Have you ever had the experience of waking from a dream with a peculiar feeling
or bad taste in your mouth? The "yucky" dream, the "oh, no, not again" dream, or
the "ouch!" dream? These occurrences often come from the night's process of
leftovers from the previous day, and some of them can be pretty moldy.
My question to you is, "Is that something you want to wake up with every morning?"
Dreams allow us to gather all the daytime garbage, stick it into our sleeping minds
and dwell on it the whole night long. In the process, all sorts of strange and
disturbing conceptions can be produced. So, how can you help your dream psyche
convert that sort of experience into something more positive?
The answer is...you can give your dreams a break, a vacation from eating their
basic diet of day residue. And you do that the night before. You give yourself
some space before you go to sleep to unwind from all the chaos of the past
day and detach from all those things you have to do for tomorrow. You do not,
I repeat, do *not* flip on the eleven o'clock news before you go to sleep.
Unless you have some overriding emotional experience to mediate, that's
virtually guaranteed to give you all sorts of crazy dreams. I can't tell you
how many times I've had late night talk show dreams. Granted, it is an
improvement over the news. But it's still a demonstration that what you
bring to bed is likely to impact your dreams. Are you taking teddy bears
or snakes to sleep with you?
Yes, you can influence your dreams by what you're thinking and
whatever you see before you close your eyes. But let's get down
to the gut level. Dreams are full of feeling tones and emotions.
How about, instead of waking up with "yuck" and "oh, no" and "ouch,"
you awoke with something else?
First one: Ahhhh! This is the ecstasy, the integration, the expansion
of awareness. Let's shake out the cares of the day. Relax. We're
going to have one terrific night's sleep, oh boy, are we, and we
are going to wake to ecstasy. Ready? Ahhhh!
Well, that was pretty lousy. That was awful. I'm sorry, but it's not going
to do the trick. That teenie effort is not going to override all the rest of
the emotions of the day. You've got to put your whole being into this.
You've heard of primal screaming? Well, we're going to do primal
"Ahing." One, two, three. "Ahhhh!" One more time. "Ahhhh!" Well,
that's a little better.
If you're not into "Ahs," how about "A-ha!"? This is the act of discovery,
the lasting synthesis, the stroke of inspiration, the fusion of two frames
into one. "A-ha!" One, two, three. "A-ha!" Well, gee, that might wake you up.
While you're asleep, you might become lucid! One, two, three. "A-ha!"
And you just might just wake up next morning with a brilliant genius of an idea.
But of course, there's "Ha, ha." This is the collision of incompatible frames
that cross each other's path, that results in irony and laughter. Hmm, let's
see. "Ha, ha, ha!" What is this? Forced laughter? What can you do to be
natural...make faces in the mirror? If you can't get to laughter and spontaneity
at the end of the day, if you are dragging your feet and whatever else around
the bedroom, then think back to a laughter point in your past. Or look around.
Do you have comics by your bed? Think about that. What do you have?
What is on your bedstand? Just the clock. Tick-tock, tick-tock. That says
tomorrow-I-have-to-be-ready-to-do-everything-I-have-to-do-
oh-boy-I'm-going-to-be-thinking-about-it-all-night.
This last one is my own personal favorite. "WOW!" This is the action
of recognition and delight; opening up into further exploration and
knowledge. It's the mystery, still yet to be defined. Our dreams are
mysteries. We can analyze them, We can interpret them and we can
divide them into mincemeat pie, take them apart like puzzle pieces
and put them together again. But they're still going to be mysteries.
Thank goodness, it's the bit of curiosity that takes us further into the
exploration of the self. We can follow it into the next dream...into the
next day. "WOW!" One, two, three. "WOW!" One, two, three. "WOW!"
So, how are you feeling right now?
http://members.aol.com/caseyflyer/flying/dreams.html
(Dream Flights)
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