We are What We Dream
-by Elena Morizio
–Reading Time – 7 min Approx
“I had a strange dream.”
This is a typical phrase when we wake up in the morning. Sometimes we clearly remember the dream, with all its particulars, details, colors, some people are even sure to remember the smells. Some other times we just remember some scattered flashes. Some others all the images are gone, but we still have some deep emotions on us, without knowing where they come from. In most cases, the memory of the dream accompanies us for some minutes, some hours, but then it vanishes and suddenly, while we decide to tell the dream to a friend or try to give to it a meaning, we realize it’s gone.
And it is a pity! It is always a pity, because this way we lose the chance to understand and to welcome the message of the dream giving voice to our inner universe, to our deepest fears and desires.
That’s why it is so important to have a notebook and a pen on the nightstand next to our bed and write the dream, even just few words, when we wake up.
But first, let’s take a step back, and let’s ask us: what is a dream?
Dreams are messages from our unconscious. They show us about our path, our difficulties and our destiny.
The latter, is always about let the light enlighten our shadows, the dark sides of ourselves. Dreams reveal us what we don’t know yet, they never talk about what we already know. They show us the feelings, the emotions we hide and deny. What we consciously exclude in our daily life goes back to us in form of dreams, asking to be included, to be integrated. Dreams’s goal is a balance between consciousness and unconscious.
Dreams lead us to change, if we are brave to listen to them, if we are ready, if we don’t want to procrastinate.
If we give them attention, they can bring us awareness about our blocks, our stagnant mechanisms and our fantasies that distort our perception of reality.
We are so addicted to and affected by the fantasies we create in our mind! We transform them in obsessions at the detriment of everything that really happens around us. Why? Because we are often so afraid of facing all the events, memories, fears, people and true ambitions that compose and shape our reality. It is so uncomfortable and scared! We prefer to approach life in a passive way instead of taking action and making choices that determine our destiny. It is easier to tell us lies to feel illusory safe.
But dreams disagree with us and fight to change our minds. Through all their symbols, archetypes and images they try to get our attention to all our truths, making us responsible for ourselves.
You have to know that we all dream. There is no one who doesn’t dream at night, at most people just simply don’t remember the dream in the morning.
Dreams often use the events of the day before as a supporter of the story they are telling us. That’s why we never have to minimize or try to explain a dream saying “Oh, I just dreamt this because yesterday…”
All the aspects of the dream tell us, reveal us aspects of ourselves, and, most important thing, every person, every place, every event, every object is a projection of us!
What does it means? If you impersonate, if you identify with one object or one person of the dream, telling again all the story from its point of you, you will allow parts of yourself to reveal your secrets, your unexpressed needs to you! Because they need to come to light and be accepted.
I give you an example with a dream of one of my clients:
“There’s an elevator full of people suspended in the void and supported by an old rope. I am observing the scene. The rope is breaking, the elevator falls and lands on the water, a flowing water. I’m worried about the people inside the elevator because if it will sink, they will die.”
I asked him to impersonate the elevator.
“Well, I am a very very old elevator, badly reduced. I am no longer useful, neither I nor who I contain inside of me. They are no longer needed, I don’t care about those people, they can get by on their own.
And about me, I can lightly flow on the water without faults and weights.”
The water represents life. Life that flow and always change and transform itself and what it is around it. When we grow and become adult we can start to create, to build, to flow and to walk our life’s river realizing our purposes and goals, becoming responsible and most of all detaching ourselves (without feeling guilty)in a healthy way from family attachments on which we depended. This way we can recognize and define our identity creating a healthy balance with our beloved ones.
The old structures that conditioned us (the elevator and people inside)are now useless.
The client had to become aware of the fact that what he’s continuing to deny (and what his unconscious is trying to tell him) is about his own conflict between what he wants and what it is scared about.
It has been hard to him to accept this, like “if I cut the umbilical cord I will no longer be useful to them and they will not be able to save themselves and move on without me!” but this is not true!
This is called self-sabotage, this is a fantasy to which we cling to not take our life in hand.
But if we have the courage to do it, flowing on the water as independent individuals, no one will block us, no one will judge or condemn us, no one, outside of ourselves.
This is the greatness of dreams. A dream is always a way to compensate something, a way to face fears of to assimilate trauma or it is the anticipation of an inner change! The latter is our case. The client was confused, reluctant to accept his will to change, to walk his path free. He was totally blocked by fear. But on a subconscious level all was already happening! The dream gave shape, turned into image the transformation’s process and its obstacles.
The client was in front of his truth. When we transform a feeling in the form of an image, of a symbol, we can no longer deny it. We can see it clearly and we can only go to meet it.
Write your dream! Draw your dream! And do your best to understand it with the help of a psychologist or a counselor or an art therapist. It will be a gift for you.
A person once asked me a question:
“Is it your state of mind that influences your dreams or is it your dreams that influence your state of mind?”
I think that the truth lives in a word: harmony.
There’s a never ending dialogue between the two, dream and mind. They whisper to each other. They influence each other walking together the path towards our self-acceptance, self-realization, self-love.
A particular state of mind can talk us about something more, something that is hidden, denied and that influences our daily emotions. Consequently those emotions will impact on our dreams. The latter will try to transform in images and symbols all those emotions and the truth behind them leading us to compensate what we lack and what we do not listen during the daylight. The dream will bring the message to the conscious mind the morning later, influencing again our day, feelings and state of mind. Until when?
Until we will decide to listen. To face, to understand, to accept the message and change!
It can become a loop. Experiencing and experiencing a feeling without the will to face the desires or fears behind it. So mind and dream (unconscious) will always continue to collaborate proposing again, night and day, that emotional state, that weird dreams with silly, funny, crazy, scary symbols until you will make a decision.
It is all about listen or not. Be brave or not.
It is like being in front of a river flowing. Imagine yourself standing on the river bank. A little boat will pass inviting you to get in. If you will, you will start a journey full of meanings, discoveries, magical places, sometimes scary but so important to experience. You will come back bringing with you answers, truths, comprehension, compassion, forgiveness, changes.
If you decide to don’t get in, you will lose the chance to make a change, to let go what is meaningless and welcome the new. Don’t turn back. Do not give up the boat ride.
You will have the opportunity to do the ride every night and to give to the unconscious and thus to yourself the attention you deserve.
Shakespeare wrote: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”
-by Elena Morizio
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