You’re trekking through a dense forest, trying to minimise the sound of your footsteps, but the rustling leaves don’t help. The forest has come alive in the night, an orchestra of animal sounds punctuating the silence. And suddenly as you take that next turn, you come face to face with a pair of gleaming eyes, and by the time your eyes are able to figure out the rest of the form, a blur of yellow with black stripes jumps on you. You flail your hands to protect you, and you wake up with a start, realising that it was just a dream, and you’re safe in bed, rather than in a forest. As that experience begins to wane and you start to get ensconced in the cosiness of your bed, that fear still feels very real, and it takes a while before sleep obliges.
As we grow older, we become increasingly identified with not just our possessions and relationships, but also our worries and problems, holding on to them. And yet, each night, when we consign ourselves to the realm of sleep, each one of us is alone, as consciousness perhaps returns, even if briefly to source. The world as we knew it, fades away, and a strange new world is conjured, a hybrid of reality blended with our fears, or perhaps what’s playing on our mind at the time. This make-believe world of our dreams feels as real as reality, and yet they disappear in the instant that we wake up.
In the grand scheme of things, this reality that we exist in is also just an identified experience, as temporary and as fleeting as that dream, although it feels very real, but in the continuum that is space-time, it’s barely a blip. This experience is a rollercoaster, of joys and disappointments, happiness and pain, and when it all gets a bit too much and we’re overwhelmed, stepping out of the frame and having this perspective, no matter how seemingly simplistic, does help. Having this perspective also lets us be selective about what we’d like to persist with, and drop what no longer serves us, rather than trudging along, like it was our cross to bear.
On a completely different note, dreams also sometimes serve as incredible portals to divine inspiration, which can present answers to the most complex questions we may be dealing with. The universe has a way of speaking with us, and when we drop our weighty identities in the state of deep sleep, it can be easier for us to become available to intuition. So the next time you’re stuck with a problem, sleep over it, quite literally, and you may wake up to a solution that seemed almost impossible!
