Last night a dream leapt up from my subconscious and forced me to remember that I have dreamed the same dream multiple times. The subconscious is a dangerous place full of hiding places for our fragmented souls and it launches an attack when our conscious mind is sleeping. The insomniac knows this trick and remains on guard throughout the long night. The subconscious is canny, it shows us a flash of a dream, enough for us to recognise it is a frequent visitor but then snatches it away in case our conscious mind goes to work on decoding its language. The language of the subconscious is in dreams and only the life force permeating our finite meanderings can understand its true meaning.  

Dreams like water have many fathoms, some skim the surface of our daily lives and others dredge deeply linking us to the unfathomable depths of infinity. There are dreams that are prescient in quality, forewarning us of the path we are about to take and others that excavate our emotional graveyard for buried trauma. Decoding dreams is a tricky business and the truth within them can only be felt, it cannot be told. In a way, dreams transcend death and mortality giving us a glimpse into a world beyond the waking mind and the repetitive noise that creates the rigid corners of our existence. Occasionally, we have a dream that presses a reset button and rids us, albeit temporarily, of our structured thoughts and beliefs. In these enlightened dreams, we can reach back in time to touch the great minds of the past, those unhindered by religion and societal constraints. It offers us a fresh objectivity on life as a whole, steering us past our cornered subjectivity.

We can enter into contemplation, a relaxed open state of mind allowing ideas to germinate and grow, rather than an active thinking mind where constant mental activity leads to a hurried pace within and without. When we are engaged in constant mental activity we enter a treadwheel of finite possibility, when we are in contemplation we are on the precipice of wonder. Contemplation is not mental laziness, it is a state of vibrational activity and offers fertile soil for new ideas. The means by which these new ideas bounce into life is by enthusiastic and creative response.

And so, back to my dream, a tool to circumvent my active thinking mind that is moving along life’s middle lane and missing out on contemplative opportunities. In the dream I am driving a car, an illusion of control, until in a flash I am moved into the passenger seat and trying to steer from the side-lines. I need to indicate and pull off the motorway, it’s time to allow the life force at the core of my being to take the steering wheel from the middle-of-the-road conscious mind. My acquiescence finally allows the dream to decode in my conscious awareness. I am not in control. I am in control. The dichotomy of my existence rests on this axis. The former occurs when I am trying to control my life through active thinking, the latter comes about through contemplative openness. Dreams are powerful communicators from the source of intelligence if only we would allow that source to work through us.