78 - A Dream in a Dream

Several components of your being are trying to speak to you in your dreams. Or is it that what you think you are is interrogating your deeper self, only to find that the layers of your being are part of a many-tiered puzzle in infinite regression. Will you ever reach the elusive depths? Umpteen obstructions block your access. Yet those thwarted pieces of your being beg for recognition, cry for expression - to play their role in fashioning your being. Imagine what we are missing out by neglecting to listen in!

Of course thoughts, emotions, images are jumbled like radio waves in the atmosphere or eddies on a lake. To your day thinking, you only express a slither of what you imply. And what you imply even eludes your own awareness. Maybe it's the job of the Shaman among the wiser minds around you to earmark a flash of the emotions behind you words, your semantics, the effigies of yourself which you project in your narratives, the myths concealed behind your reality. But the wise are rare and far between and one is indeed privileged to have any such wizards around. So one is left with the alternative of falling back on the wise person mysteriously lurking within in one's dreams or aroused in rare moments of vivid lucidity.

The forced tempo of 'real life' estranges one from one's dreams. Our longing for life to be a dream come true is condemned to the wastepaper basket of utopia except - except - if one is prepared to fight for it at the cost not only of great strife and stress, but pain to oneself and others, and of course incurring the scourge of being labeled a freak. On the other hand, society sees to it to marshal people within the limits of the common denominator called the 'norm', which operates as a salutary safety valve against whimsical, incongruous aberrations. It is the correspondence of our dreams to our everyday life that guarantees their relevance and saves our creativity from the entropy of erratic fantasizing.

A whole barrage stands between the deep yearning of one's soul and the 'real world': our involvements, the desires of our bodies, of our hearts, of our minds, our likes and dislikes, our vulnerable self-image, our upbringing, our conditioning, sheer survival. One tends to slip down to the lowest common denominator, the path of least resistance. One would no doubt find it easier if chances opened up to give one an opportunity to prove oneself to be a hero. But they do not come to us that way, we need to create those opportunities.

Of course in your pensive ponderings, scan yourself, confront your motivations with the power of truth to eliminate insidious self-deception and justification. But while revealing its secret step by step when cross-examined, by virtue of its need to parade a masquerade of validation, our psyche covers up the deeper frustrated motivations conspiring in our soul. Unless you succeed in piercing this smoke screen in meditation (or hypnosis) it is in your dreams that some clues as to these deep springheads of your soul may erupt. Images, effigies, scenarios blurred or distinct may project themselves on the screen of your dormant mind with sufficient force to buffet your memory when waking up. The chances are that our interpretations of them are afflicted by wishful thinking or sheer conceit or dusky misgivings.

If in deep meditation, turning within, you may be able to spot a deeper motivation that your psyche will concede - the cause spurring the cause, whereas turning upwards, you may grasp lots of different values, sometimes at loggerheads, sometimes reinforcing one another. Is it your quest for beauty? Is it your pursuit of excellence? Is it your honoring truthfulness? Is it your concern for compassion? Is it joy? Is it peace? Is it love? Is it accomplishment? Is it wisdom? Enlightenment? Freedom? These may conflict and not tolerate any compromise. Your soul may be pummeled, pulled in opposing directions as in a tug of war, or etiolated in a challenging quandary. In no way could you expect to solve the riddle you are faced with because everything is important, everywhere are priorities and priorities of priorities.

Your dreams may however prove of good counsel because they bypass the mind's commonplace rationalizations. The key is accessing your dreams through your meditations. Meditation skills may be devised to auto-suggest to yourself a pilgrimage into your dream world.

But watch out for the emotions lurking behind the imagery of your dreams featuring fleeting incongruous effigies. This is where the message incubated in your dreams explodes with the greatest thrust. Gauge its compelling urgency, its insidious forcefulness. It may catch you unaware, not realizing how important the emotional need it conveys is to you. The emotions of the heart are imperative enough and cannot always brook their inability to adapt to real-life situations. But the nostalgia of the soul is overwhelmingly compulsive when unmasked and arouses a challenge to the status quo of one's life and the established order or routine built over years of dedicated hard work, perhaps because it affects one's self-validation so deeply. This nostalgia erupts in every recess of one's mind and sparks the emotion of the heart which delights in rising from the personal emotions into responding to its more cosmic source.

To access the emotions at the soul level, the ordinary dream will not suffice. It takes the tour de force of awakening from your dream into a 'dream within a dream'. You dream that you are dreaming of images, while realizing that these are mere projections of your creative mind. But at the level where you are, there are no forms, no metaphors, no mental constructs just ecstasy and realization.
