Goals and Creativity - The Artist and the Tidal Wave

For a few years the occasional desires I remembered gave the impression to be either unintelligible nonsense or exhaustive dramas about frustrating work scenarios. I would get up in a panic, relieved it was just a dream. But one December night over twenty years in the past what do dreams mean , all the pieces changed. I dreamt that I was wanting by a tiny window in an enormous, ornate door, intently curious to see what was in a mysterious room. I was startled to see a huge single eye wanting back at me intently. That winter night I started a remarkable journey that ceaselessly modified my life, an adventure that continues to this day.

Starting with that dream, the floodgates opened and a torrent of desires spilled over the walls of my well-planned and fairly atypical life. They contained thematic pictures, symbols, and dramas that moved by my life, leaving unusual tracks, exotic fragrances, tearing down old buildings, setting fires. I was captivated. I dedicated myself to understanding their real that means and regularly crammed five dream journals with hundreds of desires, all the while voraciously studying all the pieces I may discover on desires, symbols, the creativeness, and theories and methods of dream interpretation. A number of years later, how to interpret dreams another unusual dream was the catalyst that impressed me to leave a profitable enterprise career, return to school and turn into a psychotherapist specializing in dreamwork.

The poet and thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), as soon as prompt a surprising risk: that "Desires ... might well have an analogy with our whole life and fate." I could not agree more! After twenty-plus years of researching dreaming and methods of dream interpretation, working with over twenty thousand particular person desires, I discovered that many of our desires have a profound intent and goal; they stand as guardians at the gates of the human spirit, defending us from all manner of nefarious influences. The truth is, our desires focus, with laser-like precision, on liberating us from anything that's self-negating and self-defeating. Desires are like a grasp sculptor eradicating all the pieces from the block of marble that's not "elephant." This natural process slowly however absolutely brings one's Authentic Self and explicit genius into clear definition. Like a fog lifting as the daylight emerges, we start to see and to know precisely what it's that we must do with our life as well as what it's that we must stop doing to ourselves.

This liberating characteristic of dreaming has tremendous implications: it means that we each have an inside, religious and psychological protection system designed to not only insure the survival of life as we all know it but additionally to facilitate the evolution of the human spirit and change the world we reside in. To make sure, our desires are social activists. Desires need the individual life to turn into a creative intervention in the social order.

Here is a fascinating instance that seems to be a specific reminiscence of dying: Terri, a good looking, exuberant eighteen-yr-old rebel, had a daunting dream immediately after joining a religious group. She had the dream simply as she was in the process of shifting across the country in order that she may very well be close to the minister, a commanding, charismatic lady in her early sixties who she described as "my religious teacher." Sadly, over time, the group evolved into a very destructive cult. Many years later, after lastly leaving the group, we worked on that old dream that still puzzled her. Again then, her religious trainer advised her the dream was from a past life in Pompeii and that was the tip of that. The dream had at all times haunted her and was a kind of desires that might simply not go away. Here is her dream: