CREDIT FOR IMAGE AND POEM ABOVE –
Katrina Plumb, Chief Poet and Inspirer at Writing Tank
Some people make resolutions, some people choose mantras – my years have themes.
I don’t make conscious decisions about these themes. I don’t really think about them at all. But for the last five years, around the first of the year, I’ll say something, or hear something, or write something, and a quiet little voice will whisper, “There is your theme for the year – beginning right NOW!”
As the end of 2011 inched closer, and 2012 peeked over the horizon and raised an eyebrow at me to say she was getting curious about what I planned to do with her, my thoughts turned to dreams.
My theme for 2011 was “Embracing my Inner Pollyanna.” The year had started with a fanfare of high notes; wonderful clients doing meaningful work, an inner circle of dear friends that included an amazing man I’d been married to for nearly 25 years and continued to love even after we separated, a relationship with a new love I thought I would happily spend the rest of my life with, a head full of ideas for bringing new life and light to entrepreneurism and a heart full of gratitude for all the love and possibilities I saw in my present and my future.
I’d spent much of 2011 on “dream work,” helping other people clarify and realize their dreams. I’d been training a group of Certified Go-Giver Coaches to use the Stratospheric Success Mapping process I’d developed, and Dynamite Live, an event I’d hosted in October, was focused on “putting your dream in drive and you in the driver’s seat,” including a Big Dream Gathering with Mitch Matthews.
As I cast my mind toward the next twelve months, I thought about my dreams – the ones I’d seen realized, and the ones I’d watched slip through my fingers.
My dream of “exploding entrepreneurship” flourished, but my dream of creating products went nowhere. My dream of having even deeper relationships with like-hearted people was realized in ways I could never have imagined, but the relationship with the one I had imagined to be my soul-mate soured. I’d dreamed of finishing a business book on my Blast Thru Coaching™ method, instead I was nearly finished with a book of pseudo-fiction that had nothing at all do to with business. My dream of speaking at an event that had been in my heart-space for four years came true, but left me empty. However, I hosted my own event, a dream I’d never dreamed, coming true in amazing fashion and touching many lives.
Sorting through – celebrating dreams realized, laying to rest dreams relinquished, selecting dreams worthy of future commitment – I began to picture each dream as having physical form. From that grew a post on choosing the dreams to keep in the “closet” and letting go of dreams that no longer “fit.”
And there was my theme for 2012 – “The Year of Dreaming True.”
Following my sharing the post and my 2012 theme on Facebook, I received this question from a friend and amazing thought-instigator, Katrina Plumb (who sent me a couple of challenges – one of which I’ve featured above.)
She posted to my Facebook wall, “I’m trying to figure out what you plan to do with dreams this year. So tell us, is there such a thing as ‘dreaming false’?”
Katrina is a beautiful thinker and poet, she often hands me conundrums like glittering, tangled chains, and I can’t rest until I’ve straightened them out in my mind. But this was more like a can of Silly Putty – it said “Here I am, DO something with me. I DARE ya!”
Can we have ‘false dreams?’ If not all dreams are true, then some dreams must be false, right?
To explore the notion of dreaming true or false, I had to examine my understanding of dreams – and my understanding of truth.
What does it mean to “have a dream?”
As in, “Last night I had the strangest dream?”
Or, “Dreaming my life away?”
Or perhaps we refer to the unforgettable line, “I have a dream!”
Do we mean dreams born of the sleeping subconscious mind, the waking semi-conscious mind, or the wide-awake intentional mind?
Sometimes those thoughts and ideas reach us awake, sometimes they wait until we relax our mental barriers and surrender to sleep. And sometimes we craft those ideas into visions and plans that we are willing to devote energy to bringing to fruition.
What is a dream if not simply a thought, an idea, a mental representation of something we believe is not presently real?
So what constitutes a true dream as opposed to a false one?
Have you ever had a nightmare? It’s just a dream, right? But it’s a dream you would never want to have come true.
Have you ever had an idea or a thought that wasn’t true for YOU? Something you knew was a leftover recording of someone else’s judgment, or a belief cultivated by society, or a deep-seated fear?
What is true if not what you choose to accept and to own?
And what is false, if not what you choose to reject and refuse to make a part of your reality?
So to answer Katrina’s beautifully illustrated question to me:
Do you really think the dreamer escapes?
Really detaches from egotistic
Energies and joins a great agenda
Accumulated by other powers, Up
Miles away, beyond time and distance,
FREE!
I think it is in dreams, all kinds of dreams, that we do escape our egotistic energies and our surface one-life-to-live agendas. I think that we are those “other powers” and it is in dreaming true that we join with our own divine agenda, take ourselves up beyond time and distance, and become truly free.
So what is a “true dream?” I think it is simply a thought, an idea, a mental representation of something we believe is not true for us now, but which we desire to make true.
What is a “dream come true?” I think it is the manifestation, the realization, the actualization, the awareness that what we desired is our reality.
I think that’s why we call it “living the dream.”
The post Would You Know a True Dream if it Bit You? appeared first on Dixie Gillaspie.