DREAMING IS WAKING UP

Let'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.

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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.

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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...