Do you remember your dreams? Or do you simply awaken in the morning knowing that you dreamed but have no idea what it was about? Then, there are those dreams you can’t forget…ever. They stick with us and at times when we have a flash of a vision, we wonder if that was a fragment of memory from something that actually happened to us in our waking hours or was it from our dreamscape? Even in our sleep we dream and feel as if we are “awake” and moving consciously through our world. In our dreams, our consciousness continues to create and interact with dream figures and objects of our nether world just as if we were awake. We “wake up” in the morning and then transition into a different reality–one we call the “real world.”

Too often, we only remember fragments of our dreams. “What did that mean?” you ask yourself. Some people have great dream recall and with practice we can all have better recall of our dream world. This takes conscious intention and a routine that facilitates that recall. Keeping a notepad and pen by your bedside helps so that you can jot down what you recall immediately upon awakening. Don’t speak or get up because that wakefulness seems to erase our ability to recall our dreams. If you can keep your eyes closed, that is even better. Don’t worry about writing grammatically correct sentences. Just single words can help.

If we are lucky to remember our dreams or at least fragments of it, we feel as if we are informed somehow by our nighttime wanderings. Perhaps the dream experience might hold some vital information or solutions for our waking lives. Many discoveries and lyrics to songs have emerged from these nighttime wanderings.

Waking consciousness is just as obscure as our dreaming consciousness. We behave in ways that we don’t quite understand. We have feelings and reactions that seem to just come out of nowhere. What if we could unravel the origins of those moments and behaviors? Would we be able to discard what doesn’t work for us and evolve into a newer self?

We search to understand ourselves and others, trying to make sense of what is going on within us. What if we could AWAKEN enough to begin questioning ourselves? Often when we ask questions, we work hard to find the answers, but in this quest to AWAKEN, the answers are not as important as diving into the question itself. What other questions arise from asking the first question?

Answers are not that important in this exercise. The value is in the process of asking the question for it leads to additional questions that will help awaken us out of our waking sleep.

Following are some good questions to get you started. See what other questions arise from each as you ask yourself. I’ve provided a few examples:

* Who am I? (as a female, a sister, a friend, a lover, a mom, etc)

* Can I be Me? (Which “me”? Are there different aspects of “Me”?)

* What do I want? (Why do I want that? Will it make my life better? Who taught me that it is desirable to have?)

* Where will I go?

* Who will go with me?

* Why was I born?

* Do I have a purpose?

* Why do I react the way that I do?

* Why do certain situations make me feel the way that I do?

* How can I prepare for what lies ahead?

* What am I missing?

* Am I missing anything?

* How can I reach my highest potential?

* Are there tools that I can learn to help me to evolve and uncover the authentic Self that lies within?

* What would it mean for me to live from my AWAKENED SELF?

Although we generally don’t ask these questions of our dream world, if we were to do so, our dreams could lead us to creative and satisfying solutions that we know came from our own inner wisdom. For example, explore the people and objects in your dreams. You put them there because it’s your dream. When we dream of people we’ve known, do we dream of them because we miss them? Or is there a deeper meaning to be discovered?

If we look at the people and objects that we’ve inserted into our dreams, by seeing them as metaphors or symbols that represent something about us, we are one step closer to hearing our inner voice. What do they represent? What are their characteristics? How are you similar to people that you placed in your dream? How are they acting in the dream? How is your current behavior (or feelings, attitude) similar to that? We dive deep into our psyche to find meaning.

Being conscious that our dream is a dream while we are still physically asleep is a characteristic of lucid dreaming. We wake up in our dream—we are conscious and aware that we are in a dream—yet we remain physically asleep. We are lucid because our awareness is similar to our waking state and it is what we refer to as being conscious.

Being lucid in your dreams allows you to work within a different reality where the rules of how the world works bends and we discover that time and space no longer constrict our abilities to know things and to be comfortable in the world. We can travel anywhere instantly, even to other planets or into outer space, cruising the galaxy. We can travel to different realities and meet up with people who we know have died and have conversations with them. We can fly. We can shape shift. We are super beings.

How can we have more lucid dreams? During the day we can ask ourselves, “Am I asleep?” Doing this habitually, when you enter your dream world when you sleep, you will likely ask that same question again. That is the time when you can “wake up” and become lucid in your sleep. Another tactic is to notice anomalies that only happen in your dreams. For me, one recurring anomaly in my dreams is that when I try to turn on lights by flipping the switch, no lights work. If I can question, “Is the electricity off?” I may have a chance to realize I’m in a dream and then do what I most enjoy in my lucid dreams…I fly! Another cue is that I find it almost impossible to read in my dreams and if I do, the words keep changing. I remember one dream when I looked up at a theatre marquee, and the title of the movies being shown keep moving and changing so I couldn’t read it. It was almost like an electronic theatre marquee but it was the old fashioned type with letters inserted to form the words. I was aware enough in my dream to recognize, “I’m in a dream!” So of course, I ran down the street trying to fly! It was great!

In a sense, we are beckoned to Awaken to both of these worlds—our dream world and our world when we are physically awake. To awaken to the messages of our dreams teaches us that these symbolic messages of the unconscious can inform us in a way that lead to creative solutions, greater happiness, and more peace in our lives.

To Awaken to our daily reality would teach us to make more conscious choices that result in the kind of reality that we desire because we have come to understand the impact that being unaware has had on our lives.

As we learn more about the cartography of the psyche, we use consciousness to determine how the pieces of the puzzle fit together. We “see” that there are factors that impact the reality that we experience and we begin to use our tools to reshape our perceptions, which in turn, impact our attitudes. These changes in perception and attitude help us create realities that are closer to our desires.

We begin to trust our choices in the world because we are aware that too often we are reacting instead of responding to situations. Reactions are knee-jerk habitual behaviors, while responses are thought out with conscious awareness. We learn that our unconscious behaviors are often distortions or perceptions that are fueled by our past experiences or pain or trauma. They fueled our emotional reactions and prevented us from consciously responding to subsequent situations that are similar.

We learn to be, rather than compulsively applying definitions to our experiences. You know this one…”You know those people! They’re all like that!” We learn to appreciate and take in what is happening in the moment, the NOW, allowing us to see the world as through the eyes of a child—untainted and unencumbered. We stop applying our stories to what is happening and realize that the soul cages that we live in are not locked. We need only to open the door. The handle is on the inside.

Music Credit Acknowledgment:

https://uppbeat.io/t/rahul-popawala/north-indian-alleys

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