D. TWO KINDS OF WORTHWHILE DREAMS

Among the tools that will be useful in your journey are dreams.  There are two kinds of dreams we can have.  There are the intentional dreams we have for the future of our life or the life of the nation or the world.  Such dreams are usually called visions...The Book of Proverbs says "Without a vision the people perish."  I believe that.  Wherever we are in our lives there has to be something challenging us to a fuller life or a better human community and pulling us toward its achievement.  Humans are the only animal who perceive the difference between things as they are and as they ought to be.  It is our prerogative to be dreamers.

"Mystic on a Cliff" by Tim Holmes

Someone has said "Hope is not a dream, but a way of making dreams come true."  Dom Helder Camera noted the importance of dreaming in community.  He said, "When we are dreaming alone, it is only a dream.  When we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality."  The fact that his friend Archbishop Oscar Romero and dozens of other Catholic workers were later martyred in El Salvador reminds us how dangerous dreams can get.if we dare to act on them.  Dreaming can be costly, even sometimes costing your life, but it's only the dreamers that push the world ahead. 

And there's also the other kind of dream,  the involuntary kind that come to us in our sleep.  Often they don't seem to make any sense, but they are more important to our self-understanding than we may realize.  Hugh Prather can say "There's something wrong with my life and I don't understand what it is," and the dream says, "Look, I'll show you a picture." 

It is well-known that the creativity of poets, artists, writers and scientists  frequently linked the dreams with dream-like states.  We've heard stories about writers waking up in the night and furiously scribbling their great intuitions before they forget them,  or mathematicians and scientists  crying "eureka" in the dead of night or at moments of waking,  The scientist, Elmer Green, quotes the  chemist, Kekule, who urged his contemporaries, "Gentlemen, let us learn to dream." 

When Sigmund Freud (revolutionary psychotherapist of the 19th century) published his book The Interpretation of Dreams  in 1899 he was met with ridicule.  He believed that dream interpretation was "the royal road to the unconscious and it influenced many younger theorists including Carl Jung.  Psychotherapist Fritz Perls claimed that everything in our dreams - not just every one, but every thing, represents a part of ourselves.  We do well to pay attention to the pictures our dreams paint for us.  Most of us tend to forget most of our dreams shortly after we wake up.  I've discovered that I can more easily remember my dreams when I describe them aloud before I move my body.  Some people keep a notepad by their bed to jot down their dreams.  Most of our dreams don't appear to make any sense at all, but over time certain patterns appear that may make some good sense.

One of the best books on the subject is The Dream Game, by Ann Faraday.  One thing she says is that we shouldn't assume that all of our dreams have some esoteric meaning.  For example, if you dream that you're driving your car and a wheel falls off, you might do well to check the lug nuts on your car because you may have heard a noise that you didn't pay attention to, but that registered unconsciously and came out in a dream.

Both kinds of dreams are important.  Here are a couple of questions for starts:

 What vision to you have for your life?

         What's your dream for your life twenty-five years from now?

   What recent dream did you have that seemed especially interesting or perplexing, or maybe                             instructive?


EXTENDED READING IF YOU'RE INTERESTED

The book I mentioned above is one among many that I think would provide some good guidance on this question - The Dream Game, by Ann Faraday.

NEXT  TIME:  YOUR STORY IS WORTH TELLING

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