The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination (4 page)

But paying attention to the Three Only Things gives us much more than a winning edge.

Living this way — even for just five minutes of dedicated time each day — we put ourselves in touch with our inner truth. We find our inner compass and get a “second opinion” on vital personal issues in the midst of confusion and conflicting agendas. We open and sustain a dialogue with a Self that is wiser than what Yeats called “the daily trivial mind.”

We allow ourselves to move effortlessly into creative flow.

We also allow our Big Stories to reveal themselves. Australian Aborigines say Big Stories hunt the right people to tell them, like predators stalking and sniffing in the bush. The trick is not to go chasing them, but to let them catch up with us.

Sometimes a Big Story seizes us through a riff of coincidence we simply cannot dismiss. When we are seized by a Big Story, our lives are different. We have the power to cope with everyday dramas with greater courage and grace, because we are aware of a deeper drama. We have access to
mythic
resources, in the sense Joseph Campbell conveyed when he reminded us that healing is what happens when we “move beyond suffering into myth.” We now travel with a sense of mission, and when we travel with that sense of mission, we draw different events and people and opportunities toward us.

We make ourselves available to the Big Stories when we make room in our lives for dreams, coincidence, and the play of imagination.

PART 1
ONLY a DREAM

God created the dream to show
the way to the dreamer in his blindness.
— PAPYRUS INSINGER, LATE EGYPTIAN DEMOTIC WISDOM TEXT

CHAPTER 1
DREAMING IS WAKING UP

L
et's try it again: How often have you said, “It's only a dream”? You may have said this to yourself when you wanted to forget about something that troubled you during the night, wishing that issue away.

Maybe you said it wistfully, surfacing from a dream in which you were enjoying beauty and pleasure that seemed unattainable in ordinary life.

As we rush or stumble into the business of the day, it's easy for us to leave our dreams behind. A door slams shut in the mind, and the dreams are gone. It's poor strategy in life to let that happen. Here 's why:

Dreams are not on our case, they are on our side.

They open vistas of possibility that take us beyond our everyday self-limiting beliefs and behaviors. Before we dismiss our dream lover, our dream home, or our dream job as unattainable — “only a dream” — we want to examine carefully whether there are clues in the dream that could help us to manifest that juicy vision.

Our dreams also show us things we may prefer not to think about — which is a major reason why many of us slam that door shut on our dreams and try to keep it closed. Those things may include future life problems, or parts of ourselves we tend to ignore or repress, or the larger values and issues involved in a situation we are approaching from a limited point of view.

We may prefer not to think about these matters, but if they are in our dreams, it is because our wiser Self is telling us we
need
to think about them. When our dreams show us future problems, they are also offering tools to avoid or contain those problems — if we will only heed the messages and take appropriate action. When our dreams reveal aspects of ourselves we tend to deny, they invite us to reclaim the energy we waste in denial and to integrate and work with
all
the aspects of our energy. When dreams reflect the bigger issues involved in a current situation, they offer us an inner compass and a corrective to decisions driven by ego or other people 's expectations.

When we see things in night dreams we don't like, we need to pay careful attention, because we are being shown elements in our life situation that require understanding and action. The scarier the dream, the more urgent the need to receive its message and figure out what needs to be done.

When you know that, and act accordingly, you'll find your dreams can help you get through the toughest things life throws at you. You'll discover your dreams can help you save your job or your relationship — or move to a better one. They can help you to avoid illness, and the car accident that is otherwise waiting to happen next Tuesday. They can save your life, both your physical life and your life 's meaning. To be alive as humans, we need
purpose
, just as we need food and air and sex. Dreams help us remember our life 's purpose and live our larger story.

In street talk, when we say, “in your dreams,” we are being even more dismissive than when we say “only a dream.”
Tu rêves
, on a Paris street, means it can't happen; you're deluding yourself. A guy who tries to pick up an Israeli girl on the beach might be told, “You're dreaming in Spain.”

Students of Eastern philosophy often quote the teaching that dreaming is a state of Maya, or illusion (though in Eastern philosophy, waking life is an even more illusory state).

We dismiss dreams, yet the word
dream
has magic. We use it to describe experiences that are hugely important, things that stir the soul and can change the world.
I have a dream
. Martin Luther King may or may not have been inspired by a night dream; by his own earliest account, the numinous moment came when he was leaning over a kitchen sink in the middle of the night, close to despair, and felt the presence of a greater power blessing him and propelling him forward. We all know what he meant. The phrase still sends shivers of recognition through us.

Hollywood is the “dream factory,” and the word has long been the most popular in the vocabulary of the advertising business. We are lured by the prospect of acquiring our dream car, our dream appliance, our dream vacation, and our dreamboat (maybe through an online dating service).

So in our usage as well as our understanding, the word
dream
is very slippery. It's illusion or nonsense
and
it's the heart's desire, the secret wish of the soul, a vision for the world.

There 's something creepy in the root cellar of the English word
dream
.

When it first appears in Old English, the word
dream
means joy, revelry, or merriment. It can also mean music, or mirthful noise — the kind of merry din you might get if a bunch of medieval topers are downing too many jugs of mead. Other words, ones that look odd to the modern eye (
swefn, maeting
) are used in Old English to mean “dream” in the sense of a vision or an experience during sleep. The word
dream
does not assume those meanings — in general usage — until Chaucer's time. The linguists aren't sure how the shift came about.

