Open Up Your Heart and Dream
Everyone dreams. Open your heart and whisper before going off to sleep land, “I’m open to dreams and whatever they tell me tonight.” This is enough to get the dream juices flowing. Dreams will feel more welcome and speak to you, and the more you listen, the more they will come with vivid and helpful images.
Opening your heart is easy to say but hard to do. You may think you’ve done it, and then nothing comes. The dream well remains dry. There’s a reason for this. It often lies in a hidden fear of what we will encounter. If this happens to you, meditate on what you might be most afraid of. For many people, it’s the simple act of letting go that makes opening up to dreaming so hard.
Control is good; too much control is not. You may be the type who holds on tight to your emotions and does not permit a sense of freedom of feeling and expression respectful of self and others. There, there's going to be problems dreaming. The channels are clogged. Too much control, as on patient aptly described, “ . . . means that I’m afraid to let go and grow.”
So, the question is, how are you afraid of letting go and growing? You might fear facing something about someone you care about or thought you cared about. One person related the following dream, “I was alone in a dense forest. I’d been there. It was deep in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Santa Fe. From a distance, I saw my husband. He was in the everyday world, separate from the forest, a bustling city. Turning a corner, he stepped into a bar, sat at the counter next to a woman. They knew each other—intimately. The dream stopped, I awakened, tears streaming down my cheeks.”
The meaning of the dream spoke to her marriage and what she feared. Before entering therapy, she had sensed the problem from afar. Intuition had nudged. It told her to listen to her surge of mistrust toward her husband and his frequent business trips. She had dismissed this intuition. For over two years, she ran from what needed attention in her marriage. Finally, anxiety brought her to my office. She hadn't dreamt for two years.
Dreams stopped because emotions were blocked. Anxiety due to blocking feelings primed the pump for truth-facing. Images surfaced from her unconscious mind and dramatized the truth behind her marriage. It was not the marriage she had painted in her mind; the illusion shattered.
As fate would have it, the night she was to speak to him of her misgivings, he approached her. Business problems propelled an otherwise faithful husband of twenty years to have a brief affair. He broke off the affair and entered treatment. His own therapist guided him to come clean with his wife. They entered marital therapy and were able to, over time, heal a deep wounding of their relationship.
Opening your heart to dreams, whisper to your unconscious mind before you go to sleep: "I'm open to dreams and whatever they tell me tonight." Because you're reading this book of practical guidance, your unconscious mind will know to speak practically. Once you've seen what you need to see, things will be set in motion both within and without. All it takes is for you to open your heart and dream.