If you don’t dare to dream, you are executing on a coward’s vision.
Just Be Like This Today: “Today I am Daring to Dream”
This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.
If you lived your whole life dreaming, you would fall out of touch with reality. It is called fantasy and delusion—only the Villain and the Trickster wants these.
COMING DOWN
(Reality is fundamental)
Jump all you may,
yes, the pull of the whole earth
is something you can defy
in a single parabolic leap,
in the lifting of single stone,
or loosing the borrowed tension
from the borrowed sinew
on the borrowed wing
—a feathered arrow.
But even the eagle
who can carry a full grown lamb
to the loftiest eyrie,
on the tallest cliff, finds
and must meet the ground,
even in these high places.
So it is with the Truth.
I did not mean to bum your groove.
But that is how Truth and reality is. We cannot live in fantasy, because it is an illusion of Reality. Reality will pull us out of the illusion, like your body waking you up when there is trouble at the door. But that also means that even the troubling Nightmares need to end.
Depression and Anxiety are some of the Body’s way of waking up the Heart, out of the bad dream, and getting the attention of Attention into the dawning Reality of what is Unfolding and what is Possible.
Depression and Anxiety are some of the Body’s way of waking up the Heart, out of the bad dream, and getting the attention of Attention into the dawning Reality of what is Unfolding and what is Possible.
The Truth is that the world is as beautiful and full of mystery and meaning as you one imagined…Potentially.
But to make that potential probable, we have to help create it and we have to refine the dream. To turn it from a Possible to a Probable, takes some cooperation and investment ony our part. To belong to a relationship, you had to walk and mend the boundaries between you and around you in a way where both feel safe and heard. To belong to a project or a hobby takes patience and endurance. To belong to an identity takes authenticity and resilience. To belong to the reality of our waking dream we need to own the journey and the reality we walk through which means, we need to have strong vitality and we need to feel vital.
We need to honour the needs of our body, caring how we learn and grow, and how we process and recover. We need to honour the cradle we are playing in, the way we are integrated with our world and our environment.
And we need to honour the spirit of hope that drives our creativity and our imagination. This last piece is also vital and necessary.
That is what it means to dream.
You get the dream you live, if you aren’t daring to dream your own dream, you are living someone else’s. Maybe that’s why some of it feels like a bad dream?
If we don’t dare to dream and connect wholeheartedly with our dreams, how can we ever be truly inspired? If you cannot be truly inspired how can you ever connect deeply with a sense of purpose.
Your purpose is to Dream.
TIMEBOX IT
Make space in your routine for Dreaming. Make room for that way of holding the Conversation. Choose the proper Stance of it. To dream means to loosen the sinews of literal meaning. Restrain the other Voices. Let that songbird sing, without bars and cages. And make a Season and an Hour for it, and devote yourself to the honouring of that Hour and that Season. This is how to Dream and not be lost in the dream, or far worse, be lost without It.
This is like coming to get your cup of replenishment from a sacred magic Well.
This is like clearing the fireplace, gathering the fuel, kindling the fire of the sacred magic Hearth and the holiday bonfire.
In my practice I run this cycle every 4 weeks, and just about once a day. The season I make for it, is Lunar, because you can’t find a better clock than that, and I set New Moon waxing as my cue to allow myself to Dream again. And once a day, I let my imagination off the leash and let it go running with my heart, for somewhere between 15 minutes and several hours, depending on what my life best allows.
PRACTICE IT
I put on some music, that indulges my dreams or stimulates my imagination.
(If you are partial to cannabis edibles and these are safe, legal and appropriate, these can loosen the sinews.)
Otherwise, you could be sitting taking the bus, or doing a menial chore that you can do with your eyes closed, raking leaves, or shovelling snow, washing dishes, or walking your dog. This is our passport, yours and mine, out of drudgery. Instead of your vitality and enthusiasm being put to sleep by your more soul numbing necessities, you completely switch the polarity and you make this the time when your hunting hound of your vitality and enthusiasm can catch the scent of rabbit again.
Every now and again, make time for this quality of dreaming when you aren’t distracted or preoccupied with something or someone else. That means you have to put your shit down from time to time. You have to put your guard down.
And it helps if you can stop filtering out the symbolic, the totemic and the mythological in your life—these are the verbs, adjectives and pronouns of that Language.
To Dream is to play with the frightening questions that arrive in that Language. Dreams always happen right at the border of the conscious and subconscious, between thought and feeling. Dreams are about imagination, and the shadows it casts. To dream means to loosen the sinews of literal meaning.
Ask “What would I wish for?” and let that puppy run before you take out the leash and poo-bag of working out the details. And once the puppy has had a good run, ask yourself “How can I help make that happen?” and let that ancient hunting hound off the leash and watch it go, snaking through the undergrowth.
This is the wellspring of Imagination and Creativity. Without the courage to dream, there is only what is already outside and behind us, that we can draw purpose and meaning from. Purpose and Meaning are our perennial source of courage and motivation. So if you want more courage and motivation you have to dare to dream your own dream. It comes from inside.
Dreaming is Vital to Vitality.
This is one of the playlists I craft and curate to sit with.
Each of my playlists are a curated collection of tracks, each ‘track’ having something different to ignite in you, and when played in order, guide the listener on a journey.
Here are another two to try:
- The Woman’s Door: A curated inner journey into the feminine psyche.
- Ceremony for One: Curated for a wholistic inner journey.
These are playlists I created for my clients and patients.
You might choose other music, for different kinds of dreams. I am highly neurodivergent and this is how I dream.
Please share with me in the comments how you like to dream, what kind of music plucks the harpstrings of your heart like that, I would love to hear what your medicine is and how you take it.
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