Most scholars believe that the word
dream
in the English language today is not the same word as the Old English
dream
, even though the words are spelled the same; the general view is that
dream
, in the sense of a vision or a sleep event, is an import from Old Norse (
draumr
) or Old German (
Traum
). So we need to go tracking in the northlands to find what is hidden in the word
dream.
When we do, we find that
dream
has some tricky relations in the north. One of them is
draugmas
, which means “deception” or “illusion.” Another of them —
draugr
— is a ghost, a haunting, or a visitation by the dead. The word
Traum
, contrary to appearances, is not related to
trauma
(which comes from the Greek word for “wound”), but a dream of the
draugr
might indeed be traumatic.

The word
dream
will not stay pinned down, like a big beautiful blue Morpho butterfly that just will not consent to be put under glass.

Many of us, if asked to come up with just one definition for
dream
, would probably talk about images or impressions that appear during sleep. In some European languages the words for “sleep” and “dream” are identical, as in the Latin
somnium
, from which is derived the older French word for dream,
songe
.

Yet for many ancient and indigenous cultures, dreaming is not fundamentally about sleeping; it is about
waking up
— that is, awakening to a larger truth and a larger reality than are accessible to ordinary consciousness.

This is clear in the language of ancient Egypt, which knew a lot about dreaming. The Egyptian word for dream is
rswt
. It literally means “awakening,” and in hieroglyphics it often appears followed by a determinative depicted as an open eye.

This makes sense when we reflect that in much of waking life, we can find ourselves in the condition of sleepwalkers, driven by schedules and other people 's agendas, too busy or too stressed or too “out of it” to remember what it's all about. The Renaissance physician and alchemist Paracelsus put it like this: “That which the dream shows is the shadow of such wisdom as exists in man, even if during his waking state he may know nothing about it. . . . We do not know it because we are fooling away our time with outward and perishing things, and are asleep in regard to that which is real within ourselves.”

For many ancient and indigenous cultures, the dream world is as real — even more real — than everyday waking life. “The dream world is the real world,” say the Seneca Iroquois Indians. For most human cultures, across most of history, dreams are of vital importance for two key reasons: they offer a place of encounter between humans and the more-than-human, and they may be prophetic, revealing events that lie in the future.

Both functions of dreaming are possible — in the understanding of our oldest psychology — because in dreams we travel outside the laws of Newtonian physics, and because in dreams, we can receive visitations. This understanding is reflected in the vocabulary of cultures that place a high valuation on dreams.

For example, among the Makiritare, a tribal people of Venezuela, the word for dream is
adekato
, which means a journey of the soul. “When we dream, the spirit goes on walkabout,” says a wise woman of the Kukatja, an Aboriginal people of Australia's Western Desert. Among the Australian Aborigines, personal dreams may be expeditions into the Dreamtime, the place of creation.

Other gifts and powers of dreaming play hide-and-seek in the vocabularies of other peoples. For the Irish, an
aisling
may be a dream, a vision, a poem, or all three. In Hebrew, to dream (
halam
) may also be to bring yourself good health. Among the Iroquois Indians, to dream (
kateraswas
) is to bring yourself good luck, and a dreamer (
atetshents
) is also a shaman, a healer, and a physician.

My favorite definitions of
dream
do not come fromdictionaries or cross-cultural analysis. They come — fresh and spontaneous, as new as tomorrow and as ancient as the antlered sorcerer on the wall of a cave near Lascaux — from people everywhere who are tuned into their dreams and honor them.

At a talk at a bookstore in Austin, Texas, I began by asking whether anyone in the audience would care to define the word
dream
. Tomy surprise, at least thirty hands went up. The first four definitions of a dream offered by the Austin crowd convey a vivid sense of the gifts and possibilities of dreaming:

1. A dream is a beginning.
   
2. A dream is an adventure.
   
3. A dream is a message from a wiser self.
   
4. A dream is a mission.
   

CHAPTER 2
The NINE POWERS of DREAMING

A
dream can be an adventure playground, a jungle gym, a night school (and a flight school), a garden of heavenly delights, a place of encounter with the more-than-human, a portal into the multiverse. A dream is a place, as the Egyptians understood very well. It may be a place of beauty or terror. It can be a place of healing, initiation, higher education, and outrageous fun.

If we are losing our dreams, we are closing off worlds of possibility, entertainment, and learning.

Of all the gifts of dreams, for me the most important are the nine powers of dreaming we 'll now unfold.

1. We solve problems in our sleep.
   
2. Dreams coach us for future challenges and opportunities.
   
3. Dreams hold up a magic mirror to our actions and behavior.
   
4. Dreams show us what we need to do to stay well.
   
5. Dreams are a secret laboratory.
   
6. Dreams are a creative studio.
   
7. Dreams help us to mend our divided selves.
   
8. Dreaming is a key to better relationships.
   
9. Dreams recall us to our larger purpose.
   

1. WE SOLVE PROBLEMS IN OUR SLEEP

John Steinbeck observed, “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.” We may or may not have any recollection of our “committee of sleep” in the morning — we may not even have the slightest recall of a dream — but all of us have had the experience of going to bed with an issue on our mind and finding we had the answer in the morning.

We've been doing this for as long as our kind has been on the planet. We dream in the womb, getting ready for the trauma of coming down the birth canal and of all that life will throw at us after that. As a species — and as individuals — we dream long before we utter our first word.

It's not surprising that creators and innovators often wake up in their dreams to new discoveries and inventions. This is true in every field of human endeavor, from composing great music to fixing the sidewalk.

Dreams help us to soar beyond our current limitations, whatever they are.