We can have these super realistic dreams where everything that we want is true. Everything that we long for during the day is ours. When we wake up we realize, in an instant, that those things aren’t true. My dream last night was that way. I was standing on the beach with someone who I last saw when I was 13. It was so fulfilling to be able to talk with them, and share my feelings. When I woke up, I became brutally aware that it was just a dream. That person I was talking to was just a projection of 11 year old memories. There is absolutely nothing I can do about that. It’s around this point that your heart sinks to some kind of low level. Often, when I wake up from a dream like this in the middle of the night, my heart is racing too much to go back to sleep. It’s horrible.
I’ve been having a lot of dreams like this lately. I can’t control the style of my dreams. What I’ve been trying to do is find the positive in these dreams. The time I spend asleep with people that have exited my life in one way or another can be painful in the morning. It can also be comforting. At least it is a chance to interact with them. At least your memories can live on in the present. Sure it isn’t real, but you still retain the memory of the dream into your day. The advice that they give you isn’t coming from them, but it is coming from your unconscious mind. Listen to it! These interactions are a way for your conscious and subconscious to converse without inhibition.
Everybody dreams, we remember some, we forget most. Our dreams may not make sense to us. We may love our dreams, and we may hate them. I was lent a book once that gave explanations for your dreams (for instance, if you dreamt about a zebra it would tell you that you were in need of some sort of social distinction). I don’t believe any of that stuff. Everybody is different, so everybody’s zebra meaning will be different to. What is crucial to remember here is that dreams serve as a path through our mind. They allow our conscious and subconscious to speak to each other. There are major lessons to be learned here. Don’t dismiss them in the morning. Think about them, listen to them, and learn from them!
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