Blue Heron Visions: Chapter 20: Dreams Asleep, Dreams Awake (Part 1)

This manuscript is both a memoir of sorts and a work of fiction. The stories and events included are based on my life experiences and memories but I have changed names, details, event sequences, and outcomes throughout the work.

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Chapter 20: Dreams Asleep, Dreams Awake (Part 1)

Winter lasted forever in Vincent's country. The days of snowflakes, frigid winds, icy air, and even more icy streets stretched on endlessly as each February day lingered seemingly longer than the one before. This morning Elizabeth had awakened with a start, breathing hard with her heart pounding in her chest. She had been living an intricate and intense dream about a squirrel with a machine gun who was helping her to escape from some criminal element that was chasing her. “Now that's one to write down and try to analyze!” she exclaimed as she rose to face yet another winter day.

Elizabeth decided to write her dream as part of her morning pages. Writing dreams enabled her to finish her pages quickly, allowed her to think about the dream and its interpretation, and ensured that she could return to the dream at a later date. She turned her computer on and began the process.

As she typed through the dream, her mind wandered from the dream. She started thinking about the other day when she had understood more clearly the illusory nature of her thoughts and actions and that daily reality was not reality with a capital R. She thought about how she had lived days in her life that unfolded as if she were dreaming. She considered how sleeping dreams could instigate emotions and their physical reactions, all while the dreamer lay safe and secure in bed. She pondered an idea she had heard or read about before that equated nighttime dreaming with daytime living as both illusions of a reality that didn't exist. While Elizabeth could understand the parallel, she wondered how that understanding could help her live life or transform the “pieces of magic” syndrome she experienced into a life flowing with magic.

As she continued her typing, her thoughts wandered to dream interpretation. When she wanted to get a sense of what her nighttime dreams were trying to communicate, she used several dream dictionaries. She would look at the meanings of the symbols in her dream and try to connect the individual meanings into some sort of coherent message from her subconscious. Although she did her best, she wasn't always successful in figuring out the dream's meaning and messages.

Elizabeth had always wanted to belong to a group that would meet weekly to discuss their dreams. Her friend who had belonged to such a group had sent Elizabeth the information about how to begin and participate in a dream group. But Elizabeth wasn't sure if she knew enough people who would be interested or had enough time to attend. Her friend, though, had been going to her dream group for several years and had often talked about how much the group had helped her interpret and integrate her dream meanings into her life.

What Elizabeth had noticed most about her friend, though, was her ability and facility to use dream interpretation in conjunction with events and experiences in her waking life. To Elizabeth, that skill would be most helpful as she attempted to use Stacy's mirror process daily. Elizabeth realized that she could start to incorporate dream interpretation of her “waking” dreams by writing down the experiences or events whose significance puzzled her or brought a “knee-jerk” emotional response. Then, she could look up the pieces or symbols in the dream dictionaries and possibly discover the meaning the situation was revealing to her.

Although Elizabeth's friend had mentioned another women who used this technique regularly, Elizabeth had never tried it herself. She would usually stew over the meaning of a relationship encounter or other experience, focusing only on her emotions and her thoughts. This strategy might be just the tool she needed to embrace the mirror process in a productive way.

Thinking about waking and sleeping dreams spurred Elizabeth's curiosity. She took a few moments to examine synonyms for the word “dream.” One synonym she found and that she knew many people often used was the word “goal.” In Elizabeth's mind, a goal was not the same as having a dream for one's life. “Does calling a goal a dream bring some sort of magic to the idea?” she wondered. “Why do I think a goal is a challenge that requires planning and work but a dream is something magical, amazing, and somehow effortless to achieve?” she wondered. Certainly dreams require effort! Think of all the athletes who had a dream to achieve a gold medal or to be the best in their sport. They had to put an enormous amount of effort into achieving their dream.

Elizabeth wondered why she had the idea that dreams could be achieved easily. “Do I think that dreaming is the same whether I'm asleep or awake?” she queried herself. In sleeping dreams, people can do and achieve almost anything. Vincent nearly always had dreams about being able to fly. (Elizabeth had flown only once in her dreams and even then she was just a few feet off the ground.) But despite what the dreamer is doing, there doesn't seem to be a lot of effort required when you realize the dreamer is laying in bed and the mind is creating the whole scenario. In waking life, the mind may be the instigator and creator of an idea or dream, but the body is essential for bringing what the thoughts have conceived into being. Action is required to create and fulfill dreams in “real life.” Elizabeth noticed, though, there was a kind of magic in this process. She saw that conceiving of something in her mind and then being able to make that picture tangible in her life is the stuff of which magic shows were made. (“Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat,” she thought, smiling.)

Elizabeth had used this magic when she wrote papers while studying for her Master's degree. The professor would assign a 30-page paper that would be due in several weeks. Elizabeth would pick her subject and then let her thoughts run wild while going through her daily life. She believed that her chosen subject was percolating on the back burner of her mind. Before she began writing, she would create a brief outline. As she sat down in front of the computer and started typing, she would envision her completed paper and see herself handing it to the professor. Any time she would struggle or get stuck as she was writing, she would close her eyes and daydream again the vision she had created. This process had never failed her. Remembering it made clear why the word “vision” was also among the synonyms for the word dream.

Another synonym Elizabeth had discovered was the word “purpose.” Purpose was something that Elizabeth felt had eluded her throughout her life and especially for the last eleven years. Even though Elizabeth had achieved goals during that time, she had never felt that she knew why she was walking the Earth and what she was here to accomplish. The uncertainty and confusion she had about her life purpose had pushed her to begin Stacy's monthly astrology course. In fact, the discomfort of those feelings had pushed her to try various teachings and programs to find her purpose throughout those eleven years. Elizabeth thought about how often she had believed that other people had more wisdom and a better plan about how she could find her one, true purpose. Elizabeth sighed. Most of the time she wandered through her life as if it were a dream—a confusing and mixed-up sleeping dream.

Come back Thursday to read Part 2 of “Dreams Asleep, Dreams Awake.